ALMOST HOME opens in a flooded Confederate prison at the confluence of the Alabama and Cahaba rivers, in the hollowed-out heart of Dixie. A one-time cotton warehouse refitted to shelter fewer than 900 men, Cahaba Prison held nearly four times that many by war’s end. One prisoner calculated that each man had six square feet of his own, two feet by three feet. Disease was rampant.

It was from here in April 1865 that the Muncie Men set out under guard for Vicksburg on the Mississippi and, finally, passage home.

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I knew I had a story I wanted to tell about an event too long ignored, and I finally realized that only fiction could do this justice. But where to begin?

Then I stumbled on this memorial stone in Muncie, Indiana, and with that I suddenly knew where my four main characters had come from and began to sense who the four Muncie Men might be and how they had ended up in one of the Civil War’s worst hellholes.

Months later, as they were enduring the almost inhuman conditions in which they were trapped, a nameless boy popped into their lives, and to my great joy and eventually theirs, the Muncie Four became Five.

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Text of the Memorial Plaque

IN REMEMBRANCE
OF THE DELAWARE COUNTY CIVIL WAR VETERANS / POW’S OF THE 9TH CAVALRY, 121ST REGIMENT-ESPECIALLY TO THOSE WHO LOST THEIR LIVES WHEN THE STEAMBOAT SULTANA EXPLODED, APRIL 27,1865, ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER, 7 MILES NORTH OF MEMPHIS. ON BOARD THE SULTANA WERE AN ESTIMATED 2300 PEOPLE. 1700 OF WHOM LOST THEIR LIVES, INCLUDING 55 FROM DELAWARE COUNTY.

WE HONOR ALL OF YOU.
WE ARE PROUD OF YOU.
YOUR SACRIFICE WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN.

MLS