Here's the first thing you need to know about Miss Cathy Williams: I am the daughter of a daughter of a queen and my mama never let me forget it. That's right. Royal blood runs purple through my veins. And I am talking real Africa blood. Not that tea-water queens over in England have to make do with. My royal blood comes from my grandmother, my Iyaiya, as we called her in Fon, our secret Africa language. And don't go picturing one of them sweet old grannies like you got nowadays with linty lemon drops tucked into her apron pocket for the grandkids. No, she had possum teeth, filed to points so, if need be, she could rip an enemy's throat out, for my grandmother was one of the Leopard King's six thousand warrior-wives, what the French called les Amazones.

The second thing you better get straight about Miss Cathy Williams is that, even though I had the misfortune to be born in Missouri nearly fifty years ago, somewhere in the vicinity of 1840 to 1844, depending on how Old Miss told the tale that day, I am not a Southerner. Only two things in this world the South is good for. Hookworm and misery. I've lived here in Trinidad, Colorado, for over twenty years and it'd take chloroform and a gun to ever get me back to the South. What I'm trying to say is I am a Western woman and that is what that dandified reporter from the St. Louis Daily Times never understood about me. Just because I was from the South, that pinch-nosed weasel expected me to be a grinning old auntie, calling him "suh," shuffling her feet, and talking about dem ole days back home. When I didn't turn out to be some green country gal fresh off the plantation never knew the touch of shoe leather and was, instead, a person who could talk just as proper as him when she was of a mind to, here's what that skunk dump wrote in the January 2, 1876, edition of the St. Louis Daily Times. He wrote that I received him "with an assumed formality that had a touch of the ridiculous."

"Assumed"? Because I knew when to say "ain't" and when not to?

How do you answer back to a newspaper? With just a few words, that bowler-hatted jasper made me out to be a fraud and every word out of my mouth a lie. No wonder folks don't believe me when I tell them I was a Buffalo Soldier. Having both my feet amputated last year has not strengthened my case either. The way I'm being whittled down, I reckon I might have another year, two at the most, to set the record straight before they fit me out for a pine box. So, with Miss Olivia Hathcock, teacher at the Trinidad, Colorado, Free School for the Children of Colored Miners, taking down my words that is what I intend to do.

No point in starting off with whatever date Old Miss wrote in her book to record the births of the slaves born onto their miserable tobacco farm off on the far west side of Missouri in a region so Confederate it was called Little Dixie. No, my real life, the one I was meant to have, did not start until an August night in 1864, three years into the war, when I watched the only world I'd ever known burn to the ground and met the man who was to be my deliverance and my damnation, the Yankee general Philip Henry Sheridan.

The first time I laid eyes on Philip Sheridan, the man might of been Satan himself. He was mounted up high on a black horse must of been sixteen hands tall set smack in the middle of fires roaring so loud that Sheridan had to yell orders down to his blue-jacketed demons in a voice that thundered like Judgment Day. The Yank soldiers swarmed through the farm, torches held aloft, kerchiefs tied over their noses against the smoke. Tears washed white streaks down their soot-blackened faces. They were burning Old Mister's tobacco crop and the smell, like ten thousand men smoking stogies, could of harelipped a bull ox.

My little sister Clemmie, a wisp of a girl subject to many a nervous complaint, trembled in terror against me, for the white preacher had warned us that Yankees were minions of Lucifer. "They'll slice you open," he promised whenever the occasion had presented itself. And many times when it had not. "And let their dogs drag your guts out so you can die watching your entrails being devoured."

Sheridan might of been Satan himself, still I could not take my eyes off of the man. When I separated him from his mount, though, I found I was looking at a squatty little fellow with black hair so short it looked painted on, a long body, strong, broad chest, short legs, not enough neck to hang him with, and arms so long that if his ankles itched he could scratch them without stooping. He had a head like a bulldog, big and round, with a hard set to the jaws that signaled once he sunk his teeth into a thing, either him or that thing'd be dead before he turned it loose. It was a head molded by the Creator to do one thing on this earth. And that one thing was fight.

There wasn't but one Yankee fit such a description, the dreaded General Philip "Little Phil" Henry Sheridan. Even the Feds called him "Smash 'em Up" as that's what the young general was given to yelling as he rode, laughing and cursing up a blue streak, into battle.

Old Mister and his Secesh friends despised all Yankees, but they hated Sheridan worse than any other Federal. They called Sheridan's habit of burning everything in his path "despicable and unspeakable savagery and against every rule of civilized behavior." Unlike, say, shackling up humans and working, flogging, or starving them to death. All in all, I was inclined to like the man.

"Burn it all, lads!" Sheridan bellowed over the sound of the flames crackling and roaring. "Burn the Rebels' food and burn what they'd sell to buy food! Burn every grain of Rebel wheat and every kernel of Rebel corn! Burn it to the ground! I want the crows flying overhead to have to carry their own rations!"

Before that moment, I had never heard this exact brand of Yankee being spoke, and though it hit my ear like a handful of pebbles hurled against a window, I had to admit that the General, as I came to think of him then and forever after, could preach him some damnation.

Out beyond the dirt yard where the soldiers had gathered us up at bayonet point, flames flowed over the fields like a river of blazing orange spreading into an everlasting lake of fire. It roared so loud it took me a minute to make out the caterwauling of Old Miss.

"You are the devil, Phil Sheridan!" Old Miss wailed, gathering her three wormy offspring to her side. "The very devil himself, for only a demon of the lowest order would burn out a poor woman with a husband lying fresh dead in her parlor and leave her and these poor innocent children with nothing to eat!"

"Don't be calling me a devil, woman," Sheridan said, his queer accent turning "devil" into "divvel."

"The Union Army has burned your crops, madam, we have not slaughtered your sons. And we shall not be laying a hand upon your daughter."

He pointed a righteous finger toward the pasty-faced Little Miss, trembling in her pinafore worn now to a gray rag beside the two Young Sirs, both bowlegged with rickets.

"You traitorous Secessionists brought this miserable war on yourselves. Insisted upon it....