History of Arguable Consequence: The Undertold Stories of the American Civil War
JossVO for Traveler
Traveler ($15): Male/Young - Middle-Aged. North American/American, Yankee/Northern accent or very slight Southern accent. We don't know the living person the narrator/traveler is based on, but we're guessing by the quality of writing that he's a Walt Whitman type -- part idealist, part realist -- someone who is tuned in equally to the beauty and the ugly of the world, or else someone who seems to be clinging to the beauty he finds amidst the devastation of the Tennessee countryside. For this, we'd like to hear a slow and thoughtful delivery, a little curious. Our Traveler is at heart a social scientist and an optimist.
ABOUT THE ROLE: The Traveler is roaming through Eastern Tennessee, commenting on the way the Civil War has affected life there. This piece is meant to convey the intermingling of Union/Confederate feeling in border states like Kentucky and Eastern Tennessee, where allegiances were split, sometimes even within the same family. In two places, the script breaks out of narration and very briefly dips into audio drama.
Along with the Traveler, voice actor awarded this part will also be asked to perform lines for several other very minor characters (Narrator, Garrison, Surgeon, voice in a crowd).
In Dry Valley lived the Methodist preacher named Dugan, (of Brownlow notoriety,) weighing some two hundred and fifty pounds, that these devils incarnate arrested for his loyalty to the Government, making him walk some ten miles through the hot sun, and riding in his buggy themselves. The poor old man fainted time and again on the journey, but there was no relenting with them. They told him they would sweat the Lincoln fever out of him.
They struggled, fell; their life-blood stained,
The cruel murderer's hand;
They clasped their country's flag, and cried,
“God and our native land!"
Let angels spread their wings above;
Let flowers forever bloom ;
Let bays, green bays, spring forth to mark
The martyr's sacred tomb.'
They hurrahed for Old Abe, and we rode on. We travelled this lonesome road a few miles farther, and came at last to the crest of the hill, some five hundred feet directly overlooking the valley. There it lay at our feet, extending north as far as the eye could reach, and at least three miles in width — dotted with neat farm-houses, and just below us Mouse Creek Station, with its dozen or more neat white cottages, and one large brick mansion.
