Books
The Widow of the South
By Robert Hicks (Warner Books)The author will be at Davis-Kidd Booksellers, Aug. 30 at 6 p.m.
When Pizza Huts and strip malls fiercely compete for space in the behemoth that is Cool Springs, it's easy to forget that Williamson County—and Franklin in particular—has a deep and compelling history. There's reason to hope, however, that with the coming publication of local author Robert Hicks' debut novel, The Widow of the South, those who live and work and even shop in the area will realize what lies so close at hand, specifically, the story of the Battle of Franklin.
What's more, the book shows every sign of becoming the kind of commercial success not seen since Oprah dismantled her book club. It's the No. 1 pick for September by Book Sense, a nationwide network of independent bookstores, and it's earned starred reviews in both Booklist and Library Journal, along with overwhelmingly favorable mentions in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, which called it "an impressive addition to the library of historical fiction on the Civil War, worthy of a place alongside The Killer Angels, Rifles for Watie and Shiloh." Civil War buffs, an immensely detail-driven and territory-mongering crowd, have also given it the thumbs-up in online reviews. But the book's appeal clearly extends to a much broader audience: advance orders to date have already exceeded 250,000 copies, a staggering number when the print run for most first novels is closer to 5,000.
On the afternoon of Nov. 30, 1864, the little town of Franklin (population 2,500) became the site for one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Within a span of five hours on that Indian summer day, 9,200 soldiers died; 15 generals were killed, captured or wounded; and a full third of the Confederate army was lost in battle. It was arguably a turning point in the war. As one veteran of the actual battle wrote, "At midnight on the battlefield of Franklin, the finger of destiny was lifted, pointing the open road to Appomattox."
The setting for Hicks' novel is Carnton Plantation, home of the McGavock family. The house was used as a field hospital in the days and weeks after the battle, and though many other homes in the area were used for the same purpose, it was at Carnton that, as legend has it, at least four dead generals were laid out on the back porch during the battle itself, and where the discarded arms and legs of wounded soldiers made a pile that reached as high as a second floor window. More importantly, Carnton was the home of the legendary "Widow of the South." Rather than let the original battlefield and its shallow graves be plowed over, Carrie and John McGavock donated two acres of land adjacent to their own family cemetery for the reburial of the nearly 1,500 Confederates' remains. Until the day she died, Carrie McGavock tended to the cemetery, taking care to mark the graves, record the names of the dead, and give some closure to those left behind.
At Carnton today, it's still possible to see the bloodstains on the floor and visit the cemetery. The place and the family of Carrie and John McGavock are real, but Hicks has embellished their history, imagining the intense feelings behind Carrie's historic devotion to the dead. As Hicks writes, "Those men were the chains that bound the living. They were the missing whose absence shackled the survivors in place, people afraid to move on for fear of being gone for their sudden return. They drew the living back to the war, back to that battlefield over and over and over again, reenacting its rituals and its skirmishes until they all would be dead." Carrie felt compelled to remember the dead, and it was a calling done in the most humble and graceful of ways. As she says, "There are things we are called to do that we cannot refuse, as futile as they seem, because to refuse them would mean to lose faith."
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Hicks lives in Franklin and works in the music business, but he's also an avid collector of art and antiquities, and is active in local historic preservation efforts. His service on the board of the Historic Carnton Plantation and the Tennessee State Museum are obvious influences on The Widow of the South, but it's clear he's also read his Southern literature. Taking a cue from Faulkner, he structures the novel in three parts and employs multiple characters and multiple points of view. Writing workshops decry writers who switch from first person to third and then back to first again, but here the strategy works: people and their stories intersect; no life is left untouched by another, and the resulting grand narrative is larger and of greater scope than it could be otherwise.
Of the many characters, there are four central figures: Carrie and John McGavock, former slave Mariah, and Zachariah Cashwell, a sergeant with the 24th Arkansas Company. At the story's outset, Carrie is a woman distraught over the premature deaths of three of her five children. She isolates herself from others, reliving again and again her powerlessness against their deaths, even going so far as to store up prescription laudanum as a sort of suicidal insurance plan. Her husband, John, is a planter and supporter of the Confederacy who patiently cares for his wife, though he cannot always understand her. Her closest friend is Mariah, a proud and determined slave woman who has been her constant companion since they were girls in Louisiana.
Cashwell enters the story when he is wounded in battle and cared for at Carnton. As Carrie describes him, "He was everything we—John and I—were not, and in his mysteries lay a certain kind of knowledge about the world that was both liberating and terrifying." His experience in the war is what draws Carrie to him: he sees war and its false promises for what they are. "The only glory to be had was the glory of surviving," he says. The Widow of the South doesn't romanticize war, and the Battle of Franklin is one example of how we "live in a world without sense." Those like Cashwell who live through such events come to a new understanding of life, one that, though not always pleasant, is redeeming in its honesty.
If there's a weakness to Hicks' writing, it's that at times Carrie's ongoing interior monologues—on death, life, her chaste and unrequited love for Cashwell—take on a level of analysis that is at times frustrating. The adages and small wisdoms, the moments of quiet introspection are welcome, but they can also be a distraction—too much thinking and not enough doing. When Hicks does let his characters act, when they engage in the world and there is movement forward rather than inward, the effect is impressive. Though we all know how the Civil War ended, and we understand the horror that must have reigned afterward, Hicks still manages to induce a state of anxious "what next" in the reader. His Franklin of 1864 seems as real—if not more so—than the Franklin we have today, with its bland succession of New South suburban sprawl. Hicks' Franklin is a place of complexity, as filled with post-battle horror as it is with honor and a sense of duty to the past.