By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 15)
As historical fiction, Charles Frazier’s Varina can be seen as an imagined memoir of the widow of Confederate President Jefferson Davis—but only barely.
It draws heavily from the verified facts about the former Varina Howell of Natchez, but is seamlessly layered with the insightful thoughts and personality of a woman from an attractive belle to an arch and wise matron in her later years. It’s truly a fascinating journey.
It covers her courtship as a young girl with the then-widowed Davis more than a decade her senior, from living on their plantation at Davis Bend near Vicksburg to moving to Washington, D.C., when he was first a congressman from Mississippi, then a U.S. senator, to being secretary of war, and, finally their days after the Civil War.
Davis himself does not get off lightly in her estimation. For example, she confided to one newspaper reporter after his inauguration as the Confederate leader that sometimes even she wanted to murder him. (Married folk can relate!)
But she speaks fondly of him, too, recalling his young man’s dream of being simply a country lawyer who wrote poetry; much as she wistfully recalled her own dream of being First Lady, not of the South, but residing on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., back when Davis was a U.S. senator and war hero. It seemed a likely prospect at the time.
The tale is told through her words to a black man who tracks her down as she is living out her later years in New York. The man, James Blake (or James Brooks), was known as Jimmie Limber when she and Davis took him in as a child from the streets of Washington and raised him, until they were split apart by the war.
As oddly as it might sound to the uninitiated, the story of a black child being raised side by side with their other children is true—at least, for a short time until the war intervened.
Some of the most gripping of the narrative (a la Gone with the Wind) involves Varina and Blake’s flight for Havana and hoped-for sanctuary in an arduous journey that ended on the Florida-Georgia border as their world came crashing down.
Frazier, known for his masterful work Cold Mountain, draws the reader in with broad strokes of often quite profound observation, along with period details, powerful accounts of the hard life of citizens after Sherman’s march, and thoughtful reflection.
For example, how she came about understanding the complex nature of slavery as a child amazed her, how even slight gradations of skin color could be so determinant. It boiled down to the sense “that a strong line cut through all the people she knew and everybody who existed,” one that “traced divisions clear and precise as the sweeping shadow of a sundial.”
And it was firmly enforced, in society, in public, in private, in homes and churches, a biblical injunction (Luke 12:47): “He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.”
The South and all in it were beaten down by it, wholly, individually, even the land itself “defaced and haunted with countless places where blood … would keep seeping up for generations to come.”
It makes one wonder, have the scars ever healed?
Frazier has produced a time machine where the reader is immersed in the Civil War era, pondering through the eyes of Varina Howell Davis the complexities, mysteries, brutalities and banalities of days long gone.
Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at the Clarion Ledger, is the author of seven books including his latest, Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them.
Charles Frazier will be at the Eudora Welty House on Thursday, April 26, to sign and read from Varina, Lemuria’s April 2018 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.
Comments are closed.