Varina
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About this ebook
Sooner or later, history asks, which side were you on?
In his powerful new novel, Charles Frazier returns to the time and place of Cold Mountain, vividly bringing to life the chaos and devastation of the Civil War
Her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects the secure life of a Mississippi landowner. Davis instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually appointed president of the Confederacy, placing Varina at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history—culpable regardless of her intentions.
The Confederacy falling, her marriage in tatters, and the country divided, Varina and her children escape Richmond and travel south on their own, now fugitives with “bounties on their heads, an entire nation in pursuit.”
Intimate in its detailed observations of one woman’s tragic life and epic in its scope and power, Varina is a novel of an American war and its aftermath. Ultimately, the book is a portrait of a woman who comes to realize that complicity carries consequences.
Charles Frazier
Charles Frazier is the author of Cold Mountain, an international bestseller that won the National Book Award and was adapted into an Academy-Award winning film by Anthony Minghella. He is also the author of the bestselling novels Thirteen Moons and Nightwoods.
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Reviews for Varina
186 ratings21 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Varina Howell Davis was the second wife of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America. Though she was raised in a world that might have produced a typical Southern belle, her father's fecklessness instead made her a young woman who was unusually educated and aware of the precariousness of her own position in life. This precariousness would color all the rest of her days as she became the second wife of a man still devoted to his dead first bride, a mother who lost her children one by one, and the first lady of a doomed rebel government.This beautifully written novel tells Varina's story as she tells it to a man who has come to visit her in the New York hotel where she is living her last days. He believes that he is Jimmie Limber, a black boy whom Varina took into her home and raised with her own children. The tale of their attempted escape through the war-torn South to Cuba, with the Union army hot on their heels, is powerful and suspenseful. The time after the war is less focused and less powerful, as Varina attempts to find a way to live with the losses she has suffered. But throughout, she never descends into self-pity; she realizes that what she has gone through is not even close to just recompense for the evils perpetuated by the Confederate system that she lived in for so long. I would probably not have picked up a book about Varina if I hadn't heard Charles Frazier speak about it and been intrigued. Her story is quite interesting and I'm glad that I read it. Frazier is sympathetic to her choices and her lack thereof, and does not let her off the hook for her sins. But the tone of this book is not angry; instead it is more regretful. After all, Varina is somewhat protected by her social status and her whiteness, despite her guilt. Maybe a little more anger would be a good thing in telling this story.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I loved Cold Mountain, so when I heard the author had a new book out, I had to read it. This is an artful, somewhat historical- but billed as a novel- portrait of Varina Davis, First Lady of the Confederacy. While I did find it apologist in some ways, and fictionalizing a real person does leave a heavy burden on the reader to parse what it history and what is creative license, it was nevertheless compelling, beautiful, and lead me to seek more information about the figures involved.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As with Cold Mountain, I appreciated Frazier's complex diction, his almost laconic narrative musings of the protagonists, his careful blend of geographic/cultural/political details with the immediacy of Varina's emotions, thoughts. Historical fiction at its best with a fascinating woman who did not fit the rosy cheeked Southern belle stereotype, who maintained a full life, intellectually & socially, in spite of her almost constant struggles with her more powerful husband and his elder brother, the deaths of so many of her six children, the inescapable chaos and destruction at the end of our country's terrible civil war, & then living with the aftermath of being the First Lady of the lost cause. Interesting choice to tease out her story with the use of a second narrator, an "interviewer" in the later years of her life (1906-). "Jimmie", now James Blake, a freed black & highly educated teacher, has vague recollections of his early childhood; he comes upon a Davis biographer's book, with references to him being a part of the Davis household as a small child. He eventually seeks out his long ago mistress & protector, to confirm his early childhood memories, & seek understanding. While this interplay of James and Varina, their subsequent meetings forces the reader to go back & forth in Varina's many years, the author remains firmly in control of both their voices, and the comprehensive portrait of an intelligent, complex woman clearly emerges. Fascinating to read. It would make a great read for a book club for those who enjoyed historical fiction/biography.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I had never spent much time considering the fate of Southern leaders after the Civil War. This piece of historical fiction is narrated by Varina, or "V", the wife of Jefferson Davis. It is the story of an intelligent woman married off to a grieving widower, and the rest is history. V is a compassionate, smart woman and through her eyes the reader glimpses the costs of war to the vanquished and the plight of women in the late 1800s. I like the first person narrative, as it allowed for great detail and enhanced insight to the time period. Excellent read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5-- That line in the song, Old times there are not forgotten. I could argue that maybe they're not worth remembering.-- I've never forgotten that girl, and I wouldn't want to. Remembering doesn't change anything--it will always have happened. But forgetting won't erase it either.Varina was the second wife of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America. She was raised in Mississippi according to her status, owned slaves and served as the first lady in Richmond. But she was also a woman who walked out of her husband's inaugural address halfway through, who, in the middle of the Civil War, took in a black child and raised him with her own children, who finished the work of her husband's memoirs after his death and then moved directly to New York City. Charles Frazier tells the story of Varina's life as a series of reminiscences recounted by Varina to a young man who believes he might be Jimmy Limber, the boy Varina took in during the war. He is searching for his past and they meet each Sunday and she remembers her life before, during and after the war, the memories moving back and forth through time, as her train of thought brings other events to mind. Many years later, now that choices matter less, V has finally learned that sitting calm within herself and waiting is often the best choice. And even when it's not, those around you become uncomfortable because they think you are wise.Frazier writes beautifully, there's not a jarring sentence or an awkward word choice anywhere in this book. He also does the difficult job of threading the needle of being both faithful to the attitudes and behaviors of that time without alienating the modern reader. Varina is a sympathetic character, but Frazier never allows us to look away at the harm done by the system she lived in and tried to preserve.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5As the American Civil War was drawing to a close and it was clear that the South was going to lose, the defeated President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, told his wife, Varina, better known as V, to take the children and flee south from Richmond to Florida to seek passage to Cuba. This is how this historical fiction begins, which portrays the life of the First Lady of the South. I had high hopes for this novel since I loved Cold Mountain, but found it a more difficult read than his debut award-winner. The novel frequently switched among V's childhood in Mississippi, courtship with the much older Jefferson, and her husband's political life in Washington. I found myself becoming confused with the transitions. The entourage meets a number of individuals during their journey south, especially through Georgia, and found myself also having difficulty keeps all the characters straight. The earlier and final chapters of the book were the best; I found the middle chapters boring. I don't recall having a similar difficult with Cold Mountain.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Varina is a novel about the wife of the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, by Charles Frazier, who also wrote Cold Mountain. A large portion of the book deals with Varina Davis’ life after the fall of Richmond. It follows her unsuccessful escape accompanied by her children, servants and friends as she tries to reach Cuba. The novel weaves back and forth in time as James Brooks, aka Jimmy Limber, connects with her in her later years. The controversy of whether James was originally a slave of the Davises, an adopted son, protege or family ‘pet’ is never completely explained. But James collects V’s memories of her life as a girl, her meeting and marriage to Jeff Davis, her early days in Washington as a political wife and later as the First Lady of the South and the tragic loss of her young son, Joe. It took me al least a third of the book to relax into the writing style. At first, I found it self aware and bordering on pretentious. As I got more deeply into the extraordinary life of V, my irritation at the forced writing style fell away. She is portrayed as a complex, intelligent and wily woman, clearly ahead of the times she lived in. What the novel did was whet my appetite to discover the true Varina Davis and I shall carry on with my research.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I didn't know anything about Mrs Davis before this book. Wouldn't have even known her name. I like the way she was portrayed here - independent, quixotic, not wrapped up in causes, but aware of how history would view her. Frazier's prose is just as gorgeous here as it was in Cold Mountain. As if an old storyteller sits on a porch spinning his tale with no regard to punctuation or full sentences. Really lovely.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is the story of the wife of Jefferson Davis, before, during, and after the Civil War. It's a fascinating look at history. It is also a tragic recounting of the myriad sorrows of her life. Most of all, however, it is another example of the lyrical mastery of Charles Frazier's writing. I put is writing up against any contemporary writer.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The life of Varina Howell Davis was at times stranger than fiction, so it made for an interesting story. This book was written as if it were a series of interviews with Varina primarily relating the account of her flight from Richmond but frequently sidetracking to other memories. It didn't make for the smoothest storytelling (Of course the author's refusal to use quotation marks didn't help either). One of my favorite things about historic fiction is seeing how the author chooses to fill in the blanks left by history, so I was disappointed that when it came to Varina's broken engagement and rescheduled wedding, we were simply told that V never talked about it. That felt like an easy way out, as if the author had been unable to come up with any interesting or believable ideas for motivation. Perhaps my impression was wrong, and there were other reasons he didn't want to get in to that part of V's life. If so, I would have been happy to read about it in the author's notes at the end. I really wish the author's notes had been more comprehensive. I love reading the motivation for telling a story in the first place as well as the reason behind some of the creative liberties. There was nothing like that here.A couple of random notes:This book gave me the impression that Varina was an only child (In reality she was not).I believe that the date was wrong at the beginning of the chapter about the inauguration. I believe it was meant to say 1861.Overall, though, it was an interesting read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I didn’t know much about the wife of the Confederate State President, Jefferson Davis, but now I do. I think she’s a person I’d like to know and I would love to have Oprah interview. Varina was an intelligent, strong willed woman who was comfortable in her skin. She didn’t rely on a man to shape her personality. I wonder if she’d have been the US Senator instead of her husband, if history would have been different.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A beautifully gwritten story of the life of Varina Howell Davis, the second wife of Jefferson Davis and the only "First Lady" of the Confederacy. Varina was the daughter of a less than successful businessman; however, she was educated by a private tutor and at a finishing school in the north. Not having many options for a marriage, she was wed to Jefferson Davis, a widower much older than herself. Davis was the son of an over-bearing landowner and was still grieving the death of his first wife.The first years of the Davis marriage were spent apart due to his involvement in the Mexican-American war. Varina was forced to live in the home of Davis' father and brother who treated her poorly. After the war, Davis ran for Congress and spent time in Washington DC along with Varina who loved the society life and interesting people there, but the question of slavery became more and more urgent.The story of Varina's life is not told in chronological order. Rather, James, a black boy who lived with her as a child (she supposedly rescued him from a beating) is now an adult and comes to visit her and discuss his early years. It takes a while to keep names straight as characters are often mentioned without "introduction" which comes later. Still, the book held my interest and I found her story to be fascinating. A woman with a mind of her own who is trapped in a marriage of convenience yet has five children and does her best to fulfill her role as a president's wife in spite of her mixed feelings about the secession of the southern states.There are episodes of hardship especially after the fall of Richmond when Varina, two bodyguards, a slave woman, and some of her children escape hopefully heading to Florida and eventually Cuba. The fall of Richmond, the destruction of the South especially in the wake of Sherman's march become real as seen through many of the episodes of the escape as the group meets various people. The strange relationship of some of the slave holders and their slaves is like none I have read about. This is not the typical harsh slave owner beating his slaves. Instead, many, including Davis, had a personal and seemingly equal relationship with slaves. Yet, the idea of ownership is shown from two perspectives: that of the owner and that of the slave. Loved this book; learned a lot about the Civil War from an angle I had never thought of. And Varina is one of the most memorable characters.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5VARINA by Charles FrazierThe person is eminently interesting – the wife of the Confederate President. The era is interesting – the decades before, during, and after the American Civil War. The episodes are fascinating – a Southern white woman raising an enslaved child as her own: the escape of fugitives in a devastated land: the marriage of a 17 year old to a 40 year old. So why didn’t I like it?The episodes are just that – episodes that jump from decade to decade with no cohesion. The story is not a story – there is no plot. The tempo and pacing are erratic at best. BUT… the writing is wonderful. The conclusions are insightful. The characters are real and well presented.YOU might like it. I didn’t.3 of 5 stars
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fascinating biographical novel on Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy. The novel is set up as dialogues on a number of Sundays between Varina, now an older woman in her 60s, with James, who had lived with her family and her children. He has kept a notebook about her all these years; it is now August 1906 and he wants her to clarify what he has written and fill in gaps. So the flashbacks and memories begin: life before, during, and after the Civil War. The novel was a bit disjointed in how the material was presented but the writing was gorgeous. Varina's life, although depressing, sounds like one to investigate further.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Varina Howell Davis, the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, is the subject of the latest book by Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain. It is presented as a series of memories as Varina recounts parts of her life to James Blake who was once Jimmy Limber, a black child she took care of during the last part of the Civil War. Now he's a schoolteacher who wants to know about the childhood he can only remember in flashes.Cold Mountain is a favorite book, and the writing in Varina is as beautiful and evocative. Mr. Frazier has a gift for choosing the perfect word or phrase, and it is on full display here. I loved the writing and often paused over a sentence or paragraph to savor its meaning. However, I never got a good feel for Varina which is too bad as she is the main character. Jimmy is more the catalyst who interviews her, trying to draw her out. I'm not sure he ever succeeds as V as she is known in the narrative is a wraith floating on a sea of bland memories buoyed only by the opium she ingests in varying degrees from the time she's thirteen. I never got a real feel for her; even her losses, the deaths of her young children, seemed distant and removed in the narrative. She knows many people but never seems truly attached to anyone, not her older husband or her children. V lived through many historical events from the Mexican-American war to the time of the Spanish-American war, but they are barely touched on in some ways, just part of her misty memories. So, I was disappointed ultimately. I'll give this book 3 and 1/2 stars because it's so beautifully written, but I wish the author had delved deeper into the real woman, even if it was a fictional presentation.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/53.5 Frazier one again returns to the Civil War, with mixed reactions from this reader. I freely admit to knowing what became of some of the principal players after the Southern defeat in said war, so I can in no way pinpoint accuracies or inaccuracies in this telling. This is narrated from the viewpoint of Varina Davis, fleeing Richmond after Lee's surrender. At her side, her remaining children, a young black boy named James, a black woman, and a few trusted protectors.This was, I felt, the strongest part of the book. The danger they encountered from an almost lawless land, Marauder's, escapes, the Federal soldiers trying to capture them, and those looking for the gold she supposedly carried. We see the damage done to the landscape and the people, some protecting what they have left, and those still trying g to !I've in the shells of their former existence. I found the author did a wonderful job painting this picture of a South in disarray and destruction.While the story is told from Varinas point of view, it is told from the future, when the young black boy, James, now grown, seeks her out to clarify things he had read. Thing being so young at the time he little remembers. It is this interaction with James and a young woman named Laura, that didn't work as well for me. It broke up the narractive, I found it clumsily done and scattered. I think a straight forward narrative would have served this story better,made it stronger, but that is not this book. So while, for the most part I enjoyed the history and a look back at this time, for me I found the changes of focus frustrating.ARC from Edelweiss.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Having read other sources about Varina Davis, the second wife of Jefferson Davis, I was disappointed that the book seemed to spend a huge amount of time on the escape from Richmond and the eventual capture of the Davis family after the end of the Civil War. There was definitely more to that lady than the author wrote about!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Varina Howell Davis was the wife of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. This novel is about her life, with the Civil War and her husband's roles in it as a background. This is not a history of that conflict nor much about what Davis did, but it is a story about the woman who he was married to, a wife, mother, and friend to many. Her views on the war are complicated and did not always align with her husband's. She spent time in Washington as the wife of a senator and secretary of war, meeting people who remained lifelong friends despite the divide within the country. I knew very little about Varina, and I enjoyed reading and learning about her, and as always, researching more about her and finding pictures of her. As most people are, she was a complex, fascinating individual. The only trouble I had reading the book was the way it jumped around in time, sometimes with little warning.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A different kind of historical fiction. More literary thoughts and discussion than would really be possible to know for Varina Davis, but once I got into it I really enjoyed being immersed in it. I had loved this about Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain also.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Charles Frazier presents another bitter look on the ravages of the Civil War, this time Frazier delves into an account on Varina Howell Davis, the second wife of Jefferson Davis. The war has ended and Varina and her surviving children race to a haven in Florida. The story jumps back and forth exposing Varina in various times of her life. The story uncovers happiness and grief and richness and poverty. Frazier described a life surrounded by politics and greed, and the hard, cold reality of war. I was in that wagon, bouncing around and hungry on that trip to Florida, and desperate for the journey to end.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Varina, written by Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, is about Varina Howell Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America. It opens in 1906 with a middle-aged black man who has come to her to fill in parts of his past to her who is staying at a "health spa" likely for addiction to laudanum. It seems that when he was a child he stayed with her family as a freed person but also as a child that they were taking care of after finding him being beaten in the streets. Varina put him in with her children to be raised. When Sherman was making his way South burning everything in his path and Richmond became indefensible, Jeff sent her and the children south heading toward Florida and Havana. Varina tells this man, James "Jimmie Limber" Brooks his story and her own story of her life before meeting Jefferson and then their life together.This book goes back and forth in time between the present, which is 1906 and 1865 and 1874 and 1842 onward. This leads to whiplash as you are thrown willy nilly through the history of this woman's life. In the beginning, she had it pretty hard in that she once came from a wealthy family, but her father squandered the money that he got from his father on bad deals. Pretty soon there was nothing left. She has no dowry to speak of and is now in a position to be asked to no parties to meet gentlemen when her father sends her to stay with a new family in the area the Davis's. While staying with Joe Davis and his many daughters who seem to be of a similar age and whose mother is not much older than Varina who is seventeen and these daughters are in their teens. No one is really sure what is going on in that house. But his brother is Jefferson Davis and he made a handshake deal with him for some land, Brierfield where he made a mess of building it. Jefferson hasn't felt like marrying anyone since his first wife died of malaria not long after they married. But when he meets Varina he sees someone he can marry, though he does not love her.Varina agrees to marry him after much ado. She has dreams that come true and she dreams of the Civil War and of the South losing and of her and Jefferson being President and First Lady and it ending badly for them. She dreams of losing children she hasn't had yet. As a matter of fact, it would be years before they would have their first child mainly due to the fact that they weren't on equal footing in the marriage and Jefferson's heart and mind were elsewhere. He doesn't even leave her Briarfield in his will but leaves it to his brother to watch over her as he sees fit. Which she knows he'll kick her out as soon as possible. So she sets out war against brother Joe and Jeff to get her inheritance and refuses to sleep with Jefferson in case they have children from that union that would be in peril of losing their inheritance and being destitute. At this time Jefferson is working in Washington D.C. in the government and without Varina there to help him he is failing at his job. Then the Mexican-American War broke out and he left them to go off and fight in it.The character of James Brooks is not fully formed and you don't feel as though you really know him at all. It's like he's a prop for Varina to tell her story to which could have just as easily have been done to a newspaper editor or someone with whom you wouldn't want to feel a connection to but don't. And the character of Laura who is staying at the place Varina is staying at in 1906 is superfluous. She has no purpose in the story and wastes time and space. Some of the histories behind Varina's story, if true, is entertaining. The story of her laudanum taking and how she is not a "professional" taker but an average person taking it every day and her reasoning behind it are interesting. This isn't a bad book, it just isn't a great book either. It's somewhere in between. I'm just not that fond of his writing style. I give it three and a half stars out of five stars.QuotesSo, right now, I wish you every day a happy day and good appetite, warm feet, good friends & everything but forgetfulness. I do not think I would have longed for, or used the water of Lethe. Memory is truly psossession sometimes.-Charles Frazier (Varina p 40)Give a Yankee one little dried pea and three thimbles and he can buy groceries. Give him a boxful of cheap, shiny pocketknives and pistols to trade and he will turn it into a career. But give him a war, and he’ll make a fortune to last centuries. It’s not something they learn. They’re saturated in it from birth. End result—we lost everything and they create thousands of new millionaires.-Charles Frazier (Varina p 43)What those miserable political animals are doing to that beautiful man [Jefferson Davis]—a man, let me be clear, I have wanted to kill many time sfor my own reasons—is disgusting and heartbreaking.-Charles Frazier (Varina p 227)Never acknowledge that the general culture is often stupid or evil and would vote out God in favor of the devil if he fed them back their hate and fear in a way that made them feel righteous. -Charles Fraizer (Varina p 328-9)You’ll find that as you grow old, you stop bothering to hide the self you’ve been all along.-Charles Frazier (Varina p 335) -And his ideas on war were equally abstract, He said, War is an affair of lines—a problem of geometry.-Except pencil marks drawn on paper with a straightedge and a protractor don’t bleed.-Exactly, V said.-Charles Frazier (Varina p 337)
Book preview
Varina - Charles Frazier
First Sunday
The Blue Book
Saratoga Springs, 1906
IF HE IS THE BOY IN THE BLUE BOOK, WHERE TO START? HE can’t expect to recognize her after four decades, and he certainly doesn’t expect her to recognize him. The last time they saw each other he would have been no more than six.
Firm memory of childhood eludes him until about eight years old, and before that it’s mostly whispers of sound and images flashing like photographs. A dead boy lying on the ground, a grand house, a tall woman with black hair and a soothing voice.
A year ago, walking down a street in Albany, he heard a dozen syllables of someone singing Alouette
through an open second-story window. The song twitched a strong nerve of memory from the deep past—a ribbon of road stretching forward, a swath of starry sky visible between tops of pine trees, a thin paring of moon, a brown-eyed mother hugging him close and pointing out the patterns of constellations, telling their names and stories. Entrained with those hazy memories came a surging feeling something like love.
FIRST SUNDAY OF AUGUST, early afternoon, James Blake walks through the heavy front doors of The Retreat carrying a marbled journal and a book bound in dark blue nubby cloth, bristling with torn newspaper place-marks. He wears his best gray suit, a club-collar shirt bleached perfect white, a striped black-and-gray waistcoat, a coral silk tie knotted loose. Three steps inside the door he removes his hat—a new boater—and walks purposefully to the front desk like he belongs there. The desk clerk looks him over and then pauses long enough to make sure Blake becomes aware that his shade of skin has been noted. The clerk—maybe fifty, thinning hair combed straight back, teeth marks intact—finally says, May I help?
Blake hands him a small envelope. Says, Could you deliver this to a guest? Mrs. Davis.
The clerk pats the envelope down onto his desktop without taking his eyes off Blake. He turns his palms up and says, She’s expecting you?
—I doubt it.
—You’re not here to interview her for some publication?
—No.
The clerk rings for a bellboy and then says, You might be more comfortable waiting outside. Turn left and there are benches. We’ll notify you if Mrs. Davis is available.
—Here in front of the fireplace will be better. So I’ll see her when she arrives.
THE LOBBY OF THE RETREAT matches every detail of public rooms in tasteful modern resort hotels designed in the Arts & Crafts style—Limbert furniture, Voysey rugs, Roycroft lighting. Except, faint and far down one of the long corridors, James thinks he hears someone scream.
He shifts uncomfortably in the strict angles of an oak and leather settle facing the massive stone hearth. Broad windows and French doors look out across a green and blue landscape—fields, woods, valleys, hills. A few people scattered around the great room read books and flap papers from Boston and New York and Philadelphia. In a corner, a tousled young blond woman sits bowed in concentration at the piano trying to play Sunflower Slow Drag.
It keeps getting away from her until she gives up and plays it half-speed.
Over the big hearth, a sentiment cuts deep into the massive keystone, lettered like a Gothic forgery on a famous man’s grave marker. It reads WHAT LIES BEHIND US AND WHAT LIES BEFORE US ARE TINY MATTERS COMPARED TO WHAT LIES WITHIN US. ~ EMERSON.
James stands and traces each letter with his forefinger, as if writing the sentence for the first time. It works to establish balance—like perfectly equal pinches of sand in each cup of a set of scales—and then he draws a deep breath and blows it all away. He touches each junction of that grand E and tries to reckon what state of guilt and dread about time past and time future Emerson proposed to comfort.
James sits again and thumbs through his blue book until he comes to a chapter toward the end that he has read and reread and underscored in pencil to the point that every line appears profound. Margins congest with question marks and checks and exclamations. If he’s right and the boy described in the book is him, this is all he knows of his origin. No living relatives, recently a widower, no links to the past until six months ago when a title on a bookstore shelf drew him—First Days Among the Contrabands. He had reached for it thinking it would be a mystery.
AN ELDERLY WOMAN enters the great room from one of the corridors. She resembles later photographs of Queen Victoria—much taller, but with similar gravity and tiredness dragging from behind. Same hairstyle. Her dress a sheen of eggplant. She walks by the piano player and palms the small of her back to correct her posture.
James doesn’t recognize the woman, but he makes an assumption and stands.
At the chair beside the settle, V stops and says, Mister Blake? I don’t recollect your name, but I’m curious.
—Yes, ma’am. Thank you for seeing me. I’ll be brief. What I wanted to speak to you about concerns the war.
She had started to sit, but now remains standing.
—Please. I’m long since exhausted with that insane war and don’t need to re-dream a nightmare.
V turns to walk away but then turns back, angry. She tells him how uninterested she is in the past, except people keep trying to clench its fist around her throat. Whatever old story he needs to tell, she’s heard a thousand of them—all the tales of waste and loss. And heaps of guilt too, for failing to find a bloodless way to end ownership of people—choosing a bloodbath instead. Since then, South and North have been busy constructing new memories and new histories, fictions fighting to become facts.
—If you haven’t noticed, she says, we’re a furious nation, and war drums beat in our chest. Our leaders proclaim better than they negotiate. The only bright spot is, the right side won. My only advice is to be where you are now—don’t look back. Otherwise, good luck and good day, sir.
—My apologies, Mrs. Davis. I saw in the Albany paper that you were here, and I wanted to see you and ask about this book and about the children. I don’t recall all the names, but I remember Joe.
—What could you possibly know about Joe?
—I remember sitting with the others, trying to wake him up.
V pauses and then says, I don’t know what you’re after, but I’ve dealt with confidence artists for decades. Or else you’re just recalling the funeral. Thousands attended.
—Not the funeral. I remember him lying on the pavement. And I remember him that night, upstairs. So still on the big bed with candles and flowers all around. He’d gotten smaller and very white, and his lips were a color I’d never seen. He looked like himself, but changed. It terrified me. I remember people coming and going late in the night. Every lamp and candle in the house lit and all the windows open and curtains blowing out.
V says, I’m lost.
SHE WORKS AT REMEMBRANCE, looks harder at Blake’s broad forehead, brown skin, curling hair graying at the temples. She tries to cast back four decades to the war. When she arrived, who was there in that huddle of people on the cobbles beneath the balcony of the house stupidly called the Confederate White House?
She had been down by the river making an appearance at a celebration—a mass of people welcoming a boatload of men and women returned through prisoner exchange from Northern detention. A brass band played Home, Sweet Home.
The kind of event where V’s every move was watched side-eyed by those hoping for a gossip-worthy moment. She stood near her carriage and chatted with Mary Chesnut, who had been circulating through the crowd birdlike in her brief, bright attentions—snapping up bits of language, facial expressions, details of wardrobe, witty comments, stupid comments, moments of human grace and foolishness—every detail of observation to be entered into her journal at day’s end.
A man, a stranger, walked up and stood close like trying to eavesdrop on their conversation. Then low and breathy, looking oddly off to the side, he said, Little Joe has gotten himself killed.
V turned to her driver, and trying not to scream said, Get me home now.
A fast rattling dash—the driver popping his whip above the horses, their shoes striking sparks off the cobbles—and she found a crowd arranged in concentric arcs below the balcony at the high end of the house. Gawkers stood at the fringes, then a few neighbors and their servants, and then Ellen and the children ringed tight around Joe. He had recently turned five and had fallen twenty feet and lay completely broken on the cobblestones. Ellen bent over trying to hug the live children and to ease them away from Joe. But when she saw V, Ellen collapsed onto her knees and buried her face in her hands.
The children—Maggie and Jeffy and Billy and Jimmie—sat on the pavers saying Joe’s name and trying to nudge him out of sleep. Joe lay on his side, and his limbs formed strange angles. A puddle of blood the size of a saucer thickened beneath his head. Maggie held Joe’s hand and the three boys kept touching his shoulder. Joe and Jimmie were close to the same age and often shared clothes.
—Missus V, Ellen said. He was playing and fell between the railings. Must have.
With her face all scared and confused, Ellen looked so young.
V remembers trying to kneel beside Joe, how pregnant she was at the time, how heavy and awkward. She remembers looking at him and touching his face and feeling numb. And then slipping sideways from her knees onto her hip, a hard jolt against the cobbles. And then the new baby began flailing inside her.
V HOLDS HER RIGHT HAND OUT toward James Blake, pushes at him like gesturing Stop. Then she presses her left palm against the fingertips and bends the right hand back toward her wrist. She presses hard, but ninety degrees is her limit.
She says, Show me.
James Blake bends his hand until the fingernails almost fold against the top of his forearm. An inch gap.
—Lately, I can’t go all the way back, he says.
—You’re Jimmie Limber.
—I don’t remember that name, but I believe the Jimmie in this book is me.
He holds out the bristling blue book.
V won’t take it. She reaches two fingers and touches the inside of his wrist as if testing his pulse, his materiality.
—I don’t need a book to know you, she says. I’ve believed for years that all my boys were long gone, crossed over. I’ve thought of it as my diminishing circle of boys pinching to a black point, like the period at the end of a sentence. But here you are.
—I hardly know anything about my life then, he says.
—Sit down and I’ll tell you what I remember.
Fugitive
1865
THINGS FELL APART SLOWLY BEFORE THEY FELL APART fast. Late March—Friday night before Richmond burned—V fled the false White House and the capital city. That afternoon she and Ellen Barnes packed in a rush, knowing they might never be back. Billy and Jimmie went back and forth from V to Ellen, touching their arms or hips for reassurance. Ellen always kept her hair parted in the middle and oiled, pulled back tight against her scalp. But that day, long curling strands escaped, and she kept sweeping them back from her face.
—Don’t fret, Jimmie Limber, Ellen said. Just a little jaunt south. Billy’s been on one before, so ask him about it.
Ellen took an apple out of her apron pocket and held it in both hands to get the boys’ attention. Then with hardly any effort or sense of motion, she snapped it perfectly in half and handed the pieces to the boys, and they went on their way laughing and studying the apple halves as if the secret to Ellen’s magic might reveal itself.
When the packing was done, Jeff took V aside and gave her a departure present. A purse pistol, slight and pretty, almost an art object suited for display in a museum.
—Do you know how to load and aim and fire? he said.
—I didn’t grow up in Mississippi for nothing.
He said that if the country fell, she should take the children to Florida and find passage to Havana. Then he told V to keep the little pistol with her at all times, and if Federals tried to violate her, she should shoot herself. Or if she couldn’t do that, at least fire it in their direction to make them kill her.
He gave her what money he could gather, and she had been building her own hoard of running money from selling furnishings and china and crystal. Her carriage horses had been seized for the army, and Jeff said he couldn’t allow her to take food beyond a few pounds of flour and grits and dried beans. Wouldn’t be fair. But he didn’t at all believe Richmond or the nation faced doom. This alarm would be like all the others. Two weeks from now, she would be coming back. General Lee would find a way.
Except V knew it wasn’t like the other alarms because he hadn’t gifted her a suicide pistol before now.
A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, vagrants traveled southwest down springtime Carolina roads, red mud and pale leaves on the poplar trees only big as the tip of your little finger, a green haze at the tree line. They fled like a band of Gypsies—a ragged little caravan of saddle horses and wagons with hay and horse feed and a sort of kitchen wagon and another for baggage. Two leftover battlefield ambulances for those not a-saddle. The band comprised a white woman, a black woman, five children, and a dwindling supply of white men—which V called Noah’s animals, because as soon as they realized the war was truly lost, they began departing two by two.
Worse yet, the core of fugitives traveled under rumors of possible Federal warrants—including hanging charges, such as treason. If true, the price on their heads would be a mighty cash fortune in a time of destitution.
V had with her a scant bit of hard money and a bale or two of government bills. A single chicken, though, cost fistfuls of that nearly worthless paper. One-dollar bills—with her friend Clement Clay’s graven image on the front—were useless except to wad by the dozens and light cookfires.
Wherever the fugitives traveled, rumor followed that their little caravan comprised the Treasure Train, the last hoard of gold and silver from the Rebel treasury, wagons heaped with millions in bullion instead of weary, scared children threatening to go croupy and feverish at every moment.
In delusion, bounty hunters surely rode hard behind, faces dark in the shadows of deep hat brims, daylight striking nothing but jawbones and chin grizzle, dirty necks, and once-white shirt collars banded with extrusions of their own amber grease. Below that, wool coats black as skillets, muddy tall boots, and bay horses foaming yellow sweat.
And yet, all along the way, the woods-edge spooled by lined with redbud blooming pink and dogwood blooming white, bearing the holy cross of the Savior. The nail wounds hammered into his hands printed on every blossom, reproduced in their billions through the Southern woods and even blooming hopefully in the yards of homes recently burned down to middens of shiny black charcoal by the Northern army.
Their immediate goal? Escape to La Florida. Tierra Florida. Floridaland. A raw frontier with Spanish moss hanging ghostly and parasitic from granddaddy live oaks. Black mold streaked gray limestone Spanish forts from parapet to white sandy ground and algae-green moat. Alligators, bears, lions, and purple snakes nine feet long roamed the swamps and jungles and scrublands. But only a scattering of people, and those reputed to be more unreasonably lawless and corrupt and predatory than anything you’d find even deep in Texas.
V penciled a thought on the endpaper of Northanger Abbey: The frontier is no place for those who can’t afford to run.
A ROUGH STRETCH OF ROAD woke the children. The ambulance banged through rocks the size of pullets and potholes deep enough with red water to drown a shoat. The driver sawed at the reins, working the tired mules, trying to avoid the worst of it. But there was only so much he could do. All day the wagon went heading and pitching from mudhole to mudhole, and now the night gathered so dark you hardly saw the mules’ haunches right in front of you.
Over the course of the journey, the children had become like weary sailors long out on the foam, able to sleep through all but the stormiest nights. But now, back in the bed of the ambulance, inside the cave of dirty beige canvas arched tight over bent oak-splint ribs, the children rose from their patchwork quilts all together and began fretting and whimpering. Winnie, though, just cried in place, being not even a year old. Every one of them suddenly needed easement.
V had been riding along for two hours, jostling dreamlike under a tiny taste of opium, feeling like the world had collapsed to rubble around her—an appropriate feeling, because it had. Not the best of times to have to budget medicine, though she had enough Dover’s powder to last a month if she took it by the conservative directions on the label. But doing it that way, V felt little effect, not nearly enough to faze her anxiety, to loosen the tight knot her diaphragm and stomach had become even when she slept. So in reality she had only a few days’ supply left. Which would have been desperate but for the promise of seeing Mary Chesnut in Abbeville, South Carolina, soon. Maybe more a hope than a promise, but surely even in an apocalypse one wonderful fact must remain unchanged, that Mary flitted through the world with morphine aplenty and used it freely to combat whatever new hell life threw at her day by day. Influenza, nausea, deaths of loved ones, loneliness, headache, boredom. She claimed it also aided in the reading of novels.
And Mary would probably have something much better than Dover’s, which was not even close to pharmaceutical quality. She called Dover’s housewife morphine, because along with opium it contained fillers like ipecacuanha, which in doses too small to cause vomiting induces sweating, thought to be good for women of fiery temperament. And also potassium sulfate, a laxative. So, a little morphine, a good sweat, and a bowel movement—the cure for everything that ails you.
V WAITED, but after a time the children still hadn’t settled. Fretting became weeping. Jeffy called her name. And when you’re called you answer, one way or the other.
V chose yes. She climbed back to the bed and knelt and lit a little brass-and-glass candle lantern. She gathered the children to her, hugging each of them separately and then all together like an enormous stinky bouquet. She held baby Winnie in her lap and began teaching the older children a song—Alouette
—making a game of it, finding a correspondence between the bucking and swaying of the ambulance and the tub-thumping, foot-stomping rhythm of the song, the accumulating repetitions. Je te plumerai la tête.
They played along happily for a while, in a language they didn’t know, singing a song of cheerful butchery. All the details of plucking the lovely skylark’s feathers and pulling off its beak and legs and wings, its eyes and head. They all shuffled a little dance for a few moments of joy, shouting not words but sounds, their thin shoulders and angular arms and grubby hands expressing music in jagged movement.
And then they fell back happy and breathing hard onto the quilts. Soon they fell asleep, except for Jimmie Limber, who lay looking up at candle shadows on the arched canvas. He murmured the doubled three-beat chorus, dropping high to low—Et la tête, et la tête, et les yeux, et les yeux. Over and over.
V kissed him and said, Sleep, little man.
—Got us a long night? Jimmie Limber said.
—We need it to be, V said. If we’re going to make it to Havana.
She kissed his forehead again and blew out the candle and climbed back over the wagon seat.
Delrey shifted the reins to one hand and lifted his hat and set it on his lap and scratched the crown of his head. He said, We really going all night?
—Camp at dawn off in the woods. Become nocturnal as possums, V said.
* * *
—Wait, James Blake says. Before you go on, I’m all confused about children. I’m not even imagining this right, much less remembering.
—Seven often seemed like a lot of children to me too, V says.
—But I just remember Joe. And a boy around my age and possibly an older girl.
—You’re conflating Jeffy and Billy. You would have been halfway between them in age. And Maggie was enough older she would have largely ignored you little boys. But this will be easier on paper. Hand me your notebook and pencil.
James turns to a fresh page and watches as V draws dashes and lines and writes dates and names and place-names. She numbers the names and strikes lines through two of them and swoops a pair of brackets and hands back the open notebook.
—Attend, please, she says. And then she talks James through the list of names, explaining a family tree. Says, Samuel there, top of the chart, number one? Born in Washington?
—Yes. With a line through his name.
—Meaning that when your memory begins, Samuel had been gone ten years. You never knew him. And then Maggie? Number two, also born in Washington. Not struck through, so still alive when your memory begins and the only one alive now. Then Jeffy, born in Washington with no line through his name, so still alive when you came to us, though he passed away more than twenty-five years ago of yellow fever. And now skip down to number six, Billy—also born in Washington and with no line, though he died in Memphis a few years after the war. Diphtheria. Now go back to numbers four and five. Four is Joe, born in Washington, and you’re there bracketed with him because you two were the same age. I have Richmond after your name with a question mark, because I assume that’s where you were born but don’t know for sure. And then finally, number seven, Winnie. Born in Richmond right after Joe died and a crying lap-baby when we ran south. She died nearly eight years ago.
V says, The point I’m making is that Joe’s death is your memory’s year zero—spring, 1864.
She reaches to his notebook and turns back the page corner and says, For future reference.
—Did one of the boys have black hair and a cannon? James asks.
—See, conflation. Billy was the only child with my dark hair, and Jeffy had a miniature cannon. The neighbors complained constantly that he was knocking chunks of plaster off their walls. It shot iron balls the size of big marbles, and the black powder sent up clouds of smoke. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill somebody. Ellen was the only one who could wrangle the bunch of you, which is why I moved her up from the kitchen to the nursery. She could soothe you all to sleep at night and reason with you during the day to make you mind her. At most, if she was really mad, she would snatch you boys up by your collars onto your tiptoes to get your attention. I was never good at reasoning with children. I either gave hugs and kisses or impatient swats on the bottom.
James looks at his notebook and says, It’s so much, seeing all these names together. So many children passed on. I can’t imagine.
—Yes, I still sometimes hear those slow drumbeats, V says. Dirt clods striking small coffin lids muffled with straw. I grieved, of course. When Samuel died, I couldn’t leave the house for two or three months. But he was my first and only child then. Later, deaths fell differently because living children need so much from you, and you can’t indulge yourself and collapse into grief. Like with Joe—six weeks later Winnie arrived. Unless you’re just worthless, you get up and put on the black dress and keep going.
V tells James how her children had died, scattered from New York to Washington to Richmond to Memphis, but had been dug up and dragged to Richmond to surround their father’s monument. And of course Jeff was dug up from New Orleans and dragged there too. Even before he was dead yet, businessmen and governments from Georgia and Kentucky and Mississippi and Virginia tried to offer her deals for possession of the body when the time came. Bragging how they would make his obelisk taller and grander than Washington’s. And that’s not even factoring the money they offered her to seal the deal. But a hill in Hollywood Cemetery above the James River seemed the right choice, seasoned with the irony that she hated Richmond because it was where they met their apocalypse. And because Joe already waited by himself down the green hill.
Soon, she will be hauled there too, not that she cares one way or the other about graves. She imagines a little flat paving stone the dimensions of a shoe-box lid without even a name—just WIFE & MOTHER and a bracket of dates. Every sunny day, the shadow of his tall statue will cross over her like the gnomon of a sundial, like a blade.
—One thing I am sure of, though, V says to James. I’ll never return to Richmond until it’s feetfirst in a box.
* * *
Jimmie Limber came to the back of the wagon seat and reached to put a hand on V’s arm. Not a word, just a touch—at which, she helped him climb over and sat him next to her and pulled him against her by his bony shoulder.
She said, Jimmie, do you need something?
—Nope. Can’t sleep.
—Cold?
—Nope.
—Not scared, are you?
—I don’t scare.
—Of course not, V said.
—Just want to watch the road.
Delrey said, I hope you can see it better than I can, Jimmie. We’ve run off into the pines three times already tonight. The mules can’t tell woods and cornfields from road much better than I can.
—I see real good, Jimmie said.
—Well, V said.
—Yes, ma’am. Real well.
He watched down the road awhile and then said, Mighty dark to travel.
V said, We’re deep in the world here, Jimmie.
He sat with her arm draped across his shoulders. If she tried to hug him too long he squirmed, but sometimes he rested his head against her, breathing deep but always awake and watching.
—I believe the road’s about to bear left, he’d say. Long straightaway coming after a creek crossing. Might be a burned-out house after that. I can smell it.
He predicted little better than Delrey or the mules or V did, which is to say about like blind chance. But he tried hard.
Jimmie said, How far is it we’re going?
V said, A hundred miles, and then a hundred miles more. Who knows how many times after that? Maybe a boat trip somewhere along the way. You boys will enjoy that.
—Keep going till we stop?
—Can you do that, Jimmie?
He thought about it a long time and then said, I’ll try it.
V said, If you’ll watch out for me, I’ll watch out for you.
He stuck out his hand to shake on the deal. Little clammy palm.
V shook and then said, A kiss on the cheek too.
He turned his head and angled his cheek for a kiss.
She said, No, I meant you kiss me.
She turned her cheek, and he made a quick peck.
An hour before dawn started showing in the sky, Jimmie Limber faded away to sleep and V held him against her with both arms awhile for her own benefit and then lifted him back to the fragrant tick mattress and patchwork quilts with the others. Under the canvas, their bedding cast an odor of overripe fruit, though they’d had no fruit for weeks, unless you counted half-rotted winter squash.
V dissolved pinches of Dover’s into a metal cup with a splash of red wine. She wanted to time it so the opium rose in her with the dawn. Both coming on in gradations of blue and gray like a bruise swelling above the pines.
LA FLORIDA. V sat on the wagon bench and looked down the road like it might appear around the next bend. Her mind kept circling back to when she was seventeen—two decades ago—wondering how she got from there to here. Thinking how all the lesser increments of time between then and now—years, months, days, hours, moments—drained constantly into the black sump where time resides after it’s been used up, whether used well or squandered.
A part of her believed this one moment—Carolina woods, a wagonload of children, lights of heaven blazing on a clear spring night—was sufficient. An eternity in itself. A perfect instant if you erased guilt of the past and dread of the future. One key lay in