The hospital, Carnton Plantation, offered little respite. Sergeant Zachariah Cashwell (a composite figure), his right leg amputated at the hip, opens the door, and "I stepped out into perversity." He saw carts piled high with the dead. Men were missing limbs so that "They all looked partially human." Marcus Sanders (also fictional), a boy from Pittsboro, North Carolina, was "one of hundreds" who died at the hospital. "They were not all the same men, they were not just bodies."
Ultimately, The Widow of the South is a story of love. Three of Carrie's five children had died before the war. The portrait of the three still hangs in the home, and their final resting place is in the McGavock family cemetery less than 50 yards from the home. She was sinking into depression until that fateful day when Carnton was commandeered as a hospital. Somehow, the dying restored her vitality, bringing her strength and a willingness to live. The soldiers became her children in many ways though one becomes more special than the others. The novel explores Carrie's relationship with her slave, Mariah, who stayed with her throughout her long life. The fictional relationship between Carrie and Zachariah is a focal point.
Ultimately, The Widow of the South is a story of love. Three of Carrie's five children had died before the war. The portrait of the three still hangs in the home, and their final resting place is in the McGavock family cemetery less than 50 yards from the home. She was sinking into depression until that fateful day when Carnton was commandeered as a hospital. Somehow, the dying restored her vitality, bringing her strength and a willingness to live. The soldiers became her children in many ways though one becomes more special than the others. The novel explores Carrie's relationship with her slave, Mariah, who stayed with her throughout her long life. The fictional relationship between Carrie and Zachariah is a focal point.
The cross-social barriers love between the dirt poor Becky Griffin and Will Baylor ("Cotton Gin" as he calls himself) is juxtaposed against the "battle" between John McGavock and Baylor, Will's father. This is also a metaphor for the crucial battle between the Old South of landed aristocracy now fallen on hard times and pitted against the rising entrepreneurial spirit of those trying to ride the crest of what was trying to be the "New South." Baylor takes parts of McGavock's land in payment of debts, and it is just one such piece that he plans to plow up two years after the battle, thereby destroying graves of hastily-buried soldiers. It is these graves which Carrie relocates to a plot alongside her family cemetery. People die in The Widow of the South; life does not always work out the way we would want it to in a romance novel. War does not discriminate, and its intrusion onto the various levels of love bring tension and literary merit to this fine book.
Some years after the war a dirt-poor family from Arkansas made the long wagon ride to Franklin prepared to take their son home. After meeting Carrie and seeing the love with which she tended the graves, they decided to leave him there. A year later, they return with a wagon load of Arkansas dirt so they can rebury him at "home." I don't know whether this incident truly happened, but I do know that it is True in the way that only novels can portray reality.
Go to Carnton Plantation today as I have done again recently. Close your eyes. Listen to the birds, and it could still be the late 19th Century, and Carrie might suddenly appear, sit on her stool, and recount the names and write letters to parents of the long-dead boys. You cannot help but feel awe for her humanity amid such a maelstrom of inhumanity. As Robert Hicks says in the Author's Note, "All I know for sure is that there was once a battle here, and it forever changed everything."
Go to Carnton Plantation today as I have done again recently. Close your eyes. Listen to the birds, and it could still be the late 19th Century, and Carrie might suddenly appear, sit on her stool, and recount the names and write letters to parents of the long-dead boys. You cannot help but feel awe for her humanity amid such a maelstrom of inhumanity. As Robert Hicks says in the Author's Note, "All I know for sure is that there was once a battle here, and it forever changed everything."
For more information about Carnton, go to www.carnton.org. Supplement The Widow of the South with Howard Bahr's novel, The Black Flower. It recounts the battle from a soldier's perspective. One of the great nonfiction accounts is contained in Co Aytch, written in 1881 by Samuel R. Watkins. He was one of only seven (of 1,500) members of the Army of Tennessee to fight and live throughout the entire war.
