For Bonnie Annie Laurie,
I'd lay me down & die
I have read this set three times, portions four and five.Howard Bahr's "trilogy" -- The Black Flower, The Year of Jubilo, and The Judas Field -- are to Civil War* fiction as Shelby Foote is to Civil War nonfiction. These are intense books filled with historical accuracy, emotion, and a deep regional sensitivity matched by few other Southern authors.
All but those obsessed with the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and the origins of the Lost Cause myth will do well to stick to The Black Flower, but your mileage may vary. The writing is consistently good, all three have fine story lines, and each addresses different aspects of history and human nature. But let's stick to the first book here.
Bahr, one-time curator of Rowan Oak (William Faulkner's home) at the University of Mississippi, claims to have read all existing faculty minutes at the University, and indeed the epigraph to The Black Flower includes the following:
"J. Bishop, B.P. Carter, R.K. Cross and J. MacMillan, Seniors, suspension of seven days for drinking, blacking their faces, building a fence across a Public Road, and acting riotously otherise." (Faculty Minutes, The University of Mississippi, November 16, 1859.
Picking up some five years later, the book follows one Bushrod Carter, serving in the remnant of a Confederate company raised in the fictional town of Cumberland, Mississippi. It is the eve of what would be called "The Pickett's Charge of the West," a frontal assault against the Union works at Franklin, Tennessee, that cost the Confederacy six generals killed and Bushrod Carter one finger. The finger costs him his life.
It's noteworthy that Bahr places Bushrod and his "pards" in a fictitious company ("The Cumberland Rifles") in the Army of Tennessee rather than in Company A of the 11th Mississippi, Army of Northern Virginia, also known as "The University Greys." (The Greys were distinguished by 100% casualties during the more famous Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, notably penetrating farther into the Union lines than any other Confederate Unit and truly representing "the high water mark of the Confederacy.") But that would have been too easy.
Although the Battle of Franklin is the great backdrop for The Black Flower, the action mostly takes place in or around the McGavock House. The house is appropriated for a field hospital, and a visiting cousin Anna Hereford meets Bushrod.
Of course, the story morphs nicely into a historical romance, but Bahr maintains enough gritty realism and Civil War authenticity to keep the story from getting too saccharine. A red wasp's travels through the field hospital introduces a bit of surrealism to the mix. It's a must-read for Civil War buffs and those who like a bit of gangrene with their historical romance.
"And for bonnie Annie Laurie, I'd lay me down and die."
As a final digression, the author begins to attribute the Lost Cause myth to women in this book, a theme that expands through the trilogy to its culmination in The Judas Field. Simply put, a whole lot of Southern women lost their husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, and boyfriends (real or imagined) in The War. Rather than admit that those men had been duped by what we now call The One Percent into giving their lives in defense of the immoral and dying economic system that was slavery, these widows and spinsters invented The Glorious Cause. And the Lost Cause became the pretty window dressing on Jim Crow, a boatload of "Southern Heritage" hogwash, and the ridiculous embarrassment that is the flag of the Great Sovereign State of Mississippi.
Think about it. Always blame it on women. Unless it's a fart. Then you can blame the dog.
* I intentionally avoided stereotyped alternatives like "War Between the States" or "War of Northern Aggression" to avoid having any furriners or damyankees getting their panties in a knot and start calling me unreconstructed. I'm undeconstructed. There was nothing civil about the American Civil War.
