December 8

Varina (2018)
By Charles Frazier

As this biographical novel opens, Varina Howell Davis is the widow of the confederate president and she meets up with an old friend in Saratoga, NY.  The year is 1906, and she reminisces about her life, especially the weeks-long wagon trip after the war when she and her children escape the southern capitol of Richmond, bound for Havana.  After coping with outlaws, hunger, weather, and fear, they make it as far as Florida, where Jefferson Davis (now considered a treasonous criminal) meets up with them, and all are captured.  After a time under house arrest, "V" is released and she travels, first to Europe, then along the eastern seaboard, eventually ending up in New York, and it is here that she meets up with "Jimmy Limber", a little mixed-race boy whom she took in, and who was removed from her at the time of her capture in 1865.  It is through the vehicle of recollecting her memories to Jimmy, now James Blake, a teacher and recent widower, that her story unfolds.  Varina grew up as the daughter of a struggling planter, well-educated but with no prospects when she met the much older Jeff, still grieving for the young wife he'd lost ten years earlier, after only a few months of marriage.  V's life is tragic, not only because a horrible war in which her husband played a prominent role, but also because of the loss of all but one of her six children (all died young from illness or accident).  She copes, with the help of opium and alcohol, and manages to complete and publish her husband's memoirs, but her life is sad.  Thus, she is happy to meet up with James, who had been like a son to her, and recall their shared adventure of near-escape.

Although the story left some loose ends (who was the young blond woman whom V looked after at the hotel in Saratoga?), it was both informative and interesting.  One doesn't always hear "the rest of the story" of the losing side.  Today, there's evidence that the Confederacy still lives in many peoples' hearts, 150 years after the war (witness the riots around the removal of Jefferson Davis monuments and Confederate flags).  Let us pray that our country can resolve its current differences.