This one took me a while to get into, and to finish. A very slow read, almost a dream-like state. But once I realized this novel is based on a true story, a real house, and a woman who grieved for those who had no one, this book began to come alive. (Check out the author's note at the end.)
Carrie McGavock is the wife of a Tennessee farmer whose house becomes requisitioned as a hospital after the Battle of Franklin, a massacre of the Civil War in 1824. Thousands were killed, and hundreds died in the days that followed. Carrie's story - including her own previous tragedies - is so unusual that she became famous as the Widow of the South - she who mothered and cared for and buried, and then reburied, so many boys, for whom she continued to wear her favorite Black attire her entire life. She recorded all their names and maintained a cemetery on her property to honor those boys. Hicks throws in a romance and includes the real person Mariah, a black woman who was given to Carrie as a slave when they were children and who is in fact Carrie's best and long serving friend, even after emancipation. As a history buff and a Southerner, this story really took me in. Another very different angle from which to study a time in our nation's history that we overlook. What happens AFTER the big events in the history books? How do people carry on? How much does life in a small Tennessee town change after they have seen and witnessed what war can bring, what war can DO to a man? Or, to a woman?
Stick with it - the story has a great full circle at the end. Robert Hicks has done meticulous research and himself works with the Carnton House where these event occurred. I, like him, hope Carrie's letters from and to the families of those killed do surface one day. Fascinating.
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