In the novel Varina, Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, tells the story of Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America.
Varina is a formidable woman – well educated, perceptive, strong minded, and one who struggles against a whole array of patronizing and threatening men. She is compassionate and principled, but she also was married to the leader of a rebellion who fought a war meant to preserve the enslavement and suffering of millions of human beings. The center of the novel involves the layers of moral realization she must work through about her own complicity in profiting from and serving as a steward to slavery’s perpetrators.
The novel is structured as a conversation (and interrogation) between Varina and a black man, James, now a teacher, whom Varina saved from a beating and raised with her own children during the final years of the Civil War. James visits her decades after the war’s end because he wants to check his fragmented childhood memory of events against her own. Her life story unspools from these conversations. One memory stands out to me now.
The War suddenly over, the Confederacy in collapse, midway in her escape from Richmond, on the run on Georgia backroads from bounty hunters and federal troops, Varina, children, and their hungry, weary escorts come across a farm whose house, barn and hog pens are surrounded by sharpened stakes and whose owners are armed. In the Wiggins’ family, the women all carry heavy pistols and “there is not a one who has not killed” at least one raider or bummer from Sherman’s Army. The boys and father carry repeating rifles and look “on their way to becoming slit-eyed killers.” Never slave owners themselves, they have held out against repeated attacks from those who wanted everything they had and then would have burned them out. They have killed 31 men and buried them in the woods.
When Varina visits with them in an attempt to procure some meat for her party, she finds them determined but bitter, strung out by their eternal guardedness and burdened by the lives they have taken. They also have precious books by the dozen and are so moved at the relief of being able to be hospitable and friendly, that the hardness comes off them (not the boys though) and their generosity and love of natural conversation redeems their experience for a few hours.
Reading it, I thought of how ordinary people anywhere, making their way in a challenging life, raising a family, placing their faith in the lawful orderliness of at least a part of their world, can so suddenly be assaulted by historical forces over which they have no control. I thought of the old Roman proverb, “A man is wolf to man,” and how tenuous and frayed civilized life actually is, held together by habit and law and often by family. But when the world begins to come apart, when history in its implacable consequences enters cities, strides down residential streets, kicks in unlocked doors of individual homes, then life becomes desperate very quickly.
And yet, the Wiggins family still delighted in books, they shared meat with strangers, they delighted in each other’s company. They retained the capacity to suspend their ferocity. They had not become that worst of all creatures, feral human beings, a confederacy of predators.
Good writers always remind me not to understand anything too quickly, but instead to wait patiently to see what layers might be revealed, to never simplify, to set aside my version of how the world ought to run and instead try and accept the messy complexity of truth as it reveals itself.
I often think about consequences these days, about the delusions and carelessness of those in power and how thoughtlessly they have set loose forces that will ravage the innocent and degrade the planet. I think of how many Americans believe that they live outside History, and that we are an exceptional people not subject to its chain-reactions. I think of how many Wiggins’ families are out there right now going about their everyday lives, unaware that tempests are brewing and that some whirlwind is going to come down their road.
