The Elder Statesman

The Widow of the South
By Robert Hicks
Warner Books
Paperback $!4.99

By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review

Robert Hicks published his first novel in hardcover last year. Warner Books has now released a paperback version, but it remains a remarkable fictional story based on the true life of Carrie McGavock. Hicks said he fell in love with McGavock’s story while a volunteer board member for the historical site at Carnton Plantation in Franklin, Tenn. once owned by the McGavock family. He said he tried to persuade professional writers to take on the book, but he couldn’t find a writer willing to write the story.

Hicks already had a career in country-music publishing but he felt so strongly about the Carrie McGavock story that he set aside that career to write "The Widow of the South."

Hicks centered his book on a fictional relationship between McGavock and a wounded Confederate sergeant named Zacariah Cashwell. It is a fictional account, he says, and while many of the facts are true, the story line, itself is a love story, from his imagination.

What he says he did was to "put meat and flesh onto the bones of the facts." Warner Books bought the novel after seeing only the first few chapters, and according to Warner book editor Amy Einhorn, "it is an amazing epic love story."

Because of his connection as a board member at the famous ante bellum plantation known as one of the must-see tourist attraction in Tennessee, Hicks was able to write with certain authencity, even though he was writing his debut novel as fiction. When the story opens it is 1894, Carrie McGavock is an old woman who is dedicated to a cemetery literally in her back yard where some 1,500 soldiers who fought in the Battle of Franklin, five of the bloodiest hours of the Civil War. There were 9,200 casualties. Carrie’s home, the Carnton plantation, is taken over by the Confederate army as a hospital. She is enlisted as a nurse to tend the wounded and the dying.

The novel then flashes back 30 years to the afternoon of the fierce battle and the wounded soldier, Zachariah Cashwell, enters Carrie’s life, and despite the boundaries of social class, she finds herself inexplicably drawn to him. The book has three main characters, Carrie McGavock, Cashwell, and a slave named Mariah Reddick.

Hicks said the story of Carrie McGavock was too good to be left untold yet too incomplete to be told as history. Although it is fiction, the facts of the story aren’t changed. In 1826 Randal McGavock built Carnton. His son, John, inherited Carnton upon the elder McGavock’s death in 1843. John married Carrie Elizabeth Winder in 1848, and she bore him five children.

On Nov. 30, 1864, the idyllic life of Carnton plantation was shattered by one of the bloodiest battles of the entire Civil War. On the morning of Dec. 1 the bodies of four Confederate generals killed during the fighting lay on the back porch.

In 1978, the Carnton Association, Inc. rescued the house from years of neglect and disrepair and restored the plantation. When the maision was restored, the floors of the home were still stained with the blood of the men who were treated there. 

In 1866, John and Carrie McGavock designated two acres of land adjacent to their 19th century family cemetery as a final burial place for nearly 1,500 Confederates. Today, the McGavock Confederate Cemetery is a lasting memorial honoring those fallen soldiers, and is the largest privately owned military cemetery in the nation. 

That cemetery plays heavily in "The Widow of the South" in which Carrie carefully cares for the gravesites as an old woman who has only her former slave, Mariah, to keep her company. She has every soldier’s name recorded in a book she keeps. Hicks writes: "the two women knew the cemetery as they might have known the wrinkles on their faces, or the pattern of repousse on the coin of silver. The white woman, dressed in worn black crinoline, carried a book tightly under her arm and periodically consulted it ‘just to make sure.’ Her servant, a Creole, walked close by."

Hicks proves to be a master storyteller in the tradition of

William Faulkner. He blends the historical facts with fictional accounts for a readable novel that surely will become a box office success as a movie.

(Bill Duncan is editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column on the News-Review Opinion Page every Thursday.)