Widow of the South (Hicks)

The Widow of the South 
Robert Hicks, 2005
Grand Central Publishing
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446697439


Summary 
In 1894 Carrie McGavock is an old woman who has only her former slave to keep her company…and the almost 1,500 soldiers buried in her backyard.

Years before, rather than let someone plow over the field where these young men had been buried, Carrie dug them up and reburied them in her own personal cemetery.

Now, as she walks the rows of the dead, an old soldier appears. It is the man she met on the day of the battle that changed everything. The man who came to her house as a wounded soldier and left with her heart. He asks if the cemetery has room for one more.

In an extraordinary debut novel, based on a remarkable true story, Robert Hicks draws an unforgettable, panoramic portrait of a woman who, through love and loss, found a cause. Known throughout the country as "the Widow of the South," Carrie McGavock gave her heart first to a stranger, then to a tract of hallowed ground—and became a symbol of a nation's soul.

The novel flashes back thirty years to the afternoon of the Battle of Franklin, five of the bloodiest hours of the Civil War. There were 9,200 casualties that fateful day. Carrie's home—the Carnton plantation—was taken over by the Confederate army and turned into a hospital; four generals lay dead on her back porch; the pile of amputated limbs rose as tall as the smoke house.

And when a wounded soldier named Zachariah Cashwell arrived and awakened feelings she had thought long dead, Carrie found herself inexplicably drawn to him despite the boundaries of class and decorum. The story that ensues between Carrie and Cashwell is just as unforgettable as the battle from which it is drawn

The Widow of the South is a brilliant novel that captures the end of an era, the vast madness of war, and the courage of a remarkable woman to claim life from the grasp of death itself. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—January 30, 1951
• Where—West Palm Beach, Florida, USA
• Education—unspecified college in Nashville, Tennessee
• Currently—lives in Franklin, Tennessee


Robert Hicks is the author of New York Times bestseller, The Widow of the South (2005) and two other novels in the Southern saga, A Separate Country (2009) and The Orphan Mother (2016). Hicks was born and raised in South Florida, moving to Williamson County, Tennessee, in 1974. He now lives at "Labor in Vain," his late-eighteenth-century log cabin near the Bingham Community.

Because of his writing, as well as his work in music, art, and historical preervation, Hicks made the #2 spot in the "Top 100 Reasons to Love Nashville." The list was featured in a 2015 issue of Nashville Lifestyles, which dubbed Hicks "Nashville's Master of Ceremonies."

Music and art
Hicks's interest in the arts are varied: over the years he has worked in music as a publisher and an artistic manager in both country and alternative-rock music. He has also been a partner in the B. B. King's Blues Clubs—located in Nashville, Memphis, Orlando, and Los Angeles—and continues to serve as the company's "Curator of Vibe."

As a lifelong art collector, Hicks was the first Tennessean ever to be listed among Art & Antiques's Top 100 Collectors in America. He focuses on artists such as Howard Finster and B.F. Perkins, as well as on different genres, such as Tennesseana and Southern Material Culture.

Hicks has also served as curator of the exhibition "Art of Tennessee" at the First Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. The exhibition—first conceived at Hicks's kitchen table—was seven years in the making, opening in September 2003. Hicks also co-edited of the exhibition's award winning catalog, Art of Tennessee.

Historic preservation
Hicks has long been fascinated by the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, on November 30, 1864—a particularly bloody fight that weakened the Confederate's ability to win the Civil War. Hick's interest led him to found Franklin's Charge, an organization that saved what remained of the eastern flank of the battlefield—turning it into a public battlefield park. It was a massive project, considered "the largest battlefield reclamation in North American history" by the American Battlefield Protection Program.

By the end of 2005, Franklin's Charge had already raised over 5 million dollars toward this goal, surpassing anything ever achieved by other communities in America to preserve battlefield open space. As Jim Lighthizer, President of the Civil War Preservation Trust said, "There is no 'close second' in any community in America, to what Robert Hicks and Franklin's Charge has done in Franklin."

In addition to his work for the battlefield park, Hicks has served on the boards of the Historic Carnton Plantation (a focal point of the Franklin Battle), Tennessee State Museum, The Williamson County Historical Society, and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He presently serves on the board of directors of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.

Historical novels
Hicks's interest in the Franklin battlefield—and a chance meeting with Civil War historian and author Shelby Foote—inspired an idea for a book, eventually leading to The Widow of the South, his first novel, which was published in 2005. Hick's intent for the book was to bring national attention to those five bloody hours on the Franklin battlefield and the impact the battle had in remaking us a nation.

A Separate Country, Hicks's second novel published in 2009, takes place in New Orleans in the years after the Civil War. It is based on the life of John Bell Hood, one of the most controversial generals of the Confederate Army—and one of its most tragic figures.

In 2016, Hicks released his third book in the Civil War saga, The Orphan Mother. The story follows Mariah Reddick, former slave to Carrie McGavock—the "Widow of the South"—who has built a new life for herself as a midwife during the post-war Reconstruction Era.

Other writing
Hicks has written other works in addition to his novels. His first book, published in 2000, is a collaboration with French-American photographer Michel Arnaud: Nashville: the Pilgrims of Guitar Town. In 2008, he co-edited (with Justin Stelter and John Bohlinger) the story collection, A Guitar and A Pen: Short Stories and Story-Songs By Nashville Songwriters.

He has also written the introduction to two books on historic preservation authored by photographer Nell Dickerson, GONE: A Photographic Plea for Preservation and Porch Dogs.

Hicks's essays on regional history, southern material culture, furniture and music have appeared in numerous publications over the years. He also writes op-eds for the New York Times on contemporary politics in the South and is a regular contributor to Garden & Gun.

More
Hicks travels throughout the nation speaking on a variety of topics ranging from "Why The South Matters" to "The Importance of Fiction in Preserving History to Southern Material Culture" and "A Model for the Preservation of Historic Open Space for Every Community."

In January 2016 Hicks was a panelist and featured speaker at the third annual Rancho Mirage Writers Festival in California. Along with American historian H.W. Brands, Hicks took part in the panel discussion "The War that Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Matters."

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Franklin, in 2014 Hicks released the first small batch of his bourbon whiskey Battlefield Bourbon. Each of the 1,864 bottles is numbered and signed by Hicks. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/14/2016.)

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Book Reviews
A new Civil War title arrived at No. 10 on the [ New York Times ] fiction list: The Widow of the South, by the first-time novelist Robert Hicks, a music publisher and manager in Nashville. It's the fictional story of the real-life Carrie McGavock, who turned her Tennessee plantation house into a makeshift hospital for Confederate soldiers after the bloody Battle of Franklin in 1864, which left nearly 2,000 dead. McGavock had almost 1,500 of the bodies buried in her own private cemetery on the Carnton plantation. In spite of some negative reviews, the book has been selling briskly, ... and it has also received a lot of attention in the Southern press. The Tennessean speculated it might do for the Carnton plantation what Gone With the Wind did for Atlanta: increase tourism.
Rachel Donadio - New York Times

Carrie McGavock's convoluted internal monologues about why she feels impelled to rescue the wounded and bury the dead halt the narrative in its tracks. Better to stick with Cashwell; he alone is worth the read. I'd follow him anywhere, wooden leg and all.
Paulette Jiles - Washington Post

Hicks's big historical first novel, based on true events in his hometown, follows the saga of Carrie McGavock, a lonely Confederate wife who finds purpose transforming her Tennessee plantation into a hospital and cemetery during the Civil War. Carrie is mourning the death of several of her children, and, in the absence of her husband, has left the care of her house to her capable Creole slave Mariah. Before the 1864 battle of Franklin, Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest commandeers her house as a field hospital. In alternating points of view, the battle is recounted by different witnesses, including Union Lt. Nathan Stiles, who watches waves of rebels shot dead, and Confederate Sgt. Zachariah Cashwell, who loses a leg. By the end of the battle, 9,000 soldiers have perished, and thousands of Confederates are buried in a field near the McGavock plantation. Zachariah ends up in Carrie's care at the makeshift hospital, and their rather chaste love forms the emotional pulse of the novel, while Carrie fights to relocate the buried soldiers when her wealthy neighbor threatens to plow up the field after the war. Valiantly, Hicks returns to small, human stories in the midst of an epic catastrophe. Though occasionally overwrought, this impressively researched novel will fascinate aficionados.
Publishers Weekly

John McGavock, the husband of our eponymous heroine, isn't even dead when she begins wearing black, but the mantle of mourning seems to fit Carrie McGavock. Having lost three young children, it is perhaps appropriate that she becomes the caretaker of over 1500 Confederate dead, all killed at the Battle of Franklin, TN, in 1864. Based on a true story, music publisher Hicks's first novel brings the reader onto the battlefield and into the lives of its survivors, including Zachariah Cashwell, an Arkansas soldier whose presence at the makeshift hospital established in the McGavock home shakes Carrie out of her stupor: "I had discovered why I had been drawn to him," she says. "He is a living thing, not a dying one." And it is life, after all, that drives Hicks's story. We know from the outset about Carrie's cemetery, but her journey to that place is compellingly told. Highly recommended for all libraries.
Library Journal

A thunderous, action-rich first novel of the Civil War, based on historical fact. Music publisher Hicks treats a long-overlooked episode of the war in this account of the Battle of Franklin, Tenn., which took place in November 1864 near Nashville. As a field hospital is pitched in her field, Carrie McGavock, an iron-spined farm woman and upstanding citizen of the town, takes it upon herself to tend after the Confederate wounded; later, she and her husband will rebury 1,500 of the fallen on their property. Hicks centers much of the story on Carrie, who has seen her own children die of illness and who has endurance in her blood. "I was not a morbid woman," Carrie allows, "but if death wanted to confront me, well, I would not turn my head. Say what you have to say to me, or leave me alone." Other figures speak their turn. One is a young Union officer amazed at the brutal and sometimes weird tableaux that unfold before him; as the bullets fly, he pauses before a 12-year-old rebel boy suffocating under the weight of his piled-up dead comrades. "Suffocated. I had never considered the possibility," young Lt. Stiles sighs. Another is an Arkansas soldier taken prisoner by the Yankees: "I became a prisoner and accepted all the duties of a prisoner just as easily as I'd picked up the damned colors and walked forward to the bulwarks." Yet another is Nathan Forrest, who would strike fear in many a heart as a Confederate cavalryman, and later as the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Hicks renders each of these figures with much attention to historical detail and a refreshing lack of genre cliche, closing with a subtle lament for the destruction of history before the bulldozer: "One longs to know that somethings don't change, that some of us will not be forgotten, that our perambulations upon the earth are not without point or destination. "An impressive addition to the library of historical fiction on the Civil War, worthy of a place alongside The Killer Angels, Rifles for Watie and Shiloh.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
1. It seems that Carrie doesn't come alive until literally everyone around her is dying. Why do you think it took her home being taken over by the Confederate Army and turned into a hospital to awaken Carrie out of her stupor?

2. Do you believe that Zachariah really wanted to die when he picked up the colors on the battlefield? Why does Nathan Stiles spare Zachariah on the battlefield specifically, when others carrying the colors were killed? Is Zachariah grateful to be spared, or is he regretful, or a little of both, and why?

3. Does John McGavock undergo a character transformation from the beginning of the novel, when he and Theopolis encounter the gang of ruffians in the woods, to the end, when we see scenes him of him wandering around Franklin somewhat aimlessly? How do you think he views the war? How do you think he views his role, or his non-role, in the war? And how does this compare with Carrie's attitude towards the war?

4. In the author's note Robert Hicks says of Mariah, "I have concluded that Mariah may well have been the most complete human of them all." Mariah never let her enslavement define her. Do you agree?

5. Discuss how the death of their children affected both Carrie and John. What is the difference between the attachment mothers and fathers have with their children? Do you think John would have begun drinking whether his children had died or not? And do you think Carrie had a propensity for eccentricity and seclusion?

6. When Carrie first notices Zachariah in her upstairs guest room, she remarks: "Unlike most of the men, he looked ready to die. He looked as if he were welcoming it, urging it along…I wanted his eyes on me." Why does Carrie take to Zachariah, and why does she later give him special treatment? Do you think it was purely physical attraction? Does Zachariah's welcoming of his own death conflict with Carrie's values?

7. Faith plays a large part in each character's motivations. Discuss the role of belief in a higher power and how it guides Carrie, Zachariah, and Mariah in their actions. For most of us, our belief system changes or 'grows' over the span of our lives, one way or the other. How did Carrie's faith change over the span of the novel?

8. Why do you think Carrie beats Zachariah on the porch? Were you surprised by this or did you understand it?

9. Zachariah and Carrie have an intense love affair yet it's never consummated sexually. Do you think the fact they never were physically intimate takes away or adds to their relationship, or does it matter?

10. At one point Carrie tells Mariah, "You always could have left, even when you weren't allowed. I would have never stopped you." Do you think this is true? Carrie seems to think of Mariah as her best friend, but she was really her property, a "gift" her father gave to her as a child. Do you think Carrie tries to make herself appear a better friend/owner than she really was? Discuss Carrie and Mariah's relationship. Could friendship really transcend enslavement?

11. Among the political issues leading up to the Civil War was the South's strong adherence to the doctrine of 'state's rights.' Among the issues to come out of the war was the emancipation of the enslaved in the 'slave states,' whether they had remained loyal to the union or had seceded and joined the Confederacy. Yet, neither of these political issues is ever addressed 'head-on' in the book. Why do you think that is?

12. Carrie comes from a rich, educated family. She is "learned." Zachariah is poor, and almost illiterate. Yet do you think one is wiser than the other?

Robert Hicks has said, "good writing is about transformation." We see transformation in Carrie, Zechariah and in their relationship, in John, in his and Carrie's relationship, in Mariah and her relationship with Carrie. Are we left with any sense that Mr. Baylor ever comes to any real peace about what has happened?

13. What does Carrie mean when she says the following to Zachariah: "You are my key. You will explain things I have not been able to understand…I want you to explain to me why I wanted you to live and why I was able to make you live. Because I don't understand, not really, and the answer is very important to me." What is Carrie not able to understand about herself, and what answer does she think Zachariah will be able to provide?

14. Carrie takes Eli into her home and he quickly assumes the role of a surrogate son and Winder's surrogate brother. How do Carrie's actions speak to her changing perceptions of family? Has her work running the hospital changed her maternal instincts or is she simply responding to the nature of war?

15. At the town party, Carrie remarks about how she doesn't fit in with the other women; Mrs. McEwen pokes fun of her efforts and jokingly calls her "St. Carrie." Why do these women resent Carrie, and does it bother her? Does Carrie see herself as saintly?

16. In 1894, after John has died, and Mariah, Carrie and Zachariah are all elderly, why does Zachariah not profess his love for Carrie more overtly? Over time, did his love become more of respect and admiration for her heroism, or are his feelings for her just as romantically intense?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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