The Widow of the South

by Robert Hicks

Members	Reviews	Popularity	Average rating	Conversations
914	36	4,560	(3.66)	45

Common KnowledgeShare what you know.

view history

You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.

For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.

Series (with order)

Canonical Title

Original publication date

2005

People/Characters

Carrie McGavock

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Zachariah Cashwell (fictional)

Important places

Carnton Plantation (Franklin, Tennessee, USA)

Franklin, Tennessee, USA

Important events

Related movies

Awards and honors

New York Times bestseller (Fiction, 2005)

Epigraph

Dedication

for Tom Martin, Jr. - Semper Fidelis

First words

Prologue - 1894: Down the rows of the dead they came. Neat, orderly rows of dead rebel boys who thirty years before had either dropped at the foot of earthen works a mile or so away or died on the floors of the big house overlooking the cemetery.

Book 1 - November 30, 1864: Dawn: That day in 1864 was unseasonably mild for late November.

Epilogue: Had the Battle of Franklin ever really ended?

Author's Note: If God was watching that Indian summer afternoon of November 30, 1864 (and some have argued that He was not, another explanation of events), He would have been looking here: on the continent of North America; in the southeastern section of what had once been and would again be called the United States; in the central part of a state they called Tennessee; between the mountains and the great river; among the burial mounds of an ancient Stone Age culture that had known nothing of firearms and artillery; in the bend of a small river at the convergence of three bright macadam roads, where brilliant streaks of light rose and fell along a gentle undulation of hills washed in the dun and yellow and red of autumn.

Quotations

…the smell of men overpowered me. My nose had no experience with such a smell. It could not parse its elements. The smell was heavy and sour and musty, and I took it to be the smell of that world which had been kept at bay by my house and my husband these many years.”

The newspapers were always on about how the best men of our country – and by that, they meant this new country of ours, these Confederate States of America – went off to fight and were lost forever. But what of the best of our women? How many lovely young women were sacrificed behind the plow in those years? Oh, I’m not saying that a woman oughtn’t guide a plow, although I shudder at the thought of my own incompetence at the reins. It’s not the plowing, you see; it’s the elimination of everything BUT plowing, the possibility that you could be anything BUT someone who walked behind a mule and gathered in the snap beans.

My breathing came harder and my face flushed, as it always did when I began to feel unmoored, or upon the discovery that there was yet another thing under the sun that I had not understood. Or both.

Those men were the chains that bound the living. They were the missing whose absence shackled the survivors in place, people afraid to move on for fear of being gone for their sudden return. They drew the living back to the war, back to that battlefield over and over and over again, reenacting its rituals and its skirmishes until they all would be dead. … They will have to come to Carnton. They’ll be safe there. I will mourn them if no one else will.

Someone had to do it, to be that person. I was the woman they wrote the letters to; this house was the last address of the war. Now it was the final resting place of the dead, or at least almost 1,500 of them, and they could not be left alone. I had resolved to remember so others could forget. In the forgetting, I prayed, would be some relief, some respite from the violence and bitterness and vengeance.

(show all 6 items)

Last words

(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)

Disambiguation notice

Publisher's editors

Blurbers