Life of general provides template for novel
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A SEPARATE COUNTRY
By Robert Hicks
Grand Central Publishing, $25.99
John Bell Hood was known as one of the fiercest commanders in the Confederate Army. During the War Between the States, he was willing to sacrifice his men to gain tactical advantage. He was both reviled and feared by his own men. Hood was wounded himself. He lost part of a leg and the full use of one arm.
When the war ended, Hood had somehow survived. He was left crippled, poor and saddled with an infamous legacy. His story wasn’t over though. He moved to New Orleans, managed to borrow enough money to become a cotton factor and later moved into the insurance business. Hood also met and married Anna Marie Hennen, a beautiful young Creole woman. They had 11 children.
In the late 1870s, a terrible yellow fever epidemic devastated New Orleans. It was a bad time to be in the insurance business, and Hood lost his fortune. Yellow Jack took the life of Anna Hood, and John Bell Hood and their oldest child, daughter Lydia. The general and Lydia died in 1879.
That is where Hicks begins his story. It’s told in the voice of a young Tennessee orphan, Eli Griffin (a character from Hick’s previous novel, The Widow of the South) and in the voices of John Bell Hood himself and Anna Marie Hood.
Eli was orphaned by the war and blames Hood for his fate, yet he comes to befriend the old general. Hood, it turns out, has written a memoir of his life — not the famous military history published after his death, but a more personal and self-critical account of what happened before and after the war with brief references to the war itself. The general calls Eli to his deathbed and instructs him to take the book to a certain man and have him read it. If the man answers a question about the book, Eli is to have it published. If the answer is wrong, he is to destroy the book. It is through this book Eli receives and reads that Hood’s voice tells his tale from the grave.
“This is how I begin my memoir. I am older, I am wiser, I’ve got nearly no money. We have embarked on a new life that looks mightily like the old one, only with no servants, fewer changes of clothes, and no more days settled into the soft red chairs of the St. Louis’s lobby,” the general writes in this book-within-a-book.
Then Eli finds a diary written by Anna Hood hidden in the house, and those writings add her posthumous voice to the general’s. Her writing is addressed, ironically, to the dead child Lydia.
“I imagine that you are reading this when you are old, and you hate me and your father for the life we led. You are poor now, and perhaps you are still. Most of the children don’t remember the servants and the fine flatware and bolts of paisleyed French cloth propped up in the corners, from which we had men sew us our dresses and curtains and bed coverings.”
Hicks shifts the voice from Eli to the general to his wife and back again from chapter to chapter. Both of the Hoods tell their tales in flashback recollections, but Eli’s comments are mostly in real time except where his story intersects the Hoods’. Confused? It is a complex kind of writing and involves reams of exposition and back story to get to the real tale.
That main story is contained in both the writing of the general and his wife. As a young woman in New Orleans, Anna meets three young men who will forever impact her life: Michael, an oversized bully with designs on her, and two orphans, Rintrah, a dwarf, and Paschal, a thin and sensitive mixed race boy.
Michael does something that injures one of the others and his guilt pushes him into priesthood. Rintrah becomes a criminal with a curious code of honor, and Paschal becomes a music teacher whose own racial confusion becomes his downfall. Their stories are interwoven with the tale of the Hoods and their children and New Orleans in the postbellum period.
Hicks does a good job of fleshing out the historical characters and of placing them in situations that change them. His main characters are strong and engaging, and his descriptions of the settings, especially New Orleans, are vivid and accurate. This is not a book just for Civil War aficionados, it’s a book with action, adventure, romance and appealing characters who experience joy, sorrow, gain and loss. Be aware that the book starts slowly. The dedicated reader who stays with it to the end will be rewarded.
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