With the exception of Civil War buffs, few today will remember Varina Howell Davis (1826-1906), wife to Jefferson Davis and the only first lady of the Confederate States of America.
Fewer will know the details of Varina’s life: the bankruptcy of her father; her life-long ties via friends to points North; her up-and-down marriage to Davis; her strained relations with his family, particularly his domineering brother; the loss of five of her six children; her post-war travails; her successful career as a New York City columnist after the death of her husband. The ebb-and-flow of the tides of history wear away the celebrity of many such figures, soon diminishing them, like wrecked ships on a beach, to a few remaining planks and rusty nails.
In Varina, Charles Frazier of Cold Mountain fame resurrects Varina, or V as he calls her, in a novel that is, quite simply, as remarkable a fiction as I have read in years.
The book opens in 1906 in Saratoga Springs, New York, when a man of white and black descent, James Blake, enters The Retreat, the hotel where V is staying, seeking to discover information about his lost boyhood. During the War, the Davis family had taken the beaten orphaned Blake into their home, and for a while made him a part of the family. Blake now wants V to fill in his memory from those years, explaining to him his relationship with the family. (In real life, Blake was Jimmy Limber, who was indeed rescued by Varina and taken into the Davis family, but who became separated from them at the end of the War. They never saw him again.)
V opens her account with the fall of Richmond to the Northern army in 1865. She, some of her family, and a few defenders become refugees, pushing southward to reach Florida and then take a boat to Cuba, hoping to connect with Jefferson Davis along the way, and working to avoid the bounty hunters and Northern troops who are pursuing them. Throughout the novel, we return to this trek, this time when a world was coming to an end, when the old order was collapsing and chaos raised a temporary throne. he describes her meeting with Davis, their subsequent capture, and their separation from Blake.
Sparked by the appearance of Blake, V also reminisces about her past: the insecurity and shame brought by her father’s failures; her husband’s undiminished adulation for his first wife, the dead Knoxie; the insults she endured while serving as first lady; the friends, particularly Mary Chestnut, who helped her through those rough times and came to her aid after the war; the constant moves—V lived in Canada and Europe for a brief time, then the coast of Mississippi, and finally in various hotels and apartments in New York.
Throughout Varina, we return again and again to the dialogue between V and Blake in which they discuss not only their mutual past, but the issues of slavery and race that both bind and separate them. After V’s death, James Blake follows her casket to Richmond, where she is to be buried beside her husband. Here he reflects on the death of Joe, the son of the Davises, who died from a fall from a balcony at the age of five when James was living with them.
Next morning James stands on the cobbles where Joe died. He remembers the spot clearly but not much else. The house is a little familiar—also a sort of dreamlike recognition of the neighborhood, the slope of the hill, the streets and alleyways. Joe had been his double. Same age, same size. They’d worn the same clothes. Both the same except the final layer of skin—so not the same at all, even now.
And after Varina is in the ground, Blake is still wrestling with his mixed feelings about race and about the turns his life has taken:
He wonders how it is possible to love someone and still want to throw down every remnant of the order they lived by. He thinks, I don’t want to be a mirror too perfect in imaging flaws—gratitude and resentment, that’s what I have.
Rather than view Varina as some sort of fictional meditation on race, however, we find instead an exquisitely written meditation on the complications of history. Some of us these days don’t do well with the incongruities and paradoxes of the past. Some despise the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence because he owned slaves; some look with disdain on the men who died fighting for the Confederacy; some ignore his many accomplishments and attack Booker T. Washington for advocating accommodation to the Jim Crowe laws; some overlook the achievements of Martin Luther King Jr. while denigrating him as an adulterer and a plagiarist. Ours is the Age of the New Puritanism, when we judge and condemn people of the past and the present for their flaws, all the while denigrating their accomplishments, all the while assuming we stand on the moral high ground.
Charles Frazier’s Varina is not only an exquisitely written work of fiction, combining style, knowledge, and wisdom to recreate Varina Davis and the times in which she lived. It is also a reminder to all of us that people and circumstances are rarely as simple as they seem.
It should also serve as a warning to all who judge others. “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” the Old Book says. We human beings are a tangle of beliefs, ideas, and prejudices. We necessarily have to judge others, but whether we make that judgment with or without the humble reminder of our own flaws makes all the difference in the world.