Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  Ada emerges as an even more carefully delineated character. Her romance with Inman develops fitfully (and remarkably briefly, in relative page count) in the few months before he leaves for Confederate service. With missionary zeal, her father had taken her from a comfortable Charleston existence and brought her into the wilds of the Carolina highlands to enlighten what their Low Country friends saw as “a heathenish part of creation,” to a people so uncivilized that “only men of gentry affected underdrawers, and women of every station suckled their young, leaving the civilized trade of wet nurse unknown” (42). (Has anyone so cleverly and succinctly satirized the elitism of Appalachia’s lowland detractors?) Ada’s father dies soon after the war begins, and she chooses to remain rather than return to Charleston, primarily to await Inman’s return.

  It is refreshing to see a home-front heroine as unabashedly helpless as Ada is, at least in the beginning of the novel. Given our celebration of southern women’s fortitude and resourcefulness (and several of us maintain that highland women held their own with the best of their Confederate sisters, as I do in several chapters in this volume), it is Ada’s very frailties and her obliviousness to even the rudiments of mountain life that make her so compelling a character. Her pampered upbringing in Charleston and her father’s own apathy toward farm management leave her bewildered, musing to herself about “how a human being could be raised more impractically for the demands of an exposed life.” She is not alone long, as she teams up with a local woman, Ruby, who is in all respects her opposite—unschooled but with a vast reservoir of physical strength and native know-how that ultimately assures both women’s survival. In effect, Frazier ends up celebrating, as we historians have, the achievement of these home-front heroines, even if it takes this oddly matched sisterhood to pull it off.

  Just as Homer’s Odyssey alternated between Odysseus’s attempt to make his way home from war and Penelope’s struggles at home as she awaits his return, so Frazier devotes alternating chapters to the very different plights of his lovers as the narrative propels them toward the reunion that ultimately makes the novel so powerful. The parallels between Greek and North Carolina epics are not especially subtle, given that Ada reads Homer to Ruby, who in pondering the trials and tribulations of the Ithacan couple, concludes that “all in all, not much has altered in the way of things despite the passage of a great volume of time” (108).

  Inman’s journey across North Carolina sometimes seems rather formulaic as he moves chapter by chapter from one encounter to another, some war-related, some not. In this sense, the book is not unlike the postwar accounts of Civil War veterans, particularly of the subgenre of “escape” narratives by fugitive prisoners (most from Confederate prisons), several of which Frazier obviously has used as a model.4 Yet as episodic as these chapters can be, the incidents and characters grow increasingly intense as Inman approaches the foothills and then the mountains themselves. If Frazier strains credibility with his protagonist’s luck and skill in overcoming so constant a barrage of adversaries—con men, jealous husbands, beguiling widows, Home Guardsmen, bandits, and even a bear—more often than not he creates something compelling, sometimes horrific, and often quite unexpected from these vignettes.

  This is not the Civil War or the Confederate South that we usually see in historical fiction. There are few if any plantations, slaveholders, or slaves on this home front. The many characters who people Frazier’s saga are far removed from those in Margaret Mitchell’s or John Jakes’s fictionalized Confederacy. With very few exceptions, these people are poor, leading lives of quiet—and often not so quiet—desperation. For all participants, the war has become one of disillusionment, resentment, desolation, and brutality as they engage in a primal quest for sheer survival.

  Both hero and heroine recognize this much grimmer face of war and articulate it. Inman, who fought under Robert E. Lee, is troubled by the general who “seemed to think battle—among all the acts man might commit—stood outranked in sacredness only by prayer and Bible reading.” He thinks to himself with much resentment that “he did not enlist to take on a Marse, even one as solemn and noble-looking as Lee” (8). Ada takes issue with a neighbor who “found the fighting glorious and tragic and heroic,” asserting instead that “she found it, even at a great distance, brutal and benighted on both sides about equally. Degrading to all” (140–41). And so, in Frazier’s narrative, it proves to be.5

  Frazier’s historical grasp of this late-war reality in the southern highlands is impressive and effectively conveyed. In addition to the “family stories” about his great-great uncle, Frazier acknowledges a dozen or so rather mixed sources for his research, including Horace Kephart and James Mooney, Richard Chase’s “Jack Tales,” Walter Clark’s North Carolina regimental histories, and firsthand narratives of regional renegades such as Daniel Ellis and J. V. Hadley. Real figures and incidents—from William Holland Thomas and his famous Cherokee legion to the infamous bushwhacker Robert Teague, who terrorized deserters in that very area of Haywood County—make brief but indelible appearances.

  Frazier does not depict the war in the mountains with much complexity; very little is made of the ideological splits and confusions, though clashes between bushwhackers, deserters, Home Guards, and even Heroes of America regularly occur throughout Inman’s cross-state odyssey. Frazier draws heavily from Philip Paludan’s Victims, but he sets his version of the infamous Shelton Laurel massacre in the piedmont rather than in remote, mountainous Madison County, and he makes Inman the sole, if unintended, survivor of an extralegal mass execution by local Confederates. He is left for dead and even buried with his less fortunate fellow captives, owing his ultimate resurrection to feral hogs rooting in the shallow grave—yet another bit of luck that strains credibility.6

  Union marauders, lonely women coping on their own, poverty and war weariness, and Home Guard units that harass “outliers” are as prevalent as Inman moves through the piedmont as they are in the mountains, a reality those of us chronicling the war in the highlands perhaps need to be reminded of. Nevertheless, as Inman moves beyond Salisbury into Wilkes County and on toward Grandfather Mountain (a rather circuitous route for one headed toward Haywood County), the intensity of civilian and paramilitary terrorism and the danger they pose become ever more ominous.

  Though he never dwells on it, Frazier acknowledges, with his usual economy of form, the class resentment that the war spawned in the mountain South and that would eventually pervade much of the rest of the Confederacy. As Inman moves through Happy Valley, certainly among the most affluent enclaves of western North Carolina slaveholders, he notes the “big houses with white columns . . . ringed around with scattered hovels so that the valley land seems cut up into fiefdoms.” He looks at the lights in these houses as he sneaks by them at night: he “knew he had been fighting for such men as lived in them, and it made him sick” (205). Frazier never uses the words “slaves” or “slavery” here, and the white columns are a rare bow to stereotypical convention. Yet the resentment stirred over who was fighting and who was not and why was certainly central to the tensions that plagued the mountains as well as much of the rest of the South by late 1864, even if Inman’s sense of justice is far more enlightened than that which motivated most highland yeomen.

  Personal grudges lead to blatant forms of revenge and brutality. In a later incident, as related to Ada by Ruby’s father, “one of the county’s few gentry, a leading slaveholder . . . fell afoul of the cave society,” meaning Teague and his bushwhacking terrorists in Haywood County. Walker, the target of this retribution, “had long been a high-handed bastard with all he considered his lessers, which in his estimation included most everybody. Punishment, the cavers had decided, was in order” (264). And delivered it is, in a vividly described raid on Walker’s home.

  Frazier even explores the origins of the war fever that would later degenerate into such disillusionment and internalized conflict. A female hermit, or “goat woman,” eking out a living in the crevasses on
Grandfather Mountain forces Inman to articulate why he went to war in the first place. In one of the book’s most intriguing chapters, this oracle, “a pinched-off little scrag of a person” with whom our hero takes shelter for several days, asks him why men go to war and why he himself felt compelled to join this war in particular. Inman is quick to deny that “fighting for the big man’s nigger” motivated him; he feebly responds instead, “I reckon many of us fought to drive off invaders.” But in later pondering what really drove him and his fellow highlanders to respond so readily to the call to arms in 1861, Inman is forced to admit to his hostess that even that rationale holds little weight and that the real reason was in fact “change” or “the promise of it that made up the war frenzy in the early days. The powerful draw of new faces, new places, new lives. And new laws whereunder you might kill all you wanted and not be jailed, but be decorated.” He goes on to reflect:

  Men talked of war as if they committed it to preserve what they had and what they believed. But Inman guessed that it was boredom with the repetition of the daily rounds that had made them take up weapons. The endless arc of the sun, wheel of seasons. War took men out of that circle of regular life and made a season of its own, not much dependent on anything else. He had not been immune to its pull. (218)

  Here, as at other points throughout the novel, Frazier encapsulates through his deceptively spare and simple prose the essence of issues with which historians have grappled for years.

  Much of the beauty and emotional depth of this saga lie in the intense love Inman and others feel for their highland home, which stands in stark contrast to the sheer revulsion they feel for any area outside their mountain region. After many months of fighting far from the Blue Ridge, Inman has come to hate “these planed-off, tangled pinebrakes. All this flat land. Red dirt. Mean towns. He had fought over ground like this from the piedmont to the sea, and it seemed like nothing but the place where all that was foul and sorry had flowed downhill and pooled in the low spots” (53). Those who never left the mountains have similar disgust for those “low spots.” The very name of Georgia conjures up dismal imagery to these western Carolinians. One of a roving band of “outliers” is a young deserter from Georgia seeking his way home with little success through the Blue Ridge. One of his companions—perhaps the novel’s lowest and most contemptible character—says of him, “I feel sorry for that boy. . . . He’s wishing he’d never left home, but he’s not even got sense to know what kind of vile state he’s from. If I had a brother in jail and one in Georgia, I’d try to bust the one out of Georgia first” (286). Ruby, offering direction to the same boy, states simply, “They say you know Georgia when you come to it, for it’s nothing but red dirt and rough roads” (296).

  At the same time, the more articulate and sensitive of these highland-based characters, whether native or transplanted, find something mystical, even spiritual and life-affirming, about the grandeur and beauty of the mountains. This is especially true both of Inman, so desperately trying to return to them, and of Ada, so desperately trying to survive within them. From his hospital bed in Raleigh, Inman is sustained by his yearnings for Cold Mountain and the antidote it provided for the horrors he’s experienced on Virginia battlefields. “He could not abide by a universe composed only of what he could see, especially when it was so frequently foul. So he held to the idea of another world, a better place, and he figured he might as well consider Cold Mountain to be the location of it as anywhere” (17).

  Once in the mountains and nearing home, Inman stands atop a peak from which he “achieved a vista of what for him was homeland.” He takes great joy in seeing “the leap of hearth smoke from the houses of people he had known all his life. People he would not be called upon to hate or fear.” As comforting a thought as that is, it is the sheer physical world he is reentering that seems most to exhilarate him. Frazier’s writing is at its most eloquent when describing Inman’s feelings:

  As he studied on it, he recognized the line of every far ridge and valley to be remembered. They seemed long ago scribed indelibly on his corneas with a sharp instrument. He looked out at this highland and knew the names of places and things. He said them aloud: Little Beartail Ridge, Wagon Road Gap, Ripshin, Hunger Creek, Clawhammer Knob, Rocky Face. Not a mountain or watercourse lacked denomination. Not a bird or bush anonymous. His Place. (281)

  Ada too, though a relative newcomer, is caught up in the power of place. To her and her father, “this mountain country was so dark and inclined to the vertical compared with Charleston.” But within a few days after their arrival on Cold Mountain, Ada’s father notes that “like all elements of nature, the features of this magnificent topography were simply tokens of some other world, some deeper life with a whole other existence toward which we ought to aim all our yearning” (112). After his death, “outsider though she was, this place, the blue mountains, seemed to be holding [Ada] where she was. From any direction she came at it, the only conclusion that left her any hope of self-content was this; what she could see around her was all that she could count on” (50).

  Despite her helplessness to survive alone in this harsh setting, made all the more bleak by the ravages of war, Ada is as fully attuned to the beauty and the wonder of the natural world around her as Inman is. Just as William Bartram’s vivid descriptions of the area a century earlier sustain and inspire Inman as he moves toward the highlands, so she comes to find very little outside of her mountain world to be of much comfort or meaning. She becomes increasingly bored reading Adam Bede and wishes that its characters could be “more expansive, not so cramped by circumstance. What they needed was more scope, greater range. Go to the Indies, she directed them. Or to the Andes” (259). Her own life is expanding, with more scope and greater range, so that by the time she and her lover are reunited, she has undergone a transformation fully as profound as that inflicted on Inman by the traumas of war.

  Thus in a number of ways and at a number of levels, Cold Mountain is a profound and deeply moving novel. There is something quite edifying in seeing a work of this depth and power, and grounded so richly in the historical and geographical realities of the mountain South, claim so vast a national readership. Never before in American literature has the Civil War been depicted in quite this way, though it is a side of that experience that is readily recognizable to those of us (and our numbers are legion) researching the war in the southern highlands. Nor have nineteenth-century Appalachia or Appalachians been rendered in fictional form in quite this way. An outsider stuck in the mountains by circumstances beyond her control, and a native highlander, stuck outside the mountains for reasons not of his own making, yearn for each other and somehow find their strength and their drive within and through the mountains themselves. If it is not necessarily these attributes that account for the extraordinary popularity of Frazier’s work, they will undoubtedly have much to do with its lasting significance as historical fiction and as Appalachian literature.

  As a film, Cold Mountain is part of a genre of intimate historical epics—Dr. Zhivago, Reds, The English Patient, Pearl Harbor—in which war serves as the catalyst for doomed romance. It is often war that brings lovers together and then pulls them apart—sometimes temporarily, sometimes for good. As Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine states in Casablanca, a somewhat less-than-epic variation of this Hollywood type, “The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” But of course, it is just that—the problems of these “little people”—that draws us in as viewers and allows us to relate to a particular “crazy world,” the chaos and trauma of war, on such a personal and tangible level.

  Curiously, the Civil War has only rarely provided the setting for these film spectacles, although Gone with the Wind is, of course, the granddaddy of them all. But other than that and Shenandoah, a 1965 drama starring Jimmy Stewart as a Virginia farmer determined to keep his family out of the conflict, no major Hollywood film has dealt as fully with southerners and their home-front plight as does
Cold Mountain.7 And even more than other such epics, Anthony Minghella’s elaborate production does so through its dramatization of lovers’ separation and their desperation to reunite in a narrative so emotionally compelling that it assured its success both on best seller lists in the late 1990s and at the box office in 2003 and 2004.

  Minghella’s film is unusually faithful to the book in recreating Inman’s encounters with beleaguered widows, bushwhackers, Union renegades, fellow deserters, and the seemingly omnipresent Home Guardsmen, who collectively suggest the disorder, desperation, and corruption that characterized southerners’ struggle to survive in an increasingly lawless and dysfunctional society. One of the film’s great strengths is that these struggles are presented in such graphic, unflinching form, more often than not with violent resolutions that genuinely shock. Rarely has the collective plight of a people at war been conveyed to movie audiences as effectively as in this series of disturbing and emotionally charged episodes.

  The screen adaptation does almost as well with the home-front situation, embodied most notably in the unlikely partnership between the overeducated but hapless Ada Monroe, and Ruby, the brash native woman, portrayed by Nicole Kidman and Renée Zellweger (who won an Oscar for her efforts). Their teaming makes for the film’s most appealing and satisfying development, with the cultural disconnect between them providing much needed comic relief.