Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South
Page 40
Yet as vividly as the impact of the war on southern civilians is rendered, this is a war devoid of much meaning. The film does not address the issues behind the struggle or why those from Cold Mountain choose to fight for the Confederacy. When a church service is interrupted with the news that the war has begun, local men and boys are excited and express their eagerness to fight. It is very much like the scene at Twelve Oaks in Gone with the Wind where the same news is met with equal enthusiasm; but in that film, an earlier scene of Rhett Butler debating with hot-headed young Georgians at least provides some context and meaning for their exuberant response. In Cold Mountain, there is no such rationale for these highlanders’ almost mindless revelry, the most distinguishable dialogue in the scene being, “We got our war, man! We got our war.” (It’s not even clear what spurs this particular moment: Is it the attack on Fort Sumter? Lincoln’s call for troops to put down the rebellion? North Carolina’s secession vote a month later?)
Neither slaves nor slavery plays much part in the film; only fleeting references are made to both. Inman crosses paths with a band of African American refugees as he treks through eastern North Carolina; it could have been a very revealing scene if they hadn’t merely fled from each other. A particularly odd moment has Ada taking refreshments out to her slaves—never seen—during a party at her home. Even the otherwise meticulously re-created Battle of the Crater at Petersburg, which opens the film, fails to portray the many black Union troops who played such a key role there.
If the film captures the sheer messiness of this internalized Appalachian war, it vastly oversimplifies the forces of good and evil that do battle in the region. Perhaps because the protagonist, Inman, is first and foremost a deserter, all other deserters become sympathetic characters and innocent victims who pose little threat to anyone else. It is those who seek them out—the Home Guard—who become the film’s unequivocal villains. From the war’s beginning, Captain Robert Teague (a historical figure) and his self-appointed band of local vigilantes are portrayed as menacing, power-hungry thugs who become increasingly ruthless, cruel, and destructive in their harassment of the very civilian population they are charged with protecting. In actuality, it was often the deserters, along with those avoiding conscription, escaped prisoners of war, and other renegades who made up the bushwhacking bands who hid out in the more remote Carolina highlands and wreaked such havoc on nearby towns and farms. While Home Guard units did engage in unauthorized violence and harassment, they often served, if not always very effectively, as the only protectors and restorers of order for many communities so plagued by these lawless bands.
Perhaps Minghella’s most serious deviation from Frazier’s book is the elimination of Inman’s internalized thoughts and feelings as he heads home. The novel is infused with a palpable sense of place; it especially comes through in Inman’s yearning for his Blue Ridge mountain home that—along with his beloved Ada—he counts on to restore his sanity, indeed his humanity. The beauty of North Carolina’s mountains (which this native western Carolinian must grudgingly admit is fairly convincingly portrayed by the Romanian Alps) is apparent throughout the film; it poses a striking visual contrast to the wretched Virginia battlefields with which it is juxtaposed in alternating opening scenes. One of Minghella’s strengths as a filmmaker is his ability to create a compelling sense of place, as he did so beautifully for both Italy and North Africa in his Oscar-winning adaptation of The English Patient (1996). This film’s landscapes are just as stunning, yet little of that love of the mountains is seen or felt through Inman’s eyes or memories. As a man of so few words, he only briefly acknowledges his revulsion of war or his longing for the comfort and refuge of his highland home, which make up some of the most moving and meaningful passages in Frazier’s novel. We see nothing of his love of the highland flora and fauna, or the inspiration he derives from the descriptions of William Bartram, which in the novel provide him with an intellectual dimension and sensitivity that account for much of his appeal. (Bartram’s Travels makes it into the film, but only in an offhanded way: Ada hands the book to Inman as he’s departing for war, saying, “They tell me it’s good; I think he writes about these parts.” Thereafter the book’s function seems to be little more than a place for him to store Ada’s picture.) With this side of the character so diminished, Jude Law’s Inman thus is far more an Everyman—reacting to a range of far livelier and more colorful characters, than is his prose counterpart. In the book, Inman’s intellect, sensitivity, and emotional depth make him a far more compelling and complex character than the “average” Confederate soldier or deserter.
One of the more striking and fully developed themes in the film is the plight of women caught up in guerrilla warfare. Historians of the Civil War in Appalachia and other fringes of the Confederacy have described the wartime breakdown of conventional gender roles. Left without male protection, women either had to participate in the war or were forced to serve as the first and last line of defense of their households and often of their husbands, sons, or other male relatives, many of whom were forced into hiding close to home.8 Michael Fellman’s characterization of women caught up in Missouri’s guerrilla conflict during the war years—“disintegration, demoralization, and perverse adaptation” in which women became forced participants, with “varying degrees of enthusiasm, rage, and fear”9—is fully applicable to the women of western North Carolina and specifically to the female characters of Cold Mountain. Two of the film’s three central characters are women, of course, but so are several of the more vivid supporting characters, and their roles tell us much about the war and its often devastating impact on their real-life counterparts.
Historically accurate women at war are new to film depictions of Appalachia, but strong women who are forced into traditionally masculine roles are not. As with all facets of Hollywood’s depiction of southern mountain life, Jerry Williamson in his book Hillbillyland gives full attention to portrayals of women. “Hillbillyland grants extraordinary equality to women. At times,” Williamson notes. “Strong backwoods women with weapons have regularly appeared in movies . . . , fighting back against whatever threatened them—with guns especially.”10 In his chapter on “Hillbilly Gals,” he devotes sections to “Uppity Women,” “Cross-Dressers,” and “Mannish Misfits.” One can certainly see in Zellweger’s brash rendering of Ruby elements of all three, and several of the other female characters exhibit “mannish” behavior or character traits. In fact, in both her feminine appearance and gentle demeanor, Kidman’s Ada Monroe is perhaps most distinguished from anyone else in the film. Even when she ultimately resorts to wearing men’s clothes—a sign that she’s about to enter the fray in a serious way—little else about her appearance or demeanor seems to change.
If such women are not unusual in the Appalachian-based movies Williamson analyzed so brilliantly in Hillbillyland, much rarer are Hollywood productions that have dramatized the struggle of southern women during the Civil War. Again, the obvious exception is Gone with the Wind, but few others since have even focused on the Civil War home front, much less on how its women coped. In Shenandoah, Yankee renegades murder Jimmy Stewart’s new daughter-in-law, and his daughter wears men’s clothes to join her brothers in taking revenge, but the women’s roles are never more than marginal.
In Cold Mountain, however, female characters respond in a variety of ways to the violence and hardship forced upon them as the war disrupts their households and communities. By the war’s final months, when most of the film takes place, several characters fall victim to the desperation and lawlessness that has overtaken the highland home front. In one encounter during his arduous trek home through North Carolina, Inman is taken in by Sara, a teenage war widow and mother (played by Natalie Portman), who is struggling on her own in an isolated mountain cabin to keep herself and her sickly newborn alive. Soon after his arrival, three Union renegades approach her cabin, demanding whatever food she has. They bind her to a post outside and expose her baby to the elements in an e
ffort to force her to reveal where she’s hidden her hog and chickens. Inman, on hearing them approach, escapes out the back, where he watches and schemes how to rescue his young hostess.
Here Minghella provides an intriguing twist on Frazier’s narrative. In one of the novel’s most riveting passages, Inman stalks the men as they depart with Sara’s hog and several chickens, her only means of support. Inman follows them to their camp, where he picks them off one by one, and returns to Sara with her hog, as yet unkilled, and the chickens, one living, two dead. On-screen, Minghella compresses this sequence considerably by having Inman ambush and kill two of the three Federals inside Sara’s house, one as he attempts to rape her. Inman is willing to let the youngest and least malicious of the three men, by then cowered and fully repentant, leave unharmed, but as this young renegade scurries away from the scene, he is suddenly shot in the back . . . by Sara. This is a war that has made killers of women and girls; in this case the woman kills out of vengeance and hatred, showing more of those emotions than Inman, that most sensitive and compassionate of Confederate soldiers. As Williamson found to be the case in early silent movies, a “hillbilly gal” is allowed a symbolic moment “of equal power through violence.”11
Equally as harrowing is an incident in which a woman is more brutally victimized and left without recourse to fighting back. Sally Swanger, a very minor character in Frazier’s novel, emerges in the film as the most prominent female in the Cold Mountain community, the wife of one of its more prosperous farmers and a neighbor fully sympathetic to the plight of the hapless Ada. Like many mountain women, she is forced to hide her two sons, who have deserted the Confederate army and returned home. The suspicious Home Guard, in an effort to either force her to reveal their hiding place or force them out to rescue their mother, bind Sally to a rail fence with a noose around her neck and place her fingers between the top rails. The youngest and least scrupulous of this gang of thugs dances sadistically along the top of the rail, in the process breaking her hands.
The historical record includes numerous accounts of just this sort of torture—both with nooses and rail fences and, for that matter, babies exposed to the elements and pets shot—applied to women in western North Carolina. The incidents involving Sara and Sally Swanger were likely based on the brutalities inflicted upon Unionist wives and mothers as prologue to the infamous Shelton Laurel massacre in early 1863, as well as the experience of another Madison County woman, whose story is related in Muriel Shepherd’s Cabins in the Laurel.12 Torture on a rail fence occurs in the opening pages of Wilma Dykeman’s novel The Tall Woman, in which the heroine’s mother falls victim to a sadistic group of “outliers” seeking the meat supply that she has carefully hidden.13 Frazier made only fleeting reference to such abuses in his novel, but Minghella included an extended scene in the film, which is all the more powerful because he turned Sally into a more fully developed character (well played by Kathy Baker), who in addition to her physical torture must watch as her husband and both sons are gunned down in front of her.14
Like Sally defending her deserting sons, other women serve as protectors and caretakers for men at war, whether stranger or friend. In one of the novel’s most revealing chapters, Inman encounters the “goat woman” setting traps in the woods around Grandfather Mountain. When he asks for food, this elderly woman leads him to her remote encampment on the side of the mountain, where she allows him to stay with her and her small herd for a day or so. The power of this episode is not only that this hermit/oracle is such an intriguing character in her independence and eccentricity; it is also that she forces Inman to confront and articulate the meaningless of the war and of his participation in it.
Yet in the film, this character, vividly brought to life by the great British actress Eileen Atkins, offers much more, though in a considerably condensed scene. For Minghella, she becomes Inman’s savior: she finds him unconscious but still chained to an otherwise dead band of prisoners, all victims of cross-fire in a skirmish between their Confederate captors and a small Union force who stumble upon them. With great effort, the goat woman manages to get Inman to her shelter, where she treats his wounds and nurses him back to health over several days. She thus becomes an even more integral determinant of Inman’s ever-questionable fate; more important, however, her role stands as yet another indication of the degree to which men at war depended on women—known or unknown—for their very survival.
So it is that the film’s central characters, Ada and Ruby, are also drawn more inextricably into the guerrilla warfare waged around them. Like Sally Swanger, they find themselves forced to protect and provide for Ruby’s brutish father and his renegade companions, who have deserted the Confederate army and become outliers (though rather more benign and thus far more sympathetic than their real-life counterparts). Ada and Ruby are forced to move from the comforts of home and farm—where providing sustenance and protection to these men was relatively easy, even though it rendered them far more vulnerable to harassment by the Home Guard—into the thick of the mountain wilderness, where they learn that their male charges have been attacked and are in need of their attention. In taking off on this rescue mission, the two women arm themselves, dress as men, and—in the words of a Cherokee County woman in 1863—“assumed all the duties of the sterner sex.” They thus further blur gender roles as they engage in a shoot-out that serves as the film’s climax.15
Mary Bell of neighboring Macon County, whose story is told earlier in this volume, confided to her husband in the spring of 1862 that “I wish I could be both man and woman until the war ends.”16 She was referring primarily to the sometimes overwhelming burdens she faced in managing her farm without her husband’s help. Many women throughout the Confederacy faced this challenge and probably felt about it as Mary Bell did. Cold Mountain’s Ada Monroe experiences these burdens with her father’s death, and her first attempts at taking charge reflected how totally helpless she is to assume any such manly roles. It takes another woman, one of Williamson’s “mannish misfits,” the irrepressible Ruby, to save Ada by saving her farm. It is only later in the war, and primarily in this highland environment, that many women were forced to take on even more of a man’s role by engaging in the horrific guerrilla warfare that engulfed them.
It is here that Anthony Minghella altered Frazier’s novel for the screen by amplifying the roles of women as participants and partners in that “inner war” that so plagued western North Carolina. Far more than is the case in the book, women become in Minghella’s screenplay far more active agents in their own defense and in the care and protection they provide for males. Certainly in no other film set in Appalachia and in no other Civil War film since Scarlett O’Hara vowed that she would never go hungry again has this point been dramatized as vividly or as centrally as it is in Cold Mountain. For all of the other problems from which the film suffers in terms of how historic reality is compromised—and there are several—Minghella deserves much credit for how effectively he portrays the gendered nature of this very messy war as it played out on the many home fronts of Southern Appalachia.
When the book was published, a colleague of mine, a distinguished Civil War historian and biographer of Robert E. Lee, read it and wryly pronounced it to be a cross between Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy, with most of its characters “trailer park trash before there were trailer parks.” Cold Mountain indeed depicts a war and a people that Lee would probably not have recognized; neither gods nor generals play much of a role here. It is thus all the more remarkable that, despite the limitations and concessions imposed by a major Hollywood production, the final product should demonstrate so much respect for the novel on which it is based and provide so unflinching a portrayal of the bleak and unsettling realities of the Civil War as it was waged throughout Appalachia and other parts of the war-torn South. It is a far less familiar version of the war, but it is one that would have been all too recognizable to thousands of hardscrabble southern men and women who lived through it.
&nb
sp; Notes
1. Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997); John Jakes, North and South (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982); James Dickey, Deliverance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970). A television miniseries of North and South first aired in 1985; a film version of Deliverance debuted in 1972.
2. Cold Mountain won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1997.
3. Frazier has given different versions of this story in interviews over the years since Cold Mountain’s publication. For two particularly revealing interviews conducted soon after the book’s publication, see Charles Frazier on Cold Mountain at www.bookbrowse.com, and “Cold Mountain Diary: How the Author Found the Inspiration for His Novel among the Secrets Buried in the Backwoods of the Smoky Mountains,” Salon.com (July 9, 1997). For another treatment of the original William P. Inman, see Rob Neufeld, A Popular History of Western North Carolina: Mountains, Heroes, and Hootnoggers (Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2007), 68–71.
4. See chap. 8 in this volume, “ ‘Moving through Deserter Country’: Fugitive Accounts of Southern Appalachia’s Inner Civil War.”
5. For a different, very perceptive assessment of the historical accuracy of the novel, see Martin Crawford, “Cold Mountain Fictions, Appalachian Half-Truths,” Appalachian Journal 30 (Winter/Spring 2003): 182–95.
6. Phillip Shaw Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981). The detail of rooting hogs comes from a gruesome reality at Shelton Laurel, where wild hogs who dug up the Madison County mass grave chewed the head off one of the victims rather than saving him.