Varina

by Charles Frazier

The war—sold to the people as a collective fantasy—became daily reality, a constant condition of life—death and strange days stretching from the present instant to the farthest horizon you could imagine or even dream until at some point of weariness, war rests quiet in the mind.

BEING ON THE WRONG SIDE of history carries consequences.

But by then, it was too late to apply Lee’s advice more widely because we were in the middle of trying to pull apart a country to protect the wealth of slave owners. There was no going back. Bad, angry decisions left behind a huge cost in life and suffering for the entire nation. And utter loss of wealth for the South. But not for the North. Plenty made fortunes off the war. Give a real Yankee one little dried pea and three thimbles and he can buy groceries. Give him a boxful of cheap, shiny pocketknives and pistols to trade and he will turn it into a career. But give him a war, and he’ll make a fortune to last centuries. It’s not something they learn. They’re saturated in it from birth. End result—we lose everything and they create thousands of new millionaires. —Bitter feelings still, ma’am?

I’ve come to accept that our debt may stretch to one of those generational Bible curses. Unto the seventh son of the seventh son. Born on the seventh hour of the seventh day.

Except time flows one way and drags us with it no matter how hard we paddle upstream.

So even very young she saw slavery as an ancient practice arising because rich people would rather not do hard work, and also from the tendency of people to clench hard to advantageous passages in the Bible and dismiss the rest.

Yankees put much stock in the famous Puritan witch-killer Mather, and V had read plenty of that crazy old man’s thoughts, all the fear and dread he cursed America with down to the tenth generation. But Yankees loved to claim relation with him and all those other fanatics that came over here to establish their own flavor of dictatorship led by preacher tyrants. Winchester had made V read their writings, and even at fifteen she believed the English were right. Those people needed to be locked up. But instead, they ran to the wilderness and found the freedom to be as crazy as they wanted and to kill Indians and bothersome

witch women and to drive a poison nail into the head of this country that still hasn’t been pulled out.

Civilization balances always on a keen and precarious point, a showman spinning a fine Spode dinner plate on a long dowel slender as a stem of hay.

Our goal was simple. If every generation helps the next take one step up, imagine where we might all be someday.

that what you believe right now is eternal truth because you believe it so fervently—those

The railroad station, three hotels, three general stores, and a few dozen houses—some grand before the war—stood unpainted and in poor repair because now you had to pay people actual money to get such jobs done rather than just buying the people and owning their labor forever.

Never acknowledging that the general culture is often stupid or evil and would vote out God in favor of the devil if he fed them back their hate and fear in a way that made them feel righteous.

the last bright repository of all their dead memories.

—He was never a rebel. He was a businessman and a politician who believed the Constitution protected the capital of his class and culture above everything else. And he may have been right on the legal front, given that the federal government held him in prison for years under the charge of treason and then lacked confidence to try him. What a disaster if they had lost the case on Constitutional grounds. They would have won a disastrous war for nothing. All the dead and all the living with empty sleeves and eye sockets, all the widows. Half a generation wiped away.

Varina is describing her husband, Jefferson Davis.

The most cold-blooded view is that the war was a violent argument over the forms it could take. One form was people. My husband argued that the slave economy was more humane than the child labor mills of Yankee capitalism. His argument was that with slavery, labor and capital were one and the same. The owner had a strong stake in the welfare of his workers because they were a great portion of his capital. Whereas the mill owner up north can work his people to death and it costs him nothing. Another boatload from Ireland or Italy will solve his problem.