There was a story my grandfather used to tell as the self-appointed keeper of the family myth. It was a story of cruelty in a now ancient time — of an aging ancestor dragged from his home by a band of Tories and locked away in a burial vault.
As my grandfather told it, the story ended well. The old man was rescued just a few minutes short of suffocation, and the tale was told far and wide in the land — a testament to the gratuitous cruelty of the Crown. But the unspoken truth in that piece of oral history — a truth captured brilliantly in Robert Morgan’s new novel — is that the American Revolution was, in fact, our first civil war.
It was a time of nearly unspeakable brutality, neighbor against neighbor, especially in the South. People were tarred and feathered and hung, whipped sometimes to within an inch of their lives, and the perpetrators were as likely to be rebels against the rule of King George as they were his supporters.
“People in those days lived in their own hells,” says one of the characters in Robert Morgan’s Brave Enemies. And that bitter truth has been obscured through the years by the mythology surrounding the American Revolution. We have come to see it as a glorious time, when the heroic wisdom of the Founding Fathers gave birth to a nation that was different from any the world had ever seen. There is, of course, some truth to that conceit. But as Morgan shows us in this wrenching work of fiction, there was a darker, more agonizing side to our history, a level of suffering that for a while at least seemed to be all-consuming.
Morgan takes us through those terrible days with a pair of flawed, but sympathetic characters — Josie Summers, a young girl living in the Carolina wilderness, raped and shamed by a brutal stepfather whom she murders in a desperate act of revenge; and John Trethman, a traveling minister still in his 20s, a man of idealism and faith who later falls in love with the girl. They live happily for awhile in a rough-hewn cabin, as the war and the killing are raging all around them. But eventually they’re torn from their private refuge, separated by the powerful forces of the times.
Trethman is arrested by British soldiers, who are incensed by his insistent professions of neutrality, and who force him to serve as a chaplain to their army. Josie escapes and in her desperation to survive, she disguises herself as a boy and joins the American militia, fighting on the opposite side from her husband. Inevitably, they move toward a fateful reunion at the Battle of Cowpens, a bloody encounter important to the ultimate outcome of the war.
In telling his tale, Morgan weaves a seamless tapestry of the fiction that springs from his own imagination and the unembellished drama of American history. His characters are struggling not only with the violence and brutality of a war, but also with their own understanding of themselves. The young protagonists, as the story unfolds, emerge as reflective, self-critical people, preoccupied with morality and faith, as well as the immediate need to survive. Morgan reveals them to us in a style that is both poetic and plain, influenced, at least in part, by the oral history handed down in his family.
He grew up with stories of the American Revolution and ancestors fighting at the Battle of Cowpens, and his fascination with this corner of our history is one of the greatest strengths of his novel.
When Morgan’s novel Gap Creek became an Oprah book in 2000, he found himself suddenly a literary star. Brave Enemies will only add to his standing; it’s an important and deeply original novel, ambitious in its sweep, a love story set against a gritty and gripping backdrop of history that gives us a better understanding of ourselves.
Robert Morgan will read from his book on Monday night, October 27, 6 to 8pm in Francis Auditorium at the Public Library, 310 N. Tryon St., as part of the Novello Festival of Reading. Tickets are $15. Call 704-336-2074. Frye Gaillard is a Charlotte author and CL contributor whose books include Lessons from the Big House: One Family’s Passage Though the History of the South.
This article appears in Oct 22-27, 2003.
