Books: Reconstruction Blues

THE UNCONQUERED (689 pp.)−Ben Ames Williams—Thomas Allen ($5).

Ben Ames Williams was that rare creature, a historical novelist who cared about history. When he died last February at 63 he had written some 30 books (which sold 5,200,000 copies), many of them forming a kind of family album of the U.S. in wartime. Come Spring was a tale of Revolutionary days, Thread of Scarlet a close-up of the War of 1812, House Divided took in four sprawling years of Confederate history. The books were honest, uninspired, but engagingly readable—triumphs of plausibility and painstaking research.

The Unconquered, published posthumously, is a sequel to House Divided. The new novel picks up the high-living Currain clan where the Civil War left most Southern aristocrats—at loose ends with few means. Trav Currain feels that the South should stop crying over spilled juleps and buckle down to hard work. He takes off for New Orleans with his wife, teenage daughter and son, and sets himself up in the budding cottonseed oil business. But the other Currains lack Trav’s gift for walking clean-footed through the ‘ mire of Reconstruction days. Wife Enid dawdles in bed till noon and takes an occasional snifter of opium to blot out the memory of magnolias. Daughter Lucy commits the heresy of falling in love with a Yankee lieutenant from Maine. (Trav actually likes the young man.) Son Peter turns Dixie chauvinist and joins one of a dozen Klannish clubs bent on terrorizing Negroes out of their newly gained rights.

Between the lines of these personal dilemmas, Author Williams sketches in the snake-pit struggles of Copperheads, scalawags and carpetbaggers, the cancerous ministry of fear between black and white that gradually chokes all love. As gory as any 30-page stretch in recent literature is the book’s account of the slaying of some 50 Negroes in the Mechanics Institute massacre of 1866.

Before the characters stop singing and living the Reconstruction Blues, upright Trav Currain ‘s family is caught up in a veritable carnival of killing. The Un conquered is standard Williams, with the familiar faults, the familiar virtues, and a not too novel moral: that the post-bellum South poisoned its wells too deeply to drink anything but violence for generations.