BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: When the Jessamine Grows (Donna Everhart, author)
Literary fiction, Civil War, North Carolina, neutrality, Confederate fervor, loyalty oath, subsistence farming, mother-son, vigilante justice, hardship.
BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: When the Jessamine Grows, (Donna Everhart author)
When the Jessamine Grows is a historical novel with a fresh perspective on the Civil War. Gifted historical fiction writer, Donna Everhart (author of The Saints of Swallow Hill) weaves a story about owners of a family farm in North Carolina who declined to choose sides in the Civil War. Because they remained neutral and refused to espouse loyalty to the Confederacy, they were ostracized, their property and lives threatened, and their farm and home vandalized. They feared for their safety and even their lives.
In 1861, Joetta and Ennis McBride owned and worked a Nash County, North Carolina family farm with Ennis’s father, Rudean McBride, and their two sons, Henry, 15 and Robert, 12. Their small farm produced just enough to feed themselves and their livestock. They owned no slaves. Unlike Southern plantation owners, they were not invested in the South’s battle to preserve slavery and Joetta and Ennis were opposed to a war. However, the boisterous elder Mr. McBride, Ennis’s father, dominated conversation around the family dinner table, ranting about the perceived threat posed by the newly-elected President Lincoln (despite Lincoln’s promise not to interfere with existing slave ownership), his fear of vague and amorphous threats to the “Southern way of life”, and his favorable view of the growing movement for North Carolina to secede from the Union. Though the senior Mr. McBride’s views were at odds with those of Joetta and Ennis, his strong opinions, romanticized stories and rants filled the imaginations of young Henry and Robert.
Tension grew as talk of secession and armed conflict rose. When the Confederacy formed, pockets of rabid Confederate fervor arose. Volunteers for a Confederate army mustered and assembled. A regional presumption of loyalty to the Confederate cause dominated, even for those without slaves. Joetta and Ennis refused to swear loyalty to a cause in which they did not believe and that did not pertain to their family farming existence. Their neutrality aroused suspicion and animosity in the community. To their shock, their fifteen year-old son, Henry, head filled with his grandfather’s stories, ran away to volunteer for the Confederate army.
Terrified for her son’s safety, Joetta begged Ennis to pursue him and bring him home. Angry with his son’s disrespectful and disobedient action, Ennis decided to wait for Henry to return home. Ennis expected the Confederate army to reject Henry due to his young age and send him home. After 10 days passed and Henry had not returned, Joetta insisted that Ennis go and bring Henry home. To Joetta’s horror, Ennis was unable to locate Henry, and decided that he must himself enlist in order to find his son.
Days and weeks became months. Weeks and months passed without a letter from Ennis. Left to manage the farm herself with her unhelpful father-in-law (who does not lift a hand) and her twelve year-old son Robert, Joetta struggled mightily. Robert believed that his father’s absence was his mother’s fault, and stopped speaking to her. Joetta and Robert plowed the fields, planted and weeded the crops, fed the livestock, and attempted with little success to survive without the significant labor Ennis and Henry had contributed.
Though it seems that circumstances cannot get worse, they do Confederate fervor mounts. Neighbors confront Joetta. And efore her eyes, loyalists destroyed her meager crops as a penalty for her refusal to swear an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy. Robert is embarrassed and his resentment of his mother deepens; he flees the farm to stay with Confederate-sympathizing neighbors for a while. Joetta forges on, trying to manage the farm alone. A young runaway boy-soldier arrives at the farm and helps Joetta, but he is (erroneously) identified as a Union spy, further threatening Joetta’s safety. When Robert returns to her, .Joetta decides she has no choice but to travel on foot with Robert and the boy to safety on her mother and father’s farm, further south in North Carolina. When circumstances cause them to turn bark, they find their home burned to the ground by Confederate loyalists who believed she was harboring a Union spy. Hardship piles on top of hardship. Hearing nothing for over a year, Joetta believes Ennis has died in battle.
Everhart paints a grim picture of the atrocities of the Civil War that visited everyone in its path, Union or Confederate. The War took the lives of hundreds of thousands of sons and fathers. It created devastating conditions–scarcity of food supplies leading to starvation and malnutrition, harsh winters without adequate fuel or warm clothing, families robbed of the labor fathers and sons had contributed to families already living at subsistence level, the trauma of returning soldiers who fought and were injured or maimed or witnessed unspeakable horrors of war.
Yet, When the Jessamine Grows is not a story about the horrors of slavery, or the gristle of battles of the Civil War. Though those horrors color this story, at its core When the Jessamine Grows is a smaller story with a different message within that greater one. It is about the cruelty of intolerance, and the devastating cruelty that grows out of fear. When the Jessamine Grows portrays the fate of the fictional characters who were the unwitting victims of that fear and cruelty, and how they managed to survive.
Everhart reminds us that the 19th Century was a period in our history where communication was limited to mail, sewing bees, a visit to the general store, or an occasional local newspaper or flyer. Daily life on a farm in this era consumed every waking hour and ounce of energy of a farming family’s existence; it was a never-ending cycle of planting, irrigating, weeding and reaping crops, feeding and slaughtering livestock, making every meal from scratch, sewing, cleaning and mending every article of clothing by hand. In this context, it becomes crystal clear that a subsistence farmer’s allegiance to a distant government was neither automatic or even palatable to a large swath of the country. To embrace the Civil War, subsistence farmers were asked to abandon their way of life, leave their families, to endure (and ask their families to endure) extreme hardship, hunger and scarcity, and to be ready and willing to lay down their lives to preserve the way of life of the planter class. Arguably, our past paints the present and wars, now international in scope, ask much the same of those who serve. Everhart’s powerful story ultimately is about fortitude, redemption, forgiveness and renewal. When the McBride family heads west in a covered wagon after the war, we rejoice for their determination to begin again.
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