Over the weekend I read The River Between Us by Richard Peck. This book not only gave me shivers, but also taught me something new about the female Civil War experience. It starts with a 15-year-old boy and his family driving in a Model T Ford to visit the boy's grandparents in Southern Illinois. Chapter two is set in 1861, so there is a jump back in time, and the boy's grandmother Tilly tells the story of her growing up right as the Civil War was starting. She lived by the river, and the steamboats carried people but sometimes blew up. "Bodies boiled alive would wash ashore for days after. But we'd all seen that." The book tells of a rich woman and her black servant arriving in town, but not being able to go any further because all boats had been drafted to carry soldiers. These two women pay to board with Tilly's family, and they change her life. The secret is that one of them is part black, but passing for a white lady from New Orleans, and the other is her much darker-skinned sister. They help Tilly when her brother gets sick fighting the war.
This book is about the feelings women had when their brothers and husbands went to war. It is also about some of the things they did to keep the towns and families going. The author's note at the end gives more details about the Civil War. "The custom of placage, of white men fathering families with their mistresses who were free women of color, shook the American newcomers to their shoes." He talks about how the custom ended after the war. Then he says that hundreds of the women who could pass for white went North and those who appeared Spanish went to California.
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Wow... the bodies being boiled sounds revolting. However, the rest of it is quite intriguing. How neat that both you and Kristina had a book involving white men fathering children with black women, yours with free women and Kristina's with slave women.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to check it out!
Oooohhhh!!! You have no idea how much I love this book. I grew up in central Illinois and went to college right across the river (when mid-westerners refer to the river, we of course mean the Mississippi) from some of those cities sucha s Cairo, IL where some of the battles took place. I actually took a detour one time going back to school and went to the rock in the middle of the Missisippi where the story of the ghost woman took place. It is amazing to walk where history has come so alive through historical fiction. I've been to Gettysburg, and the things I've read in textbooks and even th huge historical impact of these places don't touch me as much as getting into the stories of individual characters.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like a great historical fiction book. It sounds like you are really able to feel the soul of the characters and make connections with the characters. Thank you very much for sharing! :)
ReplyDeleteSounds like a great book, especially since it covers more than one historical time period. It's also more rare to see a book like this from a female's perspective. I also like the idea of passing stories down to the younger generation. I wonder if it would be possible to compare the boy's and the woman's experiences.
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