Widow of the South by Robert Hicks ✔✔✔✔

I was told about this book by a woman I occasionally golf with here in Florida. She said it was an excellent book, and explained a bit about the subject of the book, and also told me the title was "Woman of the South". Well, I couldn't find that title, and I sort of forgot about it. Then, about two years later a member of our book club and I were talking about our mutual interest in reading historical fiction, and she mentioned a book she'd read called "Queen of the South". She had the book and said she'd leave it in my mailbox at home, but it never arrived. Meanwhile, I'm now searching for the title "Queen of the South" on the Internet, with no luck.

I don't even recall now how I found out the correct title, probably while I was searching for something else on the local library's website, but I immediately knew this was the title I was searching for - the library system here has five copies of the book, and it has been borrowed a total of 72 times to date. That's a good enough validation for me, plus the fact that I discovered the book was set in Franklin, TN, a small city south of Nashville on I-65 a city where we spent one night in a hotel on our way north a few years back, completely oblivious to the history around us.

Franklin, Tennessee was the site of one of the bloodiest Civil War battles, a battle which took place on a single morning in November,1864, with 9200 casualties. Carrie McGavock was named the Widow of the South ( and she was a real person) because first of all the plantation where she lived was turned into a hospital for survivors of the battle, and she nursed many of them herself. But Carrie also - some years after the war - took it upon herself to write to the parents of every single man who died in her hospital, and then eventually retrieved 1500 bodies of Confederates whose remains had simply been plowed over, identified them, and created a cemetery for them in a field near her plantation She herself had lost three children before the war even began, and so it was tremendously important to her to treat these casualties of war with respect and compassion.

The final chapter of the book is the true story of Carrie, with pictures of her family, her servant Mariah who was given to her as a slave when she was a child but who was almost the completion of her own soul, and the cemetery itself.

Mike is reading the book right now and I think we'll visit this area on our way home this year.