Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

After three long months, I have finally completed my first book of the year. Call it burn out from life, but I think I got my groove back a little. I stayed up until 4:30 in the morning just to finish it and get a third of the way through a new book.

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus… let me tell you… that was heavy. No, the physical weight of the book was heavy; I think they used a heavy cardstock for the paper. The subject matter was also heavy. Maybe the whole physicality of it was to reflect the inside. I was not expecting so much heavy, probably because I do not believe that I have read a book set in Antebellum South. I have read books with the Civil War as a backdrop and/or it taking place in the North, but never in the South. Lucy Marsden, the woman of the book title, tells stories from her confederate husband’s time in the war, growing up with incredibly high societal expectations, raising eight children basically alone with the saving grace of one of her husband’s ex plantation slaves, the history of her husband’s slaves, and the ending of their marriage.

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is divided into four parts, and inside those parts the chapters are labeled as the different stories. Nothing is in chronological order, but it was nice that she did not jump around in timelines. If Lucy did, she would acknowledge it and save it for another story.

There was no holding back in these stories Lucy told. It was interesting the different forms of racism that happened. Her family, as implied, did not have slaves, but had hired them after the war. There was an incident where Lucy’s mother, Bianca, is put in grave danger because of her nursemaid; because of the incident, that shaped her form of racism, which is just spite. Willie Marden’s family, Lucy’s husband, was raised on a plantation that owned slaves, but they apparently treated them better than other plantations to a point where they would get complaints. The logic behind Lady Moore Marsden’s racism just baffled me. I think it broke me for awhile. I had to take a break from reading. To be so conditioned from your environment that, even though you “love” all of those children that you would play parlor games with and personally name all of the people, the idea that the person you “love” cannot be free and you cannot understand how that thinking is wrong in any way… The funny thing is, I felt a little unsatisfied because you never find out if Willie has that same mentality that his family had, especially after the war. To be honest though, I can understand why Lucy does not talk about that. He was already fucked up from participating in the war, and that he continually defended his status as a Rebel veteran would answer that question.

The stories of Lucy’s life with Captain hit home a little bit as well. I can only be thankful for modern mental health and military conditions. My father is a veteran, and was in Iraq when I finished elementary school and went into middle school. Even now, almost twenty years later, it still has rippling effects on our family. For Lucy to marry someone who is 40 years older than her because her parents did not say anything against it, having eight surviving children with someone who remained living in the Civil War instead of being present, and having to be treated as never enough with verbal and physical abuses, she is her own war veteran. All her life she is treated as never enough from the person that she needs that validation from most. Before marriage, it was her mother; after, it was Captain.

I love that Lucy was made strong by a strong woman: Castalia. Castalia does not put up with people’s shit. It hurts that she never got to do the things that she talked about doing once Sherman burnt down the plantation and they were free, and I think she takes it out on everyone. I love Castalia, though. She is a strong foundation. She reminds Lucy that she can get through things without saying it outright. She lets Lucy come to her own decisions on her own.

I would recommend reading Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. I would use this as a discussion topic. I do not know if I would have it in me to read it again because I want to be able to keep reading other books of the topic. All the same, you should read this. If you want to, you can find it here.

Thank you everyone for following my reviews. Doing these hold me accountable for reading, for having something outside of my day job. I forget sometimes that I am greater than the work I do. There is more to a person than their job. So thank you for supporting this. Have a great week.

9/10