Steve Bailey's Blog : July 2024

Before the 2024 Presidential primaries began, while the media was calling Donald Trump the frontrunner of the race that had not started, several of us sat around a dining room table and discussed who we would like to see run on the Democrat ticket. We all agreed that Joe Biden was too old. Gavin Newsom's name came up, someone pointed out that he was not well-liked in his home state of California. People mentioned Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar, and a few heads bobbed in agreement. Then Kamala Harris' name came up, and everyone at the table shook their heads and the discussion centered around her tendency to talk without making much sense. Word salads was the term. The conversation then moved to Pete Buttigieg and others who made the unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 campaign.

When it became clear that Biden saw himself as the Democrat candidate for 2024, the Democrats rallied around him, and he faced no serious challenge, except for a lack of enthusiasm for his reelection. Now he has dropped out of the race, and Democrats are rallying around the one person everyone at the table believed would be the worst contender. With no other challenger to Trump except fringe candidates, we are, with trepidation, lining up with the rest, and Harris is our candidate.

In a way Nikki Haley helped to make this happen. She provided the only challenge within the Republican Party to Trump, and like Harris, she is a woman of South Asian ancestry. Their politics are not alike, but they are women who challenged the misogynist, albeit Haley's was tepid. Still if one voted for Haley to attempt to fend off Trump, voting for Harris is a no-brainer. At least the change in the Democrat candidate has breathed new life into an election that was dying from dreadfulness.

BOOK REVIEW

History has not paid much attention to first ladies and Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina, less than most. The Civil War itself took up most of that space. Still, the woman's story in Charles Frazier’s book Varina is of a woman who married a man much older than herself and did not share in his political philosophy. This mother lost all but one of her children before they had grown up and lived out her life with the legacy of the failed Confederacy that she neither sought nor wholly accepted. This is a framed story, that is, a story within a story. Varina Davis, the only first lady of the Confederacy, tells her life story in a disconnected fashion to a young black man, James Blake, who begins visiting the eighty-year-old widow in a sanitorium where she is trying to recover from drug addiction. Blake wants to understand his own identity as Jimmie Limber, the black child whom Mrs. Davis rescued from a savage beating on a city street in Richmond, Virginia, and took in to be raised among her children. In response to Blake’s questions, Varina starts her story with her escape from Richmond, as this capital of the Confederacy fell to Union troops in the final stages of the American Civil War. She and her husband travel separately from each other physically and in the goals they have in mind for their respective journeys. She wants to escape and not return. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, delusional that the confederacy had not been thoroughly defeated, wanted to head west toward Texas, where there was a small pocket of resistance, and keep up the fight, a fight that had already cost the American people over 600,000 lives. A climax to this part of the story is reached when Jefferson Davis reunites with his wife in Georgia and, in doing so, brings on the wrath of the Federal troops who were pursuing him. He is arrested, and during this period, Jimmie Limber is separated from the Davises. Varina, whom Frazier refers to as V throughout the book, was convinced that had her husband left her alone, she would have made it to Cuba. Varina Howell was a young woman with no dowry when she met Jefferson Davis at a party in 1843. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-five. For her, it was not about love as much as her need for security. She was more interested in his property and material wealth than his political career or ideology. And yet she stood by him throughout his ill-fated venture as the one and only president of the Confederate States of America and campaigned to have her husband freed from incarceration in Fort Monroe, Virginia, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain, about the journey home of a Confederate deserter in the closing days of the war, came out in 1997 and was a runaway bestseller. It was made into a movie starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. He uses a lyrical style, his descriptions are deep, and he puts a lot of meaning in a few words. Varina is Fraizer’s only other book with a Civil War setting. A phraseological slip-up appears when one character uses the expression “no worries,” an Australian phrase that was not part of the parlance of the nineteenth-century American language. Nevertheless, this is an engaging story about a woman few people know much about, probably because she was an outlier in the Civil War drama.

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