A Separate Country: A Story of Redemption in the Aftermath of the Civil War
Robert Hicks, 2009
Grand Central Publishing
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446581653
Summary
Set in New Orleans in the years after the Civil War, A Separate Country is based on the incredible life of John Bell Hood, arguably one of the most controversial generals of the Confederate Army—and one of its most tragic figures.
Robert E. Lee promoted him to major general after the Battle of Antietam. But the Civil War would mark him forever. At Gettysburg, he lost the use of his left arm. At the Battle of Chickamauga, his right leg was amputated.
Starting fresh after the war, he married Anna Marie Hennen and fathered 11 children with her, including three sets of twins.
But fate had other plans. Crippled by his war wounds and defeat, ravaged by financial misfortune, Hood had one last foe to battle: Yellow Fever.
A Separate Country is the heartrending story of a decent and good man who struggled with his inability to admit his failures-and the story of those who taught him to love, and to be loved, and transformed him. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 30, 1951
• Where—West Palm Beach, Florida, USA
• Education—unspecified college in Nashville, Tennessee
• Currently—lives in Franklin, Tennessee
Robert Hicks is the author of New York Times bestseller, The Widow of the South (2005) and two other novels in the Southern saga, A Separate Country (2009) and The Orphan Mother (2016). Hicks was born and raised in South Florida, moving to Williamson County, Tennessee, in 1974. He now lives at "Labor in Vain," his late-eighteenth-century log cabin near the Bingham Community.
Because of his writing, as well as his work in music, art, and historical preervation, Hicks made the #2 spot in the "Top 100 Reasons to Love Nashville." The list was featured in a 2015 issue of Nashville Lifestyles, which dubbed Hicks "Nashville's Master of Ceremonies."
Music and art
Hicks's interest in the arts are varied: over the years he has worked in music as a publisher and an artistic manager in both country and alternative-rock music. He has also been a partner in the B. B. King's Blues Clubs—located in Nashville, Memphis, Orlando, and Los Angeles—and continues to serve as the company's "Curator of Vibe."
As a lifelong art collector, Hicks was the first Tennessean ever to be listed among Art & Antiques's Top 100 Collectors in America. He focuses on artists such as Howard Finster and B.F. Perkins, as well as on different genres, such as Tennesseana and Southern Material Culture.
Hicks has also served as curator of the exhibition "Art of Tennessee" at the First Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. The exhibition—first conceived at Hicks's kitchen table—was seven years in the making, opening in September 2003. Hicks also co-edited of the exhibition's award winning catalog, Art of Tennessee.
Historic preservation
Hicks has long been fascinated by the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, on November 30, 1864—a particularly bloody fight that weakened the Confederate's ability to win the Civil War. Hick's interest led him to found Franklin's Charge, an organization that saved what remained of the eastern flank of the battlefield—turning it into a public battlefield park. It was a massive project, considered "the largest battlefield reclamation in North American history" by the American Battlefield Protection Program.
By the end of 2005, Franklin's Charge had already raised over 5 million dollars toward this goal, surpassing anything ever achieved by other communities in America to preserve battlefield open space. As Jim Lighthizer, President of the Civil War Preservation Trust said, "There is no 'close second' in any community in America, to what Robert Hicks and Franklin's Charge has done in Franklin."
In addition to his work for the battlefield park, Hicks has served on the boards of the Historic Carnton Plantation (a focal point of the Franklin Battle), Tennessee State Museum, The Williamson County Historical Society, and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He presently serves on the board of directors of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.
Historical novels
Hicks's interest in the Franklin battlefield—and a chance meeting with Civil War historian and author Shelby Foote—inspired an idea for a book, eventually leading to The Widow of the South, his first novel, which was published in 2005. Hick's intent for the book was to bring national attention to those five bloody hours on the Franklin battlefield and the impact the battle had in remaking us a nation.
A Separate Country, Hicks's second novel published in 2009, takes place in New Orleans in the years after the Civil War. It is based on the life of John Bell Hood, one of the most controversial generals of the Confederate Army—and one of its most tragic figures.
In 2016, Hicks released his third book in the Civil War saga, The Orphan Mother. The story follows Mariah Reddick, former slave to Carrie McGavock—the "Widow of the South"—who has built a new life for herself as a midwife during the post-war Reconstruction Era.
Other writing
Hicks has written other works in addition to his novels. His first book, published in 2000, is a collaboration with French-American photographer Michel Arnaud: Nashville: the Pilgrims of Guitar Town. In 2008, he co-edited (with Justin Stelter and John Bohlinger) the story collection, A Guitar and A Pen: Short Stories and Story-Songs By Nashville Songwriters.
He has also written the introduction to two books on historic preservation authored by photographer Nell Dickerson, GONE: A Photographic Plea for Preservation and Porch Dogs.
Hicks's essays on regional history, southern material culture, furniture and music have appeared in numerous publications over the years. He also writes op-eds for the New York Times on contemporary politics in the South and is a regular contributor to Garden & Gun.
More
Hicks travels throughout the nation speaking on a variety of topics ranging from "Why The South Matters" to "The Importance of Fiction in Preserving History to Southern Material Culture" and "A Model for the Preservation of Historic Open Space for Every Community."
In January 2016 Hicks was a panelist and featured speaker at the third annual Rancho Mirage Writers Festival in California. Along with American historian H.W. Brands, Hicks took part in the panel discussion "The War that Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Matters."
To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Franklin, in 2014 Hicks released the first small batch of his bourbon whiskey Battlefield Bourbon. Each of the 1,864 bottles is numbered and signed by Hicks. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/14/2016.)
Book Reviews
Robert Hicks's riveting new novel takes up Hood's life after the war. Anyone who has ever lived in New Orleans must be prepared to be made homesick, and the bizarre cast of characters, including a dwarf, a burly priest and a boy of mixed and mysterious parentage, wouldn't seem right in any city but this one. I read A Separate Country with breakneck speed for that most old-fashioned of reasons: I wanted to see what happened next. And then I eagerly read it a second time to make sure I got the complicated twists and turns. Is there a better recommendation?"
Charlotte Hays - Washington Post
After the War, Hood scampered down to New Orleans in order to try to live as fully as possible. That's where Robert Hicks enters in his marvelous new book, which looks back on the legendary and monstrous general of the Civil War with a brand new set of eyes. Hicks doesn't ever let us forget that this was once a man who "cared very little for the men [he] ruined." Yet at the same time, this is a work which seems designed to remember Hood neither as a legend nor a monster but as a man.
Miami Herald
A Separate Country is a powerful evocation of New Orleans as it was in 1879, a book thick with history, rich in atmosphere. The characters walk the city's rough and tumble streets, witness the corruption of the Louisiana Lottery and the toll of the yellow fever epidemic, enact their very human love affairs, hide their secrets. To read it is to visit, for the length of its pages, an all-enveloping, passionately rendered past, beautiful and hallucinatory. "This city is not for the fainthearted," Hicks writes
New Orleans Times Picayune
[A] grand, ripped-from-the-dusty-archives epic of Confederate general John Bell Hood.... Hicks's stunning narrative volleys between Hood, Anna Marie and Eli, each offering variety and texture to a story saturated in Southern gallantry and rich American history.
Publishers Weekly
Suffused with racial tension, brutality, sweltering heat, and sickness, this is the tale of a warrior knowing "nothing about death, only killing" who finally seeks love and a reconciliation with God. Readers must see past the bugs and the stench of New Orleans to unravel the puzzle of these picaresque characters.... [[P]recise, evocative writing. —Bette-Lee Fox
Library Journal
A tale of mixed-up foolscap, dark secrets, a dwarf and a wharf. Tennessee-based Hicks...ventures here into Reconstruction-era New Orleans.... Hicks spins a taut tale, told in many voices, of tangled webs, vengeance and other unfinished business. Expertly written, with plenty of unexpected twists—a pleasure for...fans of literary mysteries.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What role does the city of New Orleans play in the lives of Hood and his family?
2. Describe the relationship between Eli and General Hood. Why does Hood call upon Eli to complete the task of transporting/destroying his memoirs? Why does Eli accept the request? What would you have done in Eli’s place? Hood’s?
3. What is the "separate country" to which the title alludes? Is there more than one answer to this question? If so, name them.
4. What do Anna Marie and Hood provide one another? What is their relationship based on? How does this change over the years?
5. How do the three different narrative voices affect the reader’s perception of the story?
6. Why do you think it is that Hood fell from wealth and respect to poverty and dishonor? Can his fall be entirely blamed on the war? If not, what were the other factors?
7. What is the effect of having two narrators and one intended reader (Lydia) who pass away at the beginning of the story? Does the power and symbolism of the writing change with the passing of their authors?
8. How does meeting Michel, Rintrah, and Paschal change Anna Marie? Is it a positive change or a negative one?
9. Discuss Eli’s assertion that "Beauty was accidental and fleeting, and even if you were on the lookout and caught it at the right moment, that beautiful thing would break your heart no doubt, and all you’d have to show for it was ashes" (page 100). Here he is discussing his old feelings of revenge for Hood, but to what other aspects of the story could this quote be alluding to?
10. Upon seeing the portrait that Anna Marie painted of him, Hood comments, "I must live up to it now.…That is the face of a different man" (page 112). In her letter to Lydia, Anna Marie wrote, "I thought he was insulting the painting, or making a joke. Later, I knew he was talking about himself. He would have to become the different man." What changes did Hood have to make after the war? Was he successful? How did his attempt at change affect Anna Marie and the others around them?
11. In talking to his daughter about Hood, Anna Marie’s father says, "…a man who is willing to face criticism, ridicule, failure, because he prefers to believe that men are good, such a man is closer to God than the rest of us" (page 132). Is he proven correct in his assessment? Would Hood agree with this evaluation of himself? Would Eli?12. How are Hood and Anna Marie affected by the lynching of Paschal at the hands of Sebastien? Why does Sebastien continue to have a presence in the couple’s lives?
13. When explaining her relationship with Paschal, Anna Marie admits, "Acquiescence was the price of eternal membership in a society that would swaddle me and give me warmth for as long as I lived" (page 153). How does this concept come up throughout the story? How can it be applied to society today?
14. Why do Hood and his wife hide acquaintances from their past from one another? Were these decisions wise?
15. Is it true that Hood "created" Sebastien Lemerle? Can one battle during a war really alter a man completely?
16. Before encountering Paschal, Hood asserts that he did not want to be forgotten (page 196). Was his desire reasonable, and did he effectively move toward achieving it while he was alive? In what ways did his wishes come true?
17. Hood and Anna Marie both take blame for Paschal’s death. In what ways were they at fault, and in what ways (if any) was his death inevitable, regardless of what either of them did?
18. Hood declares again and again that his sole strength and purpose is to fight and kill. Do you think that people have a set function in life, as Hood believes? If so, did Hood correctly identify his?
19. Hood admits to Sebastien that he refuses to fail at aiding the sick, but has more ambivalent feelings toward his family and his business (page 251). Why are his convictions so seemingly conflicted? He makes some conjectures about the reasons, but what do you think draws him to those who suffer from yellow fever?
20. Anna Marie reminds her daughter,
Epidemics, whether of disease or of violence or of heresy, rob the living of a sense of the past or the future. All is compressed into this day, and this night. The living become paranoid, at first vigilant against strangers and outsiders, and then suspicious of neighbors and friends. The things that once seemed important seem insignificant (page 267).
Discuss how this observation applies beyond the yellow fever outbreak of 19th century New Orleans.
21. How much truth is there in Sister Mary Therese’s accusation that Anna Marie purposefully cast Paschal out of her life (page 271)?
22. Why does Anna Marie take it upon herself to visit M and ask her to take care of Eli?
23. Do you agree that Eli owes his survival in New Orleans to Paschal, as Rintrah asserts when he’s coercing Eli to help him kill Sebastien (page 291)?
24. "All roads led back to the mother superior, it seemed like" (page 301), Eli observes. Describe Sister Mary Therese’s part in the story. How is she connected to each of the characters?
Questions issued by the publisher.)