Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War
The Year of Jubilo
The Judas Field
By Howard Bahr
Howard Bahr, fiction writer and creative writing teacher, was born in Meridien, MS. Bahr, who served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War and then worked for several years on the railroads, enrolled at the University of Mississippi in the early 1970s when he was in his late 20s. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Ole Miss and served as the curator of the William Faulkner house, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, MS for nearly 20 years. He also taught American literature during much of this time at the University of Mississippi. In 1993, he became an instructor of English at Motlow State College in Tennessee, where he worked until 2006.
Bahr is the author of three critically acclaimed novels centering around the American Civil War. He currently resides in Jackson, MS, and teaches courses in creative writing at Belhaven College. Bahr began his writing career in the 1970s, writing both fiction and non-fiction articles that appeared in publications such as Southern Living, Civil War Times Illustrated, as well as the short-lived regional publication, Lagniappe (1974-75) which he and Franklin Walker co-edited. His first published book, a children's story entitled Home for Christmas, came out in 1987 and was re-published in 1997 in a different edition (with new illustrations) following the release of his first novel, The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War. It is a beautifully written novel centering on the Battle of Franklin and is about an ordinary soldier in the Civil War. Black Flower was nominated for The Stephen Crane Award, and won The Lincoln Prize from Gettysburg College and The Michael Shaara Award for Civi War First Fiction. It was also nominated for the the Sue Kaufman First Fiction Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In addition, the novel was chosen as both a Book-of-the-Month Club and a Quality Paperback Book alternate and was a New York Times Notable Book.In 2000.
Bahr's second novel, The Year of Jubilo, is set in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War in the fictional Mississippi town of Cumberland, deals with the dehumanizing effects of war and its aftermath on Southern society. Many critics have commented on its depiction of sorrow, anarchy, and defeat, but others find in it a note of hope. Robert Morgan comments that the "affection for the greening countryside and town of Cumberland, the loving detail of forest and river, soil and graveyard, are the true moral and poetry of this war story, showing that the life of a place transcends any one ruin or atrocity." April Austin said in her review in the Christian Science Monitor in 2000 that Bahr is "A writer of uncommonly beautiful phrases and compelling characters, he has managed to convey truths about the human condition within the confines of the American Civil War."The Year of Jubilo, like The Black Flower, was a New York Times Notable Book.
Bahr's third novel, The Judas Field, was released in 2006. In The Judas Field, Bahr again returns to the Battle of Franklin theme, but this time it is through the eyes of one of its participants, again from Cumberland, who travels back to the battlefield in the 1880s to recover the body of one of the fallen, and, in doing so, relives the horror of that fateful day in 1864.
When his fourth novel, Pelican Road, came out, Times-Picayune Book Editor Susan Larson had this to say:
Bahr has a true, old-fashioned writer's resume -- he was a gunner's mate in the U.S. Navy, a brakeman and yard clerk on railroads, curator of Faulkner's Home, Roanoke -- and he draws on every bit of his experience and formidable talent to create this portrait of men at work, doing their best at a perilous enterprise.
His characters are always conscious of the riskiness of travel by steam locomotive, the dangerous nature of the work itself, the constant vigilance required to keep life and limb together. Early on, the reader learns that life can turn on a dime, in a horrifying moment when a black man is caught between a car coupling and pays with his life. Death is never far away when men have harnessed heavy metal and steam to do their bidding. But the real enemy, coupled with equal force to the train, is the passage of time itself, and the mortal race against it, the race men are doomed to lose every time. The engineer of the southbound train on that Christmas Day is A.P. Dunn, who has suffered a bad fall, and finds himself drifting mentally between a remembered train trip in 1923 and his 1940 run. The brakeman on the northbound train is Artemus Kane, a man torn between his own past experiences in the war and his relationship with Anna Rose Dangerfield, a woman writer he has come to love in New Orleans.
These are men who live by a complicated code, driven by a heightened sense of awareness. "Stay in sight. Stay out from between cars. Don't couple air hoses in a cut that's not blue-flagged. Don't be afraid. Don't hesitate. Pay attention. Watch out. Watch out. Death is always there -- in the slick grass, in the moment when you think of your girlfriend, in the great wheels turning --waiting for you to forget. So don't forget."
This is a snapshot of a bygone era, beautifully captured in Bahr's poetic prose: "The crowds swept by, each person more or less anxious, each trailing a complicated life, long or short, that had brought him to this moment. For them, the Silver Star had nothing to do with the process of their lives; a train was only a bridge over time to a place where life would be continued, the journey itself only a hiatus, a passage to some other morning, afternoon, darkness where love or decision or catastrophe awaited. The trainmen understood this, and they were aware of the secret lives that passed before them." What keeps the trainmen going? The power of the engine itself, the feeling of being part of history, the excitement of a passenger train about to get under way.
Bahr has packed so much life into this novel: We can feel the jolts of the car and the cold blasts that come up through the deck plates, smell the smoke, see the tension in the men's faces. This novel teems with life itself, its hopes, its challenges, its regrets. In the end, we are reminded that we are all, like Artemus Kane, "an instrument of the world's changing."
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