Post-Civil War novel examines possibilities of national healing
Afraid of being pigeonholed following the success of her 2010 New York Times best-selling antebellum novel, “Wench,” Memphis native Dolen Perkins Valdez had no desire to write another historical book. Then she read “This Republic of Suffering” by Harvard president and historian Drew Gilpin-Faust. The book chronicles the Civil War’s legacy of death and destruction, and Perkins-Valdez decided her next novel should investigate the possibilities of healing the personal and national trauma caused by the war. “Balm,” which was released last month, looks not at the soldiers’ suffering but at the pain of widows, former slaves and others.
The story has three protagonists: Madge, who was raised by a family of root doctors in Tennessee as a free woman of color; Hemp, who was a slave in Kentucky and is now searching for his wife and her daughter; and Sadie, a young white widow from York, Pennsylvania, who begins communicating with the dead. As the novel unfolds, all three find themselves heading to Chicago and a new life.
On a recent visit to her hometown, Perkins-Valdez sat for an interview for the WYPL-FM program “Book Talk.”
Usery: Despite being born free, didn’t Madge yearn for freedom because she didn’t feel free at home?
Perkins-Valdez: Growing up, she is raised by her mother and her mother’s two sisters. They don’t allow her to self-actualize.
They are a unit as sisters, and Madge feels like an outsider growing up in that house. Part of moving is searching for independence, but also I think if you were a free person during the era of slavery, it was difficult because your sisters and brothers were still enslaved. You were in danger because someone may not recognize your freedom. It wasn’t until after emancipation that you could breathe a sigh of relief from that kind of danger.
Usery: And Hemp wasn’t even freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery didn’t end in Kentucky until December 1865.
Perkins-Valdez: That’s right because Kentucky never joined the Confederacy, and when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, it was to free slaves in the rebellious states. To secure his freedom, Hemp goes to a “refugee camp” and enlists in the Union army. In exchange for enlistment, those men were granted their freedom papers.
Usery: And Sadie is essentially sold into matrimony to a Union officer to pay off her father’s debts.
Perkins-Valdez: She’s been sold, and she’s angry with her father and mother for making this deal. She doesn’t love him, and in some ways doesn’t even want to be married. She was happy living with her parents and working in her father’s book bindery. So she was thrown into the situation suddenly, against her will, and then she’s widowed, as so many women were.
Usery: The biggest common theme for all the major characters is healing: Sadie connects loved ones to their relatives who have passed, Madge heals people with her root knowledge, and Hemp drives the carriage for a local doctor.
Perkins-Valdez: Often I found that Civil War novels were racially segregated: You had black Civil War novels and white Civil War novels. I was really interested in ways in which the narratives converged. The one thing that we as a country had in common is that the war was a great sacrifice, on all sides. At the end of the war, we all struggled: former slaves, freed men and women, people in the North and the South. I think the narratives converge with rebuilding, which is really the American story — one of resilience and reinvention. I think that the American spirit is one of sacrifice, struggle and triumph, and those were the big themes I was playing with. The whole idea is: How does one rise from ashes? That’s really what “Balm” is about.
Usery: And if there is anything that is a balm to these characters, it’s acceptance, which would be a salve for so many of their wounds.
Perkins-Valdez: I think the book is about acceptance by the family. I tried to think about those individual families as a metaphor for our national family. So if you can find acceptance in your own small, little family, then that acceptance will be mirrored in the larger society of us accepting one another as Americans.