Title: Shadows in the Fire
Author: Gray Basnight
Publisher: Five Star: A Part of Gale, Cengage Learning
2015
Price: $25.95 ( Hardcover )
Pages: 364 pp.
Gray Basnight, a native of Richmond, Virginia, had a long career in NYC as journalist, especially in radio, turning to full-time fiction writing in 2011 with a debut detective novel, “The Cop with the Pink Pistol,” the adventures of NYC detective Donna Prima. Working out of a Greenwich Village precinct, Donna Prima finds herself teamed up with Connor Anderson, a transplanted Virginian and star of a daytime soap, “Vampire Love Nest.”
Basnight’s second novel is much more serious business. Most of “Shadows in the Fire” unfolds during the last three days of the siege of Richmond, in April of 1865. The Civil War is about the most popular subject in the country and since April marks the 150th anniversary of the fall of Richmond, he should attract some readers.
Like most historical fiction, the story is told from the point of view of an onlooker to history, not a mover or shaker, not Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee, but the most vulnerable character Basnight could conjure up: a 12-year-old slave girl, Francine Pegram. Francine lives in a pantry of the Pegram house in downtown Richmond. Her mistress is haughty and often has fits of madness, wandering around the house raving. “Fair of face,” Francine is very bright and has easily learned to read. Missus Pegram says, when relatively calm, her intelligence is “to be expected” and “understandable.” Veteran readers of Southern fiction will know what that means.
Although the soldiers, from always “gallant” and “glorious” General Lee, to the last private, are revered, Jefferson Davis is openly reviled, called “Mississippi Malefactor,” “mongoloid idiot” and “perfect fool.”
The City of Richmond is in a real mess. There is little food to be had; the citizens, black and white, are just plain hungry. Stray dogs are cooked. Confederate currency and bonds are worthless, so the economy has mostly switched to barter. Missus Pegram has been exchanging her fancy clothing, especially her hats, for food or other necessities.
These hardships are nothing of course next to the suffering of the wounded, gruesomely depicted at Richmond’s Chimborazo Hospital and in a long scene in the street when a wagonload of dying, dismembered and nearly eviscerated men stop in front of the house for some water from the well. “One man without hands sat like a helpless baby bird in a nest of straw—his bloody, cracked mouth opened to receive the gift of water.”
Basnight also has some strong scenes towards the end when the citizens set fire to the tobacco warehouses to keep the Yankees from capturing the treasure but in a fiesta of unintended consequences burn down half the city.
Those who can flee, do so, and until the Union army enters, there is anarchy and looting. Basnight has learned that even while Richmond was still smoldering, President Lincoln and his son Tad visited, almost without escort or security, and walked the streets, spending a little time in “The Great White House,” home of the hastily-departed Jeff Davis. In a diary entry Lincoln writes “I did indulge in a private moment of self-congratulation that it was I resting at the Davis desk in Richmond— rather than him resting at the Lincoln desk in Washington.”
Basnight has some stylistic problems. The black dialect is dubious in places and once he falls in love with a phrase like “at loiter” for ‘hanging around” or words like “brokens” for brogans or “Butternut” for Confederate soldier, he will use it, irritatingly, dozens of times. But there is a story here and the time is right for telling it.
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
