So Red the Rose by Stark Young

First published: 1934

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Historical romance

Time of work: 1860-1865

Locale: Mississippi

Principal Characters:

• Malcolm Bedford, the owner of Portobello
• Mrs. Sarah Tait Bedford, his wife
• Duncan, ,
• Mary Hartwell, and
• Frances, their children
• Valette, an adopted daughter
• Middleton, an orphaned nephew
• Hugh McGehee, the owner of Montrose
• Agnes McGehee, his wife and Malcolm Bedford’s sister
• Edward, and
• Lucinda (Lucy), their children
• Shelton Taliaferro, a distant relative of the McGehees
• Charles, his son
• Zach McGehee, Hugh’s nephew
• Amelie Balfour, Zach’s fiancee

The Story

Malcolm Bedford was the owner of Portobello plantation, where he lived with his second wife, Sarah, and their three children, an adopted daughter, Valette, and an orphaned nephew, Middleton. Malcolm’s sister Agnes had married Hugh McGehee, and they and their two children occupied a neighboring plantation, Montrose. Plantation life in Mississippi flowed easily in those days just preceding the Civil War, with frequent parties and visits between families to provide hospitality and entertainment. Other less pleasant happenings, however, intruded upon the serenity of plantation life. Talk of secession, states’ rights, slavery, emancipation, Lincoln, and war began to be more seriously discussed and argued whenever a group of people assembled. Hugh McGehee and his son, Edward, discussed these problems and Edward’s possible enlistment when the latter returned home for a short visit from the Louisiana Seminary of Learning and Military Academy.

Duncan Bedford was also in school at Washington College, Virginia. In love with Valette, he accused her of leading other young men on. When he went back to college, they were no longer on friendly terms.

Shelton Taliaferro, a distant relative of the McGehees, and his son Charles came to visit Montrose. Edward was home for a visit at the time, and the two young men became friends. They spent a short time together at the seminary until Charles resigned. It was this young man, to whom life seemed to flow generously, who attached himself to Edward. A year after his first visit to Montrose, he and Edward enlisted under General Beauregard. Shelton Taliaferro, his father, and Edward McGehee were the only two people for whom Charles cared, to the disappointment of Lucy, who had fallen in love with him. Duncan also enlisted, but without first coming home. He wrote a letter to Valette to tell her of his enlistment and to assure her that he still loved her.

About a year later, at the time of the battle of Pittsburg Landing, Agnes received a letter from her son. It was dated three days earlier, and according to his letter, the battle would be taking place at that moment she was reading the letter. Feeling instinctively that Edward was dead, she ordered William Veal, the butler, to hitch up the wagon so that they might set out for the battlefield and bring home the body of her dead son. When she returned, she brought with her Edward’s body and those of two other boys of the neighborhood. She also brought word that the body of Charles Taliaferro had not been found, although it was almost certain that he was dead since he was not with the survivors of the desperate fighting. Lucy was heartbroken.

After the Emancipation Proclamation on January 2, 1863, many of the slaves deserted their former owners to flee to the Union lines. A short time later, Malcolm Bedford, who had been helping to strengthen the defenses at Vicksburg, came home with a very bad case of dysentery from which he never recovered. He died, on the day Vicksburg fell, claiming that with the fall of Vicksburg, the doom of the South was sealed.

Life went on at both plantations under much altered circumstances. Natchez, the nearest town, had been bombarded and occupied. Federal soldiers swarmed over the countryside, burning, looting, and carrying off horses, food, and clothing. More slaves ran away to the protection of Federal troops in Natchez, and many joined the Federal army to help fight against their former masters. When disease broke out in the Natchez stockades, where the blacks were confined, some of the former slaves, especially the older ones, began to return to the plantations, the only place they had ever known security.

Sherman, on a visit to Natchez, rode out to see the McGehees because he had known their son Edward when he was superintendent of the seminary that Edward had attended. He was very much an enigma to the McGehees, as he was to many. His kindness and personal interest could not be reconciled with his toleration of plunder and destruction by his troops. Shortly after his visit, Montrose was destroyed by a mob of former slaves under the direction of a few white officers. They burned the place to the ground, after permitting the family to save only what could be rescued in twenty minutes. After the fire the family moved into a five-room cottage on the plantation.

The Bedfords at Portobello were having their own difficulties. One night, a group of Confederate soldiers hanged three Federals on the trees not far from the house. A fourth soldier escaped, injured, and he was taken into the house and cared for until a way could be found to smuggle him out. The three Union soldiers were quickly buried to avoid reprisals.

There had been no word of Duncan for many months, and the Bedfords at Portobello believed that he must be dead. Now that the war was over, they thought that they should at least have a letter from him if he were still alive. Then one day Duncan, without any previous warning, walked in. He had been taken prisoner but had been booked for exchange soon afterward. A Union officer had spoken insultingly of General Lee, however, and Duncan had struck him. His order for exchange was immediately revoked, and he was placed in irons, charged with having struck an officer of the United States Army. When peace was declared and all prisoners were released, Duncan’s charge still stood. At his trial, however, the judge, who felt that a great injustice had been done Duncan, dismissed the case.

The South was beginning to feel the vengeance of the North. Many of the plantations had been burned, and many of the men had been killed. The slave labor gone, there was no one to work the plantations. Heavy taxes were imposed to make the South pay for its military government. Blacks were insolent and destructive, and carpetbaggers were beginning to buy up mortgages on the plantations, thus gaining control of huge amounts of property. Mrs. Bedford and Duncan decided that they would not mortgage their property but would try to make the land productive once more. During those grim years, Duncan found Valette kinder and more understanding than she had been in the proud old days at Portobello.

Amelie Balfour and Zach McGehee, nephew of Hugh, were to be married. Amelie convinced Valette that they should make it a double wedding. Their plans were all made on the spur of the moment, and the next evening at Homewood, the home of Amelie’s aunt, Duncan and Valette were married. They were to have a honeymoon in New Orleans and then return to Portobello to live.

Critical Evaluation:

This beautiful story is told tranquilly but deeply. It is tinged with yearning for life, for peace, and for an unrecoverable past when peach trees bloomed in April and loved ones who were destined to march off and die in war were still happily alive. SO RED THE ROSE is a muted cry against war’s stupidity, a lament over the passing of an idyllic way of life. It is also a philosophy of life for the future. In his unhurried narration, moreover, Stark Young not only shows the rosy side of life in the antebellum South, the dreadful war years, and the malicious brutality of Reconstruction, but also, almost with touches of the Spanish “Costumbrista” movement, he archives “pictures of customs,” including details of dress, furniture, thought, imagery, psychology, and the way of life.

The novel’s essence is in its final scene, where Agnes sits meditating at her son’s grave in the Montrose family graveyard, with little Middleton at her side. Suddenly, she can feel the hard gravel under her feet at Shiloh, where she had sought Edward’s body three years earlier. Now she reflects, sitting by Edward’s grave (while little Middleton sits, staring at the foliage over the cemetery wall, where the sun’s rays are slanting), on how Edward had died at Shiloh, where ranks of half-trained men and boys had been cut down on each side, epitomizing war’s insanity and “the childish urges of men.” She now grasps the interrelationship of war to men, and men to war, as contrasted with the same relationship for women. She concludes that the glory and folly and pain of war must remain for men even as women dream, delight, and are afraid when confronting childbirth. The rivers of red blood, soaked up by the earth on so many “Shilohs,” must be born again in women.

Then again, trancelike, Agnes is back at Shiloh, listening to the wounded moan in the darkness ahead, and she discerns their shapes scattered on the battleground. Edward must be lying somewhere among them, but she considers all of the dead as hers. Suddenly now, at her side, Middleton is no longer gazing ahead but up at her, ecstatically, with pale face and rapt expression. She scarcely glances at him but is stirred by his expression. Tugged by memory back to her thoughts, she spiritually returns to Shiloh, amid the eerie silence, hearing only her heartbeat. The novel ends as she gazes over the gloomy field and the sleeping dead.

Agnes, however, now knows that a hallowed memory, living through time, is the finest learning to live by:

I sometimes think that never blows so redThe rose as where some buried Caesar bled;That every hyacinth the garden wearsDropt in her lap from some once lovely head.author andthe publishers,Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright, 1934, by Charles Scribner’sSons.