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Varina
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In 1906, an elderly Varina Howell Davis is living at a retreat in Saratoga Springs when James Blake, a Black teacher who spent part of his childhood in the Davis household, asks her to recover what she remembers of him. Their conversations carry Varina back to her marriage to the much older Jefferson Davis, political life in Washington and her role as the only First Lady of the Confederate States.
Her recollections move through the Confederate White House in Richmond, the flight south with her children after the capital fell and the difficult decades following defeat. James’s questions expose gaps between Varina’s private doubts and her participation in a government created to preserve slavery. The novel treats memory as selective and contested while tracing a woman who survived the destruction of the political world that gave her public importance.
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