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by Marly Youmans Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001 Harcourt/Harvest Books, 2003 352 pp.; $14, paper |
Marly Youmans writes novels like a poet, leaping through her story using images as stepping stones. She has a wonderful way with words, rendering wolves that "trickle away between trees like silvery water," or pebbles tossed in a well "breaking the image of the watcher's face into fractal pieces as the stones slowed and wobbled faintly in the water." Such images—the "wolf pit" is one she elaborates and embroiders throughout the book—make the meat and marrow of her work.
The Wolf Pit follows two main characters through the waning years of the Civil War. One is a slave, Agate, whose tongue is cut out by a vengeful master. She miraculously buys her own freedom and finds her way to a remote Virginia farm. The other character is a Confederate soldier, Robin, whose mother owns that farm. Agate and Robin never meet, but their stories intertwine: black and white, female and male, slave and free.
Agate's story is a vividly imagined yet familiar tale of the horrors of slavery. Uncle Tom's Cabin launched this series, Beloved updated it, but the main text does not much change. Abolitionists charged that the chief crime of slaveholding lay not in cruelty (brandings, whippings, separation of families), horrific as that could be, but in stealing a human being's moral agency—the right to direct his or her own life. Slavery they called man-stealing. They might have said soul-stealing. Slavery novels mean to make us feel that theft.
Agate has the good fortune to be raised in the home of Miss Fanny and Mr. Thomas, enlightened slaveholders who teach her to read, encourage her talents, and even proudly, privately publish a volume of her writings. All this refinement comes to nothing when her real, legal master takes over. Then she loses her tongue and nearly everything else. She has been given the gift of writing and then deprived of the possibility of speech.
The same mountain home to which Agate escapes represents, for Robin, a mental refuge from the suffering of war. Robin is a dreamer as well as a fighter. He relishes the thrill of battle yet often escapes into a safe, quiet place through his daydreams. Robin's character is the most filled-out of any in The Wolf Pit, yet his story, like Agate's, follows the steps of other books. The Red Badge of Courage was the first Civil War novel to capture the color-drenched, time-stopping frisson of battle, and The Wolf Pit worthily carries on the tradition. Then there is his mother's mountain haven, which calls to mind Cold Mountain, a recent, popular Civil War fiction. For a good part of the book Robin is captive in Elmira, a Federal prison camp. A more exact, Northern version of Andersonville would be hard to imagine.
The plot may be conventional, but Youmans' images are not. Robin's fevered dreams originate in a strange book he finds in an abandoned house. It tells an English legend of two children found in a wolf pit. They are green in color, do not speak English, and seem eerily alien to the villagers. The children, brother and sister, cling to each other for comfort. They long to return to the place they came from, wherever that may be.
The children's story becomes another country where Robin drifts whenever possible. When Robin sleeps, the green children fill his dreams, and when awake the green children fill his thoughts. He longs for his beloved sister, left at home, and dreams their love in parallel to the green children's. Like the children, he aches to return to the place he came from.
On medical leave Robin visits a sheep-herding farmer who digs genuine wolf pits. Robin watches the farmer and his dogs hamstring and gut the graceful, ghostlike wolves caught in the trap. This picture of death Robin later connects to The Crater, the dynamited hole that Union soldiers at Petersburg blew through Confederate lines, only to find themselves caught and slaughtered.
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