Flags on the Bayou: A Novel

by James Lee Burke

Genres: Civil War Era; Southern; Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

From American master James Lee Burke comes a novel set in Civil War-era Louisiana as the South transforms and a brilliant cast of characters—enslaved and free women, plantation gentry, and battle-weary Confederate and Union soldiers—are caught in the maelstrom.

In the fall of 1863, the Union army is in control of the Mississippi river. Much of Louisiana, including New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is occupied. The Confederate army is in disarray, corrupt structures are falling apart, and enslaved men and women are beginning to glimpse freedom.

When Hannah Laveau, a formerly enslaved woman working on the Lufkin plantation, is accused of murder, she goes on the run with Florence Milton, an abolitionist schoolteacher, dodging the local constable and the slavecatchers that prowl the bayous. Wade Lufkin, haunted by what he observed—and did—as a surgeon on the battlefield, has returned to his uncle’s plantation to convalesce, where he becomes enraptured by Hannah. Flags on the Bayou is an engaging, action-packed narrative that includes a duel that ends in disaster, a brutal encounter with the local Union commander, repeated skirmishes with Confederate irregulars led by a diseased and probably deranged colonel, and a powerful story of love blossoming between an unlikely pair. As the story unfolds, it illuminates a past that reflects our present in sharp relief.

James Lee Burke, whose “evocative prose remains a thing of reliably fierce wonder” (Entertainment Weekly), expertly renders the rich Louisiana landscape, from the sunsets on the Mississippi River to the dingy saloons of New Orleans to the tree-lined shores of the bayou and the cottonmouth snakes that dwell in its depths. Powerful and deeply moving, Flags on the Bayou is a story of tragic acts of war, class divisions upended, and love enduring through it all.

Release date: July 11, 2023

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Print pages: 303

Sample

1

WADE LUFKIN

Morning on the Lady of the Lake Plantation can be a grand experience, particularly in the late fall when the sky is a clear blue and the wind is blowing in the swamp, Spanish moss lifting in the trees, and thousands of ducks quacking as they end their long journey to the South. However, in this era of trouble and woe it is difficult to hold on to these poignant moments, as was the case last evening when our Christian invaders from the North lit up the sky with airbursts that disintegrated into curds of yellow smoke and descended on the grass and swamp in configurations that resembled spider legs.

A twisted piece of hot metal landed no more than ten feet from the chair in which I sat and the artist’s easel on which I painted, but I did not go inside the house. I would like to tell you that I am brave and inured to the damage cannon fire can wreak on the bodies of both human beings and animals. But that is not the case. There’s a Minie still parked in my left leg, and I need no convincing about the damage Billy Yank can do when he gets up his quills. The truth is I both fear the wrath of our enemies, as I fear the wrath of God, and at the same time wish that I could burn inside its flame and be cleansed of the guilt that I never thought would be mine.

I went to Virginia in ’61, with the Eighth Louisiana Infantry and a promise from our officers that I would serve as a surgeon’s assistant and never shed the blood of my fellow man.

Oh yes, in my innocence I was certain I would never bear the mark of Cain. Even if my superiors broke their pledge and ordered me to arm myself and fire into the ranks of boys against whom I bore no animus. I sawed limbs and stacked them in piles at First and Second Manassas and especially at Sharpsburg, where the Eighth Louisiana was mowed down in a cornfield near Dunker Church. Through a window I saw these poor fellows fall, and I went into the fray and dragged them inside, North and South, the living and the dead, and prayed for all of us.

Sharpsburg told us you do not have to die in order to go to Hell.

Then winter came and we began to tire of the mud and the cold and the gray shortness of the days and the fact that the Yanks were not going to give it up and go home, as our leaders had told us. Unfortunately, an army that is not marching or fighting becomes restless and troublesome. I took a stroll along a stream in a snow-covered forest of bare trees, and saw a fellow my age sitting on top of a boulder, reading a book, a black felt hat tied down on his head, a gray blanket stiff with frost on his shoulders. A few feet away a rifle was propped against a tree, a bayonet mounted on the tip of its barrel.

The soldier on the rock was glued to his book, a collection of Robert Browning’s poems. I had coffee beans in a tobacco pouch in my shirt pocket and two tin cups and a half loaf of bread and a chunk of ham in my haversack. I also carried my Bible there. It was one week from Christmas. In the dreariness of this particular day I thought how fine it would be to share my food and my Scripture with a fellow solider, one who loved the same poems as I, one probably aching to see his family, just as I was.

“If you want to gather some twigs and get a fire started, I have the makings of a holiday treat,” I said.

He didn’t reply. His book was opened in front of his face, hiding his features, as though he were masked. “I hope I didn’t disturb you,” I said.

He lowered his book slowly. Then my gaze drifted to his rifle. It was a Springfield. In ’62 Springfields were seldom seen among the boys in butternut.

“I’m unarmed, sir,” I said.

He closed his book without putting a marker between the pages, and set it beside him on the boulder, his face shadowed under the brim of his hat. He let the blanket slide from his shoulders and reached inside his coat. It was navy blue, with gold epaulets sewn on the shoulders. He pulled a small revolver from his waist and leveled it at me.

“I mean you no harm,” I said.

He cocked the hammer with his thumb.

“Please, sir,” I said, my voice breaking.

There was no anger in his eyes. But there was no mercy, either. Or anything, for that matter.

“Sir, I’ll leave. I’m a surgeon’s assistant. I’m not a combatant.”

I don’t know if his hand was shaking or if the revolver slipped, but it fired nonetheless, and I felt the ball rip through the side of my coat. The Yankee officer seemed as startled as I, but that did not stop him from continuing the accidental or wanton choice that would change both our lives forever. He aimed with both hands and pulled the trigger. The hammer snapped dryly on a dead cap.

He looked dumbfounded, or frightened, and I wondered if he had ever fired a shot in anger. I had no time, however, for analytical thoughts. My heart was thundering so loud I thought my head would come off.

Then a creature inside me I didn’t recognize took hold of both my body and my mind. “You bloody bastard,” I said, running for the rifle. “You’ll pay for that.”

He tried to cock the revolver with both thumbs. But I had his Springfield now, and I drove the bayonet into his chest, working it upward through bone and muscle and into a lung. I felt his weight curl over the blade, even as he tried to push himself off the blood groove with his bare hands, even as he slid to his knees, his eyes bulging as big and brown as polished acorns, his hands trying to clasp the rifle’s barrel.

But I wasn’t finished. I pulled the bayonet from the initial wound and aimed at his heart and plunged it into him a second time and leaned hard on the stock until the tip of the bayonet exited his back and pinned him to the snow. His mouth opened slowly and formed a cone, as though he were resting, then his arms flopped away from his body, like a crucified Christ. In his dying he never uttered a word.

I try not to revisit my war experiences and to pretend that the fighting will stay in the East and eventually go away. But I know better. And so do the Africans. In all the parishes, they have been told not to sing in the fields, because singing is the Africans’ telegraph, and often their hymns are not what they seem. But how ironic. We claim to be the superior race, yet we fear people who cannot sign their names or count past ten.

In June of 1861 the citizens of St. Martin Parish hanged six slaves and one white man who were charged with planning an insurrection. Others were “corrected.” That was the word the local paper used. The article did not use the word “slave,” either. We have manufactured a lexicon of hypocrisy that allows us to call slaves “servants.” I feel shame when I shake hands with men who I’m sure participated in the hangings and flee their presence when I see them at my church.

I get no peace, though. I voted for Mr. Lincoln, but I do not agree with his policies. After the occupation of New Orleans, the American flag was immediately hung from the Mint, and a mob immediately ripped it down. A riverboat gambler was caught wearing a tiny piece of the flag as a boutonniere, and General Butler, a malignant pile of whale sperm if there ever was one, was allowed to hang this poor fellow from the Mint’s flagstaff.

I’m afraid changing my geography will not alleviate my problem, though. I think the real enemy is the simian that still lives inside our skin. Voltaire had no answer for mankind other than the suggestion that we tend our own gardens and let the lunatics go about their way. The same with Charles Dickens. Remember Mr. Dick? He says to David Copperfield, “It’s a mad world. Mad as Bedlam, boy!” Mr. Dick had been in Bedlam and wore ink quills stuck in his hair in case he needed to write down a thought or two. Read what he has to say about the mobs who attend public executions. I have the feeling Mr. Dickens was a lonely man.

Enough of this. I am a man with no country and no cause, a sojourner at my uncle’s plantation, a painter of birds. But I have become intrigued by a young Creole woman named Hannah Laveau. She was purchased by my uncle one year ago at the slave market in New Orleans, just before the city surrendered, then rented out as what is called a wage slave to an acquaintance on Spanish Lake.

The rental lasted less than a month. My uncle drove his own carriage to Spanish Lake and fetched her to his home in St. Martin Parish and would say nothing about the matter. There were many rumors about his friend, all of them bad. But my uncle would not discuss them, and he gave the young woman a cabin to herself on the edge of the swamp. My uncle is a somber, silent man I have never understood, although he has been very kind to me.

Until last evening I had only a few encounters with the young slave woman, all in passing. Supposedly she spoke Spanish and French and had been a slave in the West Indies, where every kind of cruelty and hardship seemed to have been visited upon the Africans who were brought there. Some of my uncle’s Africans say she has magical powers. However, they tend to witness magical events with regularity in order to survive the world the Middle Passage has fashioned for them. Yesterday evening, when the Yankees started bursting cannonballs above our heads, I learned that she was of a strange mix, the kind an authoritarian society does not countenance for very long.

When the first shell exploded, my uncle and his family went into the cellar, and the Africans huddled in their cabins by the swamp’s edge. The sun was red, the shadows of the slash pines as sharp as razor cuts. But one shadow that fell across me and my easel was certainly not that of a tree.

“Ain’t Master afraid of cannon?” a voice with a French accent said.

I twisted my head around and looked up at her face. She had a shawl over her head, like a cowl. But I could see her features. Her skin was a dark, golden color, her eyes the greenish blue you see in coral pools in the Caribbean.

“I am not a ‘master,’” I said.

“Then what are you?”

A slave, or a “servant,” in our culture does not speak in the second person to white people. A shell burst above the swamp, and a second later shrapnel struck the water and made a sound like a child throwing gravel. “I’m an unemployed soldier,” I said. “Can you read?”

“Yes, suh.”

“I’ve misplaced my eyeglasses and my leg hurts. Can you fetch Mr. Audubon’s book Birds of America from the table behind the front door? Please bring a chair for yourself.”

“I need to start the fires in the hearths, suh. That’s part of my job.”

“We don’t need to notify the Yankees of our presence, Miss Hannah.”

“You should not call me ‘Miss,’ suh.”

“I can call people what I wish.”

The light was drawing down in the sky, but I could see her eyes inside the cowl she had made of her shawl. They were looking straight into mine.

“Your uncle can sometimes be strict,” she said.

“Do I have to yell at you, Miss Hannah?” I replied. But I smiled when I said it. “Bring a lamp with the book and the chair. Make two trips if you have to.”

“No, suh, I cain’t do that.”

She began to walk away. Her dress was to her ankles, her dark overcoat belted tightly around her waist, her leather shoes old and probably as hard as iron. The sun had set the western sky aflame. I thought I heard the ripple of small-arms fire, like the popping of Chinese firecrackers. She stopped and turned around, as though finally aware that the weapons of liberators kill the innocent as well as those who serve the Prince of Darkness. But I was wrong.

“Your uncle took me away from the bad man on Spanish Lake,” she said. “I was a cook with Southern soldiers at Shiloh Church. My li’l boy was with me there.” Her voice was cracking.

“Pardon?”

“I lost him in the smoke and the shooting and the tents burning.” Her eyes were wet. The booming of cannon and the explosion of shells had increased, and someone was moaning in one of the cabins. “I don’t know where my li’l Samuel is, suh.”

“I’m sorry, Hannah.”

She walked toward me, as though I were the source of her unhappiness, the redness in the sky mirrored in her eyes. “I’ll get him back. My life is not important. I’m not afraid of Yankees or Rebels. I’ll die for my li’l Samuel.”

“Don’t say these things to others. You understand me?”

“I’ll get your book, suh.”

“Please answer me, Hannah. I’m your friend.”

She walked away. The cannon had stopped, and the mallards resumed their quacking in the shelter of the swamp. The sun was an ember on the horizon, the air damp and as dark as a bruise. I blinked and rubbed my eyes. She seemed to have vanished into the gloom.