This fine first novel by a North Carolina author has its official debut this week.
Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson
MEASURE OF DEVOTION. By Nell Joslin. Regal House Publishing. 254 pages. $20.95, hardcover.
Susannah Shelburne has more than her share of worries when we meet her in late October of 1863. The deprivations of the Civil War have made life difficult on the farm in South Carolina where she lives with her much older husband, Jacob, and a few freed Negroes. Her husband is seriously ill. Their only child, is off in Tennessee, fighting with the Confederate army, despite his parents’ opposition to slavery and to his enlisting.
Then a telegram arrives from their son, 20-year-old Francis. He has been severely wounded, and he hopes his father and the doctor can come help. Of course, neither can.
Knowing her son will likely die if sent to a field hospital, Susannah starts packing a few belongings. Letty, a freed slave and faithful friend, provides her with bandages, some food, home remedies and invaluable advice.
Thus armed, Susannah, a 36-year-old woman, sets out on a mission to find her wounded son in a region where the Confederate and Union forces are gathering ominously at Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge.
In Measure of Devotion, her debut novel, Nell Joslin gives us an outstanding work of historical fiction. America’s Civil War has inspired many a fine novel, but if there’s another that offers a similar perspective, I am not aware of it.
This is the story of a heartbroken mother’s determination to help her estranged son, even as he continues to rebel against her. Told by Susannah, the account is powerful in its depictions of family dynamics, the horrors of war and the bitter divisions in the United States, not between just North and South, or white and Black, but also within communities and families.
Susannah travels alone at a time when respectable women did not do so, on trains that, in an abruptly cut-off agrarian South, are barely able to function.
She learns that Francis has been taken to a farmhouse at Lookout Mountain that’s being used to house officers. When she finds him, he’s feverish, filthy, tormented by battlefield memories – and not happy to see her. For months, she sleeps on the floor in his room, endures appalling indignities, treats his wound, takes his abuse and does the best she can to keep him and herself clean and fed. Around them, the fighting for Chattanooga goes on. Eventually Union forces take over and Francis becomes a prisoner of war.
No matter what happens, no matter the terrible news that reaches them from the front and from home, Susannah is devoted to the cause of getting her son to safety, even if against his wishes. She will do whatever it takes.
Joslin deftly weaves in the background stories of how 15-year-old Susannah, daughter of an abolitionist preacher in western North Carolina, came to marry 40-year-old, Harvard-educated Jacob Shelburne, and why their only son became a Confederate soldier despite their opposition.
Her descriptive writing brings the stark reality of the war zone vividly to life, including the abominable living conditions. When Susannah ventures out into the countryside to forage for food, we see the sights and hear the sounds of the fields and forests.
Her first-person narrative offers moving insights into her thoughts, emotions and decisions.
Not beaten down even when the heart-wrenching story ends, Susannah finds new strength and some reason for hope.
Add this book to the lists of important Civil War literature and outstanding novels by North Carolina authors.
(Joslin, an attorney in Raleigh who has also been a public-school teacher and a journalist, received her MFA degree in creative writing from N.C. State University.)