James Lee Burke writes in his author’s notes that he considers his historical novel Flags on the Bayou (Atlantic Monthly Press 2023) to be his best work. That is saying a lot considering Burke’s long and brilliant career as a novelist in which he continues to garner both critical and commercial successes. Flags on the Bayou is a great, vivid, thoughtful, gloriously plotted book set in Louisiana in the South’s losing third year of the Civil War. It’s also a brutal book in which the varied kindnesses barely soften the varied cruelties.
Better known perhaps for his modern crime series featuring detective Dave Robicheaux, Burke ventured into Civil War fiction before in White Doves at Morning (2002). Flags on the Bayou, with its heart-stopping prose and complex, often introspective story arc, sets a new standard for historical fiction about this grim era. The novel features among the many points of view, including two enslaved Black women. It shatters the moonlight-and-magnolia/knights and chivalry nonsense of some notable Civil War fiction written from the Southern point of view in earlier decades.
Burke, who grew up in Texas and Louisiana, can’t fully escape his own Southerness. Thus, while the novel shatters such outdated myths of the Old South with its stark, angry condemnation of slavery, it does so with a kind of rugged intrigue and a recognition that not all Southerners were slave-owners. As one of his primary characters notes: “There is something you must understand about the contradictions of the South. It is not one society.”
Within these contradictions, an articulate lower-class White observes: “The dark energies within the society I serve are unpredictable and can be so cruel you question the existence of God.” Yet, a northern abolitionist moved South notes: “I have to admit there is no equal to the manners of Southern gentility. They’re grand on the field of honor and go down with a sonnet on their tongues.”
Through the intricate, overlapping plot lines, Burke struggles mightily as many Southerners do with “the burden of Southern History,” a phrase historian C. Vann Woodward brought into the lexicon with his 1960 book of the same title. The slave owning plantation class do not gather Burke’s sympathy, but at least some of the poorer Southern whites caught up in the maelstrom do. For example, the author shows sympathy, even admiration, for “a nice lady named Ellen Lee Burke [who] reared three sons by herself after her husband, a survivor of the Goliad Massacre, died of yellow fever. They were poor Irish immigrants and also abolitionists.”
Also, among the many who garner condemnation in the novel are Northern army leaders like Sherman who waged a war of destruction against the civilian population by fire and ruination of food sources. As the syphilitic Redleg irregular colonel Carleton Hayes observes: “The Yankees are not trying to defeat the South militarily. That’s for show. They plan to starve it to death.”
Sociological and philosophical comments aside, this is a grand, fast-moving, action pack story in which readers can barely catch their breath (it is, after all, a James Lee Burke novel). To try and narrow the plot to something explainable in a short review would be to rob the novel of its glorious intricacy. But to try: Pierre Cauchon is charged by his job with arresting the slave Hannah Laveau, who is believed to have killed a plantation owner who raped her. Hannah has mystical powers and is kin to the famous Maria Laveau, the New Orleans voodoo queen. Hannah is driven to find her young child, Samual, who was lost during the Battle of Shiloh/Pittburg’s Landing.
Cauchon and gentle aristocrat Wade Lufkin fight a dual that is basically a prideful act of class warfare. Various armies, including Col. Hayes’ Redleg irregulars and some Yankees under the command of a ruthless killer, wander through the story inflicting terror, hunger, and violence upon all in their path.
Hannah is imprisoned and grossly mistreated. Florence Milton, a Northern spinster who came South to educate the ignorant and help slaves escape, engineers Hannah’s escape. Her jailer is killed in the process and the two women are wanted for murder. They run for their lives. As they flee, they encounter many life-threatening situations. They have many hair-raising encounters with those who would do them the most grievous harm. But not everyone they meet is evil. And therein lies some of the true beauty of this tale. Even in the worst of the worst of times, good people still endeavor to do good.
Flags on the Bayou is also, somewhat improbably, a love story. Poor White Pierrie Cauchon falls in love with a Black woman, Darla Babineaux. Darla has been freed but stays on at the plantation where she’d been a slave. Her reasons are only slowly revealed. The strangely gentle Wade falls in love with Hannah. Neither love story will run smoothly, but Burke avoids the obvious and digs deeply into the minds of these would-be lovers.
While all the multifarious characters are vividly compelling (it is, after all, a James Lee Burke novel), Pierre Cauchon is perhaps the most fascinating. He is a man who loves his horse Varina. He loved his mother, loves a former slave even while attempting to imprison another slave, and has deep insights into the world around him. He is a bundle of contradictions. He is driven both to save and to prosecute Hannah Laveau. He has the utmost respect for northern spinster Florence, claiming “she could make the devil join the Baptist Church.”
Told in alternating points of view, the story evolves more in furious swells of waves than in anything like a steady straight line. Despite the overlapping complexity, the pacing is impeccable. The varied points of view encompass Black and White, male and female, slave and free, rich and poor and North and South. That Burke can successfully give voice, words, actions, and thoughts to such diverse characters is a true earmark of his talent. The people in Flag on the Bayou are so intensively and keenly developed that readers should feel an intimacy with them.
If James Lee Burke says this is his best book, trust him. But also be prepared to be haunted by this tale long after you close the book covers. It is, after all, a James Lee Burke novel.
James Lee Burke
Burke is a native of the Deep South and spent most of his childhood on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast. He now lives in Montana. He is a New York Times bestselling author, two-time winner of the Edgar Award, winner of the CWA Gold Dagger and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in Fiction. He has authored forty novels including recently Clete and two short story collections, including the recent Harbor Lights.
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