Cold Mountain
Charles Frazier
1997

Introduction

When Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain was published in 1997, it gained immediate critical and popular success, lasting sixty-one weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and gaining the National Book Award along with other accolades that year. Readers responded to the stirring tale of a Confederate soldier named Inman, his long journey home from the horrors of the Civil War, and his bittersweet reunion with the woman who waited for him. The novel cuts back and forth between Inman's difficult journey that tests his physical as well as his emotional strength and Ada's tale of her own struggles to survive in a harsh landscape and violent time.

Stories of Frazier's ancestors along with those of the North Carolina mountaineers who were caught up in the frenzy of the war years became the inspiration for the novel. Frazier explains in an interview with Salon, "The story seemed like an American odyssey and it also seemed to offer itself as a form of elegy for that lost world I had been thinking about." Serving as a model for the fictional Inman was Frazier's great-great-uncle W. P. Inman, who also turned his back on the war and met a similar fate. Cold Mountain is a moving tribute to those who were lost in the war and those who survived it, as well as a celebration of an indomitable sense of hopeful readiness in confronting the possibilities life holds.

Author Biography

Charles Frazier was born on November 4, 1950, in Asheville, North Carolina, to Charles, a high-school principal, and Betty, a librarian and school administrator. He grew up in small neighboring towns and graduated from Franklin High School in 1969 with a vague aspiration to teach literature. He did his undergraduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where his favorite authors were Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, and Edgar Allan Poe. After earning a B.A. there in 1973, Frazier completed an M.A. program at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, graduating the following year.

Frasier tried his hand at writing fiction but was disappointed with the results and so turned his attention to teaching and academic writing. While he was pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where he specialized in twentieth-century American literature, he completed his first book, Developing Communications Skills for the Accounting Profession (1980), a practical business manual.

After earning his Ph.D., Frazier accepted a teaching position at the University of Colorado. His next book, based on his travels to South America, Adventuring in the Andes: The Sierra Club Travel Guide to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, the Amazon Basin, and the Galapagos Islands, was published in 1985.

In 1986, Frazier and his wife moved back to North Carolina when he accepted a teaching position at North Carolina State University. A year later his first fictional work, a short story titled "Licit Pursuits," was published in the Kansas Quarterly. The North Carolina landscape is an important element in this story, as it was to be in his first novel, Cold Mountain. This novel sprang from his extensive research of the culture and history of his home state, including studies of its folklore, music, travel guides, and historical diaries.

His father's story of his great-great-uncle, W. P. Inman, a Confederate soldier who had deserted during the war and walked back to his home at Cold Mountain, became the inspiration for Frazier's fictional treatment of the area and its history. Encouraged by his wife, Frazier quit his teaching position to devote himself to writing his novel, which took seven years to complete. Cold Mountain appeared in 1997.

As of 2006, Frazier lived on a horse farm in North Carolina, where he continued to write.

Plot Summary

the shadow of a crow

Cold Mountain opens in late summer as Inman, a Confederate soldier, lies wounded in a hospital after being hit in the neck during a battle near Petersburg, Virginia. As he does each morning when he wakes, Inman stares out a large open window in front of his bed, imagining scenes from home.

Inman watches a blind man who sells peanuts and newspapers from a cart outside the window. He is surprised to find out that the man has been blind since birth and not through "some desperate and bloody dispute." When Inman comments on the man's accepting attitude toward his disability, the man says, "it might have been worse had [he] ever been given a glimpse of the world and then lost it" for this would have turned him "hateful." Inman insists that is what the war has done to him.

Inman describes the battle that had the greatest effect on him: Fredericksburg. Thousands of Federals were shot down as they charged the wall behind which he and other Confederates had amassed. Inman recalls, "The Federals kept on coming long past the point where all the pleasure of whipping them vanished." That night, Inman and his fellow soldiers climbed over the wall and took boots off of the dead Federals. He was stunned by the carnage, which included a man killing wounded Federals by hitting them in the head with a hammer. The blind man tells him, "You need to put that away from you," but Inman cannot prevent the nightmares from returning.

While in the hospital, Inman reads Travels (1791), by naturalist William Bartram, and thinks about the topography of his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains, remembering as many details as he can. He walks into town from the hospital to buy clothes and supplies in preparation for escape, for he knows that when he gets better, he will be shipped back to the front lines. He reads in the paper that the government has been hunting down deserters and outliers, men who have evaded Confederate Army service.

Inman thinks about one summer when he was sixteen and herding cattle in the mountains. He met Swimmer there, a sixteen-year-old Cherokee who was also herding in the mountain with a group from his tribe. The two boys spent long hours fishing as Swimmer told stories of "how the world came about and where it is heading." Swimmer determined the spirit to be "a frail thing, constantly under attack and in need of strength, always threatening to die inside you." He insisted that one could go to a great forest above heaven where "the dead spirit could be reborn." Inman decides that Cold Mountain could be such a place, a "healing realm … where all his scattered forces might gather."

Inman starts to write a letter to Ada about his war experiences but tears it up, afraid of what her response would be to what he has seen and done. That night he awakens and steps out of the window.

the ground beneath her hands

During the same period, Ada sits on the porch of her Black Cove home in the shadow of Cold Mountain, trying to write to Inman. She had come here with her father, Monroe, six years earlier when he was asked to preach at the local chapel. Since her father died, she has been alone on their farm with no knowledge about how to run it. Her education has not prepared her for the daily rigors of farm work and the struggle just to survive. As a result, there is little sustenance left. She often seeks out a space inside the boxwoods near the house where she feels safe and cut off from the realities of her new life. That day, after seeking the solace of the hidden space, the farm's only remaining rooster attacks her there. After she escapes, an overwhelming feeling of helplessness fills her with despair.

She has had little will to improve her situation during the three months since her father died, spending most of her days reading. This day, after placing flowers on Monroe's grave, she walks to the farm of Sally and Esco Swanger who took her in for a few days after Monroe's funeral. They talk on the front porch about the war and their growing fear of a man named Teague, the leader of the Home Guard, a cruel band that has been setting its own rules for handling suspected deserters and northern sympathizers. Esco, who has been recording omens, insists that a hard winter is coming.

After Sally and Esco convince Ada to look into their well to see her future, Ada makes out the vague figure of a man, but she cannot tell if he is walking toward or away from her and is confused by its intended significance for her. She soon leaves after receiving a gift of preserves from Sally.

She and Monroe had come to the area to find relief for his consumption. Ada was apprehensive about adapting to the new environment since she had grown up in the genteel atmosphere of Charleston. Ada found little common ground with the mountaineers, whom she found "touchy and distant, largely unreadable" and frequently acting as if she and her father had insulted them.

Media Adaptations

• Anthony Minghella directed and wrote the screenplay for the critically acclaimed and commercially successful film version of the novel. Jude Law, Renee Zellweger, and Nicole Kidman starred in this 2003 production. As of 2006, the film was available on DVD.

Deciding to teach Monroe a lesson about judging others too quickly, Esco pretended a complete ignorance of the Bible and acted the part of the country bumpkin. Monroe made it his mission to educate the poor man until Sally took pity on him and told him that he had been the butt of her husband's and the town's humor. After Monroe humbly accepted the ironic etiquette lesson, he and Ada began to be more accepted in the community. As a result, Monroe decided to buy the working farm at Black Cove, but since they lived off his Charleston investments, he soon neglected it to the point that after he died, the farm was no longer self-sufficient. Ada's bleak situation was further compounded by the news that the war had wiped out her father's investments.

The next morning as Ada is considering her limited options, Ruby appears, sent by Sally to help her. Ruby, a young woman who has basically raised herself on the land surrounding Cold Mountain, insists that she can help Ada get the farm running again but demands to be treated as an equal partner, which Ada accepts. Ruby proves her capabilities when she pulls off the head of the rooster who attacked Ada and cooks him up for dinner.

the color of despair

Days after his escape from the hospital, Inman is bone weary, partially lost, and in constant fear of dog attacks and capture by the Home Guard. One afternoon, he arrives in a crossroads settlement where three men jump him. As Inman defends himself, his growing anger causes him to beat them savagely. As he walks away, he repeats a spell Swimmer had taught him "aiming it out against the world at large, all his enemies." Yet his stance soon troubles him as he remembers Monroe quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson during one of his sermons on the necessity of expressing God within oneself.

Inman's path ends at Cape Fear River where a girl offers to pilot him across for cash. While they are half way across, men on the opposite bank begin to fire at them, sinking the canoe. They are swept downstream and eventually pull themselves out of the river, battered and bruised.

verbs, all of them tiring

Ruby and Ada spend their first several days together, taking inventory of what needs to be done at the farm to make it self-sufficient. Ruby insists that they must work "to require every yard of land do its duty." She finds some hope in the extensive apple orchard, a neglected tobacco patch, bags of coffee beans in the cellar, and Ada's piano, all of which she will use to barter for the goods they need.

Ada remembers a party that she and Monroe gave for their neighbors during which she came upon Inman in the kitchen, drying himself. After an awkward beginning, the two shared a tender moment as Ada leaned her head against his chest and declared "that she never wished to leave this place."

Ruby soon arranges a work schedule for both of them that keeps them busy with hard, physical labor for the entire day. She teaches Ada "the rudeness of eating, of living" as she refuses "to tackle all the unpleasant work herself." After supper, they sit on the porch as Ada reads Homer to Ruby or the latter recounts her life story. Ruby admits that she never knew her mother, and her father, Stobrod Thewes, made her fend for herself by the time she was old enough to walk. She has not heard from him since he enlisted in the army.

like any other thing, a gift

Inman continues to follow the river until he sees a man ready to hurl a woman into it. The man, named Veasey, is a preacher who has gotten the woman pregnant. Inman intervenes and forces Veasey with the aid of his pistol to return to his town. Veasey explains that if he had been found out, he would have been run out. When Inman tells him that there would have been better ways to handle the situation, including marriage, Veasey admits that he is already betrothed.

After they reach the town, Inman ties Veasey to a tree and carries the woman back to her bed, warning her that Veasey is no good. When he returns, Inman writes a note explaining what Veasey has done and secures it to the tree. He continues his journey until he comes to a camp of gypsies, show folk, and outliers along the river. After they feed him, he watches some rehearse a medicine show and listens to others tell stories. That night he dreams of Ada, and the image of her stays with him when he wakes.

ashes of roses

At the beginning of fall, Ruby and Ada work on their winter garden. They take in for a night and feed a group of women and children fleeing the Federals. Ada is growing increasingly satisfied with the knowledge she is gaining about the farm.

exile and brute wandering

As he continues his journey, Inman meets Veasey, who has been banished from his town and is now on his way to Texas to "start fresh." Inman tells him about the battle of Petersburg when Federals blew up Confederate trenches and the two sides engaged in gruesome hand-to-hand combat. They soon reach a roadside inn where Veasey goes off into a backroom with a prostitute. Inman shares a bed with a peddler who tells him how he lost his inheritance after he fell in love with one of his father's slaves and of the cruel treatment blacks receive in the South.

source and root

Ruby and Ada walk to town where they hear a prisoner tell the story of his capture by the Home Guard. Like Inman, this man decided to walk home after becoming disillusioned by the war. The Guard, led by a ruthless man named Teague, discovered him and a group of other outliers on a farm and brutally slaughtered all but him.

to live like a gamecock

Inman and Veasey help out a man named Junior whose water supply is threatened by a dead bull. In payment, Junior invites the two to his home for dinner. Junior complains that his wife and two sisters are harlots as the three get drunk. Later, as Junior's wife tries to seduce Inman, Junior bursts in and pulls a gun on him. Junior admits that he sells outliers to the men in the Home Guard who are waiting outside. The Guard tie up Inman and Veasey and get drunk with the women and Junior, who decides that Inman should marry his wife.

After the ceremony, the Guard tie Inman to a string of other captured men and head east, back over the land Inman has traveled. That night, the Guard decides the men are not worth turning in and begin to shoot them. A bullet grazes Inman, but he survives. A slave he meets brings him to his master's farm and feeds and shelters him for a few days. He warns Inman to stay off the main roads that the Guard are patrolling and draws him a map. Before he continues on his journey, Inman returns to Junior's home and beats him senseless, perhaps killing him.

in place of the truth

Ada receives a letter from Inman, the first in four months. He tells her not to look at the picture of him he gave her four years ago when he left for the war, fearing that he bears no resemblance to it now, "in either form or spirit." She remembers when he came to say goodbye to her and her cool response to him, which prompted her to go to him the next day and make amends. After she apologized, he kissed her and they expressed their desire to reunite soon.

the doing of it

Inman meets an old woman who herds goats in the mountains. She feeds him and tends his wounds. They discuss the war, the consequences of slavery, and the benefits of living a solitary life.

freewill savages

Ruby catches her father Stobrod, who has been living with a band of outliers in a mountain cave, in the corncrib trap. She agrees to feed him and then determines to "send him on his way." That night Stobrod returns and Ruby grudgingly feeds him again. He talks to Ada about the war and plays tunes on a fiddle with a masterful touch.

bride bed full of blood

Inman comes across a cabin in the woods where Sara, a young woman whose husband was killed in the war, lives with their child. She feeds him and invites him to sleep next to her that night for comfort. She tells him of her happy but difficult life with her husband.

The next morning, Federal raiders appear at the cabin and Inman hides in the woods. The men set the baby on the cold ground in an effort to get Sara to give them anything she has, but when they realize that she has nothing, they release her. When they leave with her hog, her only means of sustenance for herself and her baby, Inman follows and kills them. After he returns to the cabin, Inman slaughters the hog for Sara and leaves the next day.

a satisfied mind

Stobrod returns to the farm with a comrade, a mentally disabled man named Pangle. The two had been living in a cave community of outliers who had been raiding wealthy farmers. After Stobrod taught Pangle how to play the banjo, the two became a duo. They play for Ruby and Ada, who are moved by it. Stobrod tells Ruby he wants to leave the outliers who have become militant in their opposition to the war and needs shelter and help. Ruby refuses, still bitter over his treatment of her as a child. When Ada tries to intervene, Ruby reminds him of the time he left her alone for three months when she was seven. That night Ada writes Inman a line from one of Stobrod's songs: "Come back to me is my request."

a vow to bear

Inman stops to help a woman bury her child. Later, a bear charges him and plunges over a cliff. Inman kills its cub and eats it, knowing that it could not survive without its mother. As he gets closer to home, his heart fills with joy.

naught and grief

Stobrod, Pangle, and Reid, a boy from the cave, camp on the mountain. After the boy goes off to relieve himself, the Home Guard, led by Teague, find the remaining two and after listening to them play, shoot them.

black bark in winter

After Reid runs back to the farm, Ruby and Ada go up the mountain to find the bodies. When they discover Pangle, they bury him and soon find Stobrod barely alive. Ruby tends his wounds and decides to find shelter, knowing that her father could not survive the trip home. They find an old Cherokee village and clean out two of the cabins.

footsteps in the snow

Inman determines to declare his love for Ada and heads for Black Cove. There Reid tells him Ruby and Ada have left for Cold Mountain, and he follows them. When Ada kills some wild turkeys, Inman hears the shot and finds her, but it takes her a while to recognize him.

the far side of trouble

Stobrod and Inman sleep in one cabin, Ada and Ruby the other. When Ruby leaves to tend to Stobrod, Ada and Inman are left alone. After he shares his fears and feelings, the two embrace. The next day she and Inman go hunting and she tells him about herself and how she has changed. That night, Ruby stays with her father and Ada and Inman consummate their love and talk about their future together.

spirits of crows, dancing

Inman and Ada decide that his best option would be to go North and surrender to the Federals. In the morning of their fourth day on the mountain, they decide Stobrod is well enough to travel. Inman insists that Ruby and Ada walk ahead while he follows with Stobrod on horseback.

Soon Teague and his men come up behind them. Inman is able to kill all but one, the boy, Birch. Inman tells him, "I'm looking for a way not to kill you," but his hesitation costs him his life when the boy shoots him. He dies in Ada's arms.

epilogue

In October 1874, Ruby is married to Reid and they have three children. Ada has Inman's child, a girl now nine years old. All, including Stobrod, live on the farm. The novel closes with a depiction of the children playing together.

Characters

Birch

Birch is the youngest member of Teague's Home Guard. He appears to have some measure of humanity when after he listens to Pangle and Stobrod play, he is so moved that he calls them holy men. Yet he does not hesitate to help kill the two and Inman, too, at the end of the novel.

Goatwoman

Inman meets an elderly mountain woman who is later referred to as "the goatwoman" on his journey home. Her humanity is evident as she cares for his wounds and feeds him. On the surface, she appears hardened, due to the difficult life that she has lived, but her eyes "were wells of kindness despite all her hard talk." She has been able to retain an optimistic perspective. She insists: "our minds aren't made to hold on to the particulars of pain the way we do bliss. It's a gift God gives us, a sign of His care for us." At this point, Inman is not able to agree, but her kindness toward him does help provide him with the spirit to continue his journey.

Inman

Inman, one of the novel's two main characters, initially thinks of himself as a peaceful man, but once he faces the battlefield, he discovers "fighting had come easy to him," which he considers "a gift." Yet this gift plagues him throughout his journey home, prompting him to wonder if after so much application of this gift, he has lost his soul.

Even though he tries to harden himself to others in an effort to ensure his own survival, his large heart cannot allow him to ignore those who are suffering, which often puts him in harm's way. He also has a strong sense of justice, evident when he saves the woman Veasey tries to drown and forces the preacher to return to the town and face his punishment. Toward the end of this journey, Inman feels tremendous guilt over the accidental death of a bear that charges him and his subsequent killing of her cub, which he knows will not survive without her. He forces himself to eat the cub, following the laws of nature, but it tastes "like sin" and "regret."

Inman had a great desire for freedom, as evident in his story about being bored in the classroom and his constant desire to walk out the hospital window. He enlists in the war not to uphold slavery but to stave off the influence of the North, which he sees as a threat to his way of life. He also values solitude and self-reliance, dreaming of the time when he can live up on Cold Mountain with Ada. He shows his resourcefulness when he repeatedly finds a way out of a predicament, as when he determines how to best get a dead bull out of a stream before it poisons it.

Junior

Junior lures Inman and Veasey to his home in order to entrap and sell them to the Home Guard. He and Teague exhibit more depravity than other characters in the novel. Junior is able to convey a sense of normalcy, however, long enough to make Inman trust him. Soon after the three arrive at Junior's home, his true character emerges in his harsh treatment of his wife and her sisters. He shows no remorse after turning over Inman and Veasey to the Guard and reveals a sick sense of humor when he forces Inman to marry his wife.

Monroe

Monroe is devoted to his daughter, Ada, but has no foresight and so leaves her completely unprepared to take care of herself after he dies. His romantic nature prompted him to buy the farm, but he was never interested in the daily running of it. Initially, he feels superior to those in his new community, and he patronizes them, which earns him ridicule. Yet his good nature and dedication to his church eventually win others over. His congregation also comes to admire his stubbornness in refusing to follow tradition.

Ada Monroe

When Ada first comes to Black Cove, she is, according to Inman, "somewhat thistleish in comportment," having little patience with and making quick, often harsh judgments of all she meets. Inman tells her that speaking to her is "like grabbing up a chestnut burr, at least thus far." She had not been satisfied with Charleston society either, finding all of her suitors defective in some way.

Yet, she begins to recognize this quality in herself and is willing to change it. When Inman comes to say goodbye, he tells her a Cherokee story about Cold Mountain that she dismisses, calling it folkloric. She later recognizes that she "had been glib. Or flinty and pinched. None of which she really wished to be," and "she feared that without some act of atonement," these qualities "would take hold and harden within her and that one day she would find herself clenched tight as a dogwood bud in January."

She fits in neither city nor country, until Ruby shows her how to make real connections. Through Ruby's tutelage, Ada learns to live fully in her world by paying attention to its smallest details. Even though "simply living had never struck Ada as such a tiresome business," she soon comes to envy Ruby's "knowledge of how the world runs." Monroe had insisted that she gain a good education, but that did not prepare her for the rigors of life on the farm. She gains a sense of independence through her work with Ruby as the latter teaches her how to be self-sufficient.

Ada soon feels a sense of pride in her accomplishments, acknowledging that her friends in Charleston would no longer recognize her, that "all such rough work" that she has done on the farm "has changed" her. She recognizes that her thoughts have changed, too; she no longer sees things as a metaphor for something but as the thing itself, and this fills her with contentment. This paring down of things to their essence prompts her to write to Inman, determined to say "what [her] heart felt, straight and simple and unguarded" and to accept him fully when he returns to Cold Mountain.

Pangle

Pangle is a mentally challenged thirty-year-old who attaches himself to Stobrod. His love of music is evident by his devotion to learning how to play the banjo, which he does quite well. The narrator describes Pangle this way: "He was gentle and kind and looked on everything that passed before him with soft wide eyes." His innocence is also revealed by his attitude toward the world: "Everything he saw was new-minted, and thus every day was a parade of wonders." His trusting nature causes him to smile at the Home Guard, even as they prepare to execute him.

Sara

Inman meets eighteen-year-old Sara during his journey home. Her husband has been killed in the war, leaving her with the care of their newborn. She becomes a symbol of the profound sense of loss experienced by families whose relatives are killed in military action. The narrator notes that "etched in every angle of her body [are] all the lineaments of despair." Her desperation and fear that she will not be able to save her child emerges in her song, which speaks of "resentment, [and] an undertone of panic."

Esco Swanger

Like his wife, Esco Swanger is open-minded and kind-hearted. He shows his penchant for humor when he plays a trick on Monroe after the later underestimates his knowledge of the world. He had been generally sympathetic with the Federals, which was common among those living in the mountains, but had grown angry with both sides after the killing wore on. The war has made him bitter.

Sally Swanger

Sally Swanger, Ada's neighbor, shows her kindness and concern for Ada when she invites her to stay with them after Monroe's funeral. Like her husband, Esco, Sally is quiet and gentle. She literally saves Ada's life when she sends Ruby to Black Cove. She also took pity on Ruby when she was a child, often providing her with food and shelter.

Teague

The brutal leader of the Home Guard, Teague looks like a traveling preacher in his black coat. He and his men "moved as a partnership of wolves will hunt, in wordless coordination of effort toward a shared purpose," which is the joy of the kill rather than any sense of justice. His total lack of humanity emerges when he refuses to help speed the death of one of his victims and sounds "festive" after the murder of others.

Ruby Thewes

Ruby is an example of the mountain people researched by Frazier for the novel. In an article published in Salon, Frasier explains that the people who lived in the mountains of North Carolina exhibited a "limitation of desire, stability, [a capacity for] making do, a healthy suspicion of change for its own sake, extreme independence of thought and action, reluctance to acknowledge authority." He also found "beneath it all, a hint of deep earth spirituality."

Ruby is unsure how old she is since her father never celebrated her birthday. Even though she had a difficult childhood, she has "a willing heart" as she proves when she teaches Ada to be as self-reliant as she is, and she accepts Stobrod after he has deserted her. She determines not to let Ada fail. Ruby also has seemingly boundless energy. Even though she is uneducated, she has gained confidence in her abilities and refuses to allow anyone, including Ada, to treat her as less than an equal. She is self-sufficient, learning how to live off the land when she was a child, and "she had whipped men single-handed."

She appreciates the world around her with an almost spiritual sense, gained from a night that she spent outside alone when she was a child. Ada marvels at how she can blow in the nostrils of her skittish horse and calm him, creating "an understanding between them." Her connection with the natural world causes her to regard "money with a great deal of suspicion … especially when she contrasted it in her mind with the solidity of hunting and gathering, planting and harvesting."

Stobrod Thewes

When Ruby's forty-five-year-old father, Stobrod Thewes, appears at Ada's farm asking for a handout, Ruby rejects him, citing his appalling treatment of her when she was a child. Stobrod was not well-suited for this task. He had simple needs, evinced by his lack of care for the cabin where they lived: "If not for the inconvenience of his having a daughter, he might happily have taken up dwelling in a hollow tree." He was also averse to hard work, which made it difficult for him to provide food or shelter for Ruby. He had been "a man so sorry he got his nickname from being beat half to death with a stob after he was caught stealing a ham."

When he arrives at Ada's, however, he has found a calling that appears to have transformed him. His musical prowess on the fiddle is "proof positive that no matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial," which becomes evident when Pangle notes to Ada after she has listened to one of his tunes, "he's done you some good there." When Stobrod plays, Ada and Ruby see "a saint's blithesome face, loose and half a-smile with the generosity of his gift and with a becoming neutrality toward his own abilities." His music has also provided him with an "appetite to live," which helps him survive after he is shot by the Home Guard.

Solomon Veasey

Solomon Veasey, the young preacher whom Inman meets on his journey, becomes an apt illustration of hypocrisy, reinforcing Inman's disgust with humanity. Veasey is "overly charmed by the peculiarities of the female anatomy," which often gets him in compromising situations, most notably when he tries to drown a woman whom he has impregnated. His greed becomes apparent when he tries to rob a shopkeeper. He continually tries to excuse his actions by either declaring that he has seen the light and will become a better person or waxing philosophic in an effort to confuse the issue. An example of the later occurs when Inman notes that he is "mighty free and easy with the property of others," and Veasey responds that "such things distract you from the grand view."

Themes

The Meaninglessness of War

Inman determines that the men of the mountain areas in North Carolina went to war "to drive off invaders" whom they felt would threaten their way of life. Ruby had thought that the North "was a godless land, or rather a land of only one god, and that was money." The people of Cold Mountain, however, soon discover that they are fighting someone else's war—those who want to protect a system that requires the subjugation of an entire race to another. Many men in the South, like Inman "had been fighting battles for such men as lived in [the grand plantations], and it made him sick." The goatwoman insists: "N——-owning makes the rich man proud and ugly and it makes the poor man mean. It's a curse laid on the land. We've lit a fire and now it's burning us down."

Inman also finds no clear purpose for the aggression from the North, insisting that "anyone [who thinks] the Federals are willing to die to set loose slaves has got an overly merciful view of mankind." His cynical view of the motives on both sides causes him to experience an overwhelming sense of waste: "every man that died in that war on either side might just as soon have put a pistol against the soft of his palate and blown out the back of his head for all the meaning it had." Ada makes a similar judgment when she declares the war to be "brutal and benighted on both sides about equally" and "degrading to all."

In the early days of the war, Inman, along with other mountaineers, got caught up in "war frenzy … the powerful draw of new faces, new places, new lives. And new laws whereunder you might kill all you wanted and not be jailed, but rather be decorated." Inman now determines that "it was boredom with the repetition of the daily rounds that had made them take up weapons." Yet his first assumption proves to be correct as well. One of the deadly consequences of war is its ability to bring out the worst in human nature.

His battle experience shows him that men enjoy the killing: "the more terrible it is the better." He sees evidence of this continually. One of the worst incidents occurs after Inman and Veasey have been captured by the Home Guard. Determining that taking their prisoners back to face justice is a waste of time, one of the guards decides to kill them. When one of the prisoners, a twelve-year-old boy begins to cry, one Guard member recoils, declaring, "I didn't sign on to kill grandpaws and little boys." But when the leader of the Guard warns him, "Cock back to fire or get down there with them," he complies, and all but Inman are slaughtered.

Topics For Further Study

• Choose one of the themes discussed in the fiction section and write a poem or a short story that explores that theme in a different way.
• Read Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and prepare a PowerPoint presentation comparing and contrasting each main character's view on the social and political aspects of the war and their participation in it.
• Read Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative and/or watch Ken Burns PBS mini-series on the Civil War and conduct imaginary interviews with some of the people presented in the book/ film on their experiences during the war.
• Watch the film version of the novel. In what ways does the film follow correctly the novel? Does the film have the same thematic focus as the novel? Are the characterizations similar? Note the scenes in the film that have been altered or added and think about why those changes might have been made. Write an essay that compares and contrasts the book and the film.

Inman also finds that the war brings out the worst in him. He has been hardened by all of the violence he has witnessed, which has caused him to act with similar brutality. After beating Junior most likely to death, he "feared that the minds of all men share the same nature with little true variance." As a result of what he has seen and experienced, Inman wants to "be hid and safe from the wolfish gaze of the world at large."

Recognition of Randomness and the Search for Order

Disorder permeates war, concerning who wins and who loses, who lives and who dies. Inman "had seen so much death it had come to seem a random thing entirely." In an effort to find some sort of order, he looks in the bottom of his coffee cup before he starts out on his journey, "as if pattern told something worth knowing," but he determines that "anyone could be oracle for the random ways things fall against each other." This sense is reinforced by a Homeric quotation he reads in the hospital: "the comeliest order on earth is but a heap of random sweepings."

Ada too finds this sense of disorder after she and Ruby bury Pangle. Ruby has taught her that nature contains a certain order, that logical patterns can be found in the flights of birds or the growing of crops. When she discovers what has happened to Stobrod and Pangle, however, Ada's belief in order is shaken. She had found a clear cause and effect relationship in the burying of winter cabbages to help ensure their survival during the winter, but she can find no such pattern in Pangle's murder, no reason that an innocent man should have died in such a way. Inman has a similar reaction when he looks at Stobrod's wounds, thinking "much in life offered little access to logic."

Yet both Inman and Ada find clear patterns in nature that comfort them, Inman as he reads Bartram's descriptions of the North Carolina landscape, which help him focus on home, and Ada as she learns how to work her farm. At first, Ada rejects Ruby's superstitions about nature:

the crops were growing well, largely … because they had been planted, at her insistence, in strict accordance with the signs. In Ruby's mind, everything … fell under the rule of the heavens.

Yet as Ada's desire to forge a connection with the land grows, she comes to view Ruby's signs as "an expression of stewardship, a means of taking care, a discipline." In this way, Ada can accept paying attention to natural patterns as a "way of being alert."

Another sense of order that comforts the characters comes from listening to Stobrod's fiddle playing. After he plays for a dying girl, he recognizes the power of music when "the tune had become a thing unto itself, a habit that served to give order and meaning to a day's end." His own playing speaks to "the rule of creation … that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift but have a shape, an aim." Those who listen to Stobrod's playing find "a powerful argument against the notion that things just happen."

Style

Literary Allusions and Connections

A literary allusion is a brief, sometimes indirect reference to a literary character, event, place, or work that encourages readers to make connections between literary works that will enrich their understanding of the present work. Many critics have noted the similarities between the novel and Homer's Odyssey, focusing on plot and character details: a warrior must make a long and difficult journey back home where he hopes to be reunited with the woman he loves. He must rely on his cunning and intelligence as he continually faces severe impediments to his goal. The woman at home who waits for him confronts her own troubles. Both face internal as well as external struggles that present physical as well as spiritual tests. Frazier also makes two specific allusions to Homer, one in the initial hospital scene in which the man in the bed next to Inman translates Greek passages from the epic and the second when Ada reads the Odyssey to Ruby.

Both the novel and the epic are structured episodically, which heightens the focus on the importance of the journey itself. Inman recognizes that "this journey will be the axle of [his] life." Ada keeps the cabriolet when Ruby comes to the farm because of "the promise in its tall wheels that if things got bad enough she could just climb in and ride away." She held "the attitude that there was no burden that couldn't be lightened, no wreckful life that couldn't be set right by heading off down the road." The Gypsies that offer Inman aid during his journey regard the road as "a place apart, a country of its own ruled by no government but natural law" and consider that "its one characteristic was freedom."

Frazier uses traditional elements found in literature about journeys. He describes the idealistic beginning of Inman's trek: "all the elements that composed [the scene] suggested the legendary freedom of the open road: the dawn of day, sunlight golden … a tall man in a slouch hat, a knapsack on his back, walking west." But Inman soon faces the reality of his time and place when Frazier includes wasteland imagery. The Civil War landscape here appears to echo the modern landscapes of T. S. Eliot's epic poem The Waste Land, which was written post-World War I. Inman's "first true vision" during his journey is of a fence that appears as "some foul variety of brown flatland viper" slithering through the "trash trees" and later of broad ditches that were "smear[s] on the landscape" along side streams clogged with "balls of yellow scud collected in drifted foamy heaps upstream of grounded logs." In response to this desolation, he wonders how he ever thought this was "his country and worth fighting for." Here the real landscape of his journey echoes his own internal wasteland as he feels "all his life adding up to no more than catfish droppings on the bottom of this swill trough of a river." When Frazier makes these connections between the novel and other literary works, his characterizations gain more depth and complexity and he gives readers another vantage point from which to discover meaning.

Historical Context

The Civil War and the Battle of Petersburg

The U.S. Civil War, lasting from 1861 to 1865, broke out between the northern states (the Union) and the southern states (the Confederacy that seceded from the Union). The causes of the war were complex and involved political, economic, and social forces. The South had increasingly tried to separate itself from the North since the Revolutionary War, a movement that escalated sharply after 1820 when the newly formed western territories began to consider the question of slavery. This coupled with the rise of the abolitionists in the North caused the South to worry about maintaining equal status in the national governance of the country.

Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 prompted South Carolina to secede immediately from the Union, a move soon repeated by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. The war began on April 12, 1861, when P. G. I. Beauregard led an attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Soon after Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee joined the other Confederate states. Robert E. Lee (1807-1870) became commander of the Confederate Army and Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) led the North.

Inman is wounded during the battle of Petersburg, one of the most protracted and bloody of the war. Petersburg is located on the Appomattox River in southeast Virginia, near Richmond, which became the Confederate capital during the war. Confederates and Union soldiers fought each other at Petersburg from June 15, 1864 to April 3, 1865. Entrenching his troops there for months, General Lee refused to give up Petersburg since it offered protection for Richmond. Each side continually tried to break the other's lines. On July 30, 1864, Union soldiers exploded a mine under a portion of the Confederate encampment, an incident depicted in the novel. Union soldiers swarmed into the crater and were mowed down by the Confederates. Grant's army, however, was better supplied and so was able to outlast Lee's. The city finally fell on April 3, 1865, one week before Lee surrendered at the Appomattox courthouse, officially ending the war although combat continued in remote areas of the southwest.

The Home Guard

Captain Albert Teague and his Confederate Home Guard, officially organized in 1863, terrorized outliers, deserters, and families who lived in the North Carolina mountain area. Frazier's research led him to the story of the Home Guard and the ruthless Teague who killed a fiddle player and a mentally handicapped boy. The Guard had asked the fiddler to play a song before his execution. The two, the inspiration for Stobrod and Pangle in the novel, were found buried together on Mt. Sterling in the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina.

Another story involved a retaliatory strike by the Confederates after a Union raid in 1863. One woman, who would become Sara in the novel, was tied to a tree while her baby was placed naked on the cold ground in an effort to get information from her about the raid. In another incident, the Home Guard executed a group of fifteen men and boys, only five of whom belonged to the raiders. Frazier fictionalized different pieces of the story in his descriptions of the executions carried out by the Home Guard in the novel.

Frazier explains in an essay he wrote for Salon that the stories of these dead men intrigued him, understanding that none of them "could have had much to do with either of the warring sides, no strong ties to slave agriculture or industrial capitalism." He assumes that they were Scots whose ancestors had immigrated in the eighteenth century, "existing in the seams between the two great incompatible powers."

Frazier's Connection to the Novel

Frazier's great-great-uncle, W. P. Inman, enlisted at the beginning of the Civil War and was engaged in some of its fiercest fighting in Virginia. After suffering a serious wound, Inman decided to

desert and walk home, back to the North Carolina mountains. He was subsequently shot and killed by the Home Guard at the close of the war. Frazier knew very little about his relative, and in the course of his research about him and the era, he began to imagine what he and his journey might have been like. The fictionalized Inman evolved from that research and his imaginings.

Karen C. Holt, in an article on the legends behind the novel, concludes: "By superimposing the life of his great-great-uncle on the life of the fictional Inman, Frazier has united them in a single grave, the stories inseparable from the landscape where the victims are buried." In this sense, then, "the graves of North Carolina have become the graves of Cold Mountain, entombing a sense of place, and the setting, for which Frazier searched."

Critical Overview

Cold Mountain has been praised for its historic detail, its rich characterizations, and its compelling themes. In a review for Salon, Laura Miller notes that Cold Mountain "has been greeted with some of the most impressive accolades we've ever seen for a first novel." David A. Beronä, in his review for Library Journal, highly recommends this "monumental novel," considering it to be "a remarkable effort that opens up a historical past that will enrich readers not only with its story but with its strong characters." In his essay on the novel for Southern Review, David Heddendorf praises the way Frazier "lovingly describes" and "painstakingly depicts … nineteenth-century rural life." Heddendorf also points out the novel's "fully imagined characters," who "can make compelling claims on us, for in their strangeness they grip our attention as our own problems do."

Offering one of the few notes of criticism, James Gardner, in his piece on the novel in the National Review, complains that at times, Frazier expresses a "desire to sound novelistic" in the development of his characters. Gardner insists that "one feels, his characters are infused with a faux complexity, a host of ‘issues’ to make them seem heavier than they otherwise would," and he finds some of the details implausible. Yet, he concludes, "such missteps are surely not fatal to the success of Cold Mountain," finding that overall, it can be judged as "an ambitious example of the historical novel … and very much to its credit—the book treats the past as if it were, in a way, present."

Gardner explains that "though Frazier has acquired a scholar's feel for the period's idioms, costumes, and mores, these become for him merely the conduits through which passes the fluent essence of life lived now." He also finds "in certain details … a genuine novelistic talent and tact which simply cannot be faked." Gardner adds that "Frazier clearly takes pleasure in the English language," revealing himself to be "self-consciously literate without being opaque."

A review in Publishers Weekly claims the novel to be "rich in evocative physical detail and timeless human insight" in its consideration of "themes both grand (humanity's place in nature) and intimate (a love affair transformed by the war)." The reviewer finds: "The sweeping cycle of Inman's homeward journey is deftly balanced by Ada's growing sense of herself and her connection to the natural world around the farm." Frazier has constructed "a leisurely, literate narrative" that becomes a "quiet drama in the tensions that unfold as Inman and Ada come ever closer to reunion, yet farther from their former selves." The review concludes with praise for the deft intertwining of character and theme, insisting that "Frazier shows how lives of soldiers and of civilians alike deepen and are transformed as a direct consequence of the war's tragedy."

Criticism

Wendy Perkins

Perkins is a professor of American and English literature and film. In this essay, she examines the characters' struggle for physical and emotional survival.

When Inman decides to desert the Confederate Army and walk back to Ada and his home on Cold Mountain, he faces serious impediments to his safety, almost as grave as those he encountered on the Civil War battlefield. Physical survival, though, is not his most challenging task. He must also survive the emotional damage wrought by the war, which he fears has made him "so lost in bitterness and anger that [he] could not find [his] way back." Ada faces her own physical and emotional trials while Inman is gone. Although hers are not as severe as Inman's, they also ultimately require strength of character as well as a hopeful readiness and openness to the world, qualities that become fully realized during Inman's and Ada's bittersweet reunion at the end of their difficult journeys.

As Inman lies in the hospital after experiencing the horrors of the war, he suffers from a profound lack of hope for his future and for that of humanity. He now agrees with his Native American friend Swimmer, who believes in the vulnerability of the spirit, which "could be torn apart and cease" while the body kept living. Inman knows this has happened to him. His wound becomes symbolic of his spirit, damaged and appearing unlikely to heal. Inman feels an overwhelming sense of emptiness, as if his spirit "had been blasted away so that he had become lonesome and estranged from all around him." This spiritual numbness has become a survival mechanism for him. He has kept his fears of death at bay by setting himself "apart as if dead already, with nothing much left of [himself] but a hut of bones."

As he sits "brooding and pining for his lost self," he fixates on the large window in front of him, through which he envisions scenes from home. These scenes become a respite from the harsh reality that surrounds him. He allows himself to replace the present with the past "for he had seen the metal face of the age and had been so stunned by it that when he thought into the future, all he could vision was a world from which everything he counted important had been banished or had willingly fled." This recognition prompts him to make a bold decision.

After imagining "many times that it would open onto some other place and let him walk through and be there," Inman decides to make fantasy reality, and he begins his journey away from the war and toward home and Ada. He determines that if he can just get home and build a cabin on Cold Mountain and so isolate himself from the rest of the world, he can survive. "And if Ada would go with him, there might be the hope … that in time his despair might be honed off to a point so fine and thin that it would be nearly the same as vanishing." Swimmer had told him that there are high places where "the dead spirit could be reborn." Inman thus envisions Cold Mountain as such a place, a "healing realm … where all his scattered forces might gather." During his journey, he reads Bartram's account of his own travels in the region, which helps sustain him.

The violence he witnesses, however, as he makes his way home compounds his spiritual emptiness. As he observes Veasey's cruelty toward the young woman he has impregnated, the Home Guard's slaughtering of innocent men and children, the Federals' emotional torture of Sara by placing her unwrapped baby on the frozen ground, and Junior's betrayal of him, Inman develops what David Heddendorf, in his essay on the novel, calls "a self-protective irony that sees him home from the outermost reaches of danger." Heddendorf claims that this irony, revealed "in the laconic, guarded tones of one accustomed to ambush and betrayal," helps him detach himself from the misery he observes and experiences. An example of this detachment occurs in Inman's understated response to Veasey's declaration, "when I took to preaching I answered a false call." Inman tells him, "Yes … I'd say you're ill suited for that business."

This misery also causes him to develop another self-protective measure—a hardness toward others. He regards each person he meets during his journey as "another stone in his passway" and determines "not to be smirched with the mess of other people. A part of him wanted to hide" while "another part yearned to wear the big pistol openly on his hip …, letting rage be his guide against anything that ran counter to his will." Two incidents show him in danger of losing the last remnants of his humanity: his savage beating of the men who attack him in a town he is passing through, and his beating, perhaps to death, of Junior after the man betrays him to the Home Guard.

Inman ultimately, however, does not lose his humanity, due in part to his inability to steel himself against the suffering of others. He feels compelled to save the woman Veasey tries to drown and to help Sara get back her hog, the only means of sustenance for her and her child. He recognizes Sara's need for comfort and so listens to her tell about her life with her husband. After he kills the men who harassed her and stole her hog, he reveals that even after all he has experienced, he still cannot get used to killing. He tries to rationalize his actions, deciding that on the battlefield, "he had probably killed any number of men more satisfactory in all their attributes than" these. Yet, he cannot quite separate himself from his act, admitting that "this might be a story he would never tell."

He also experiences acts of kindness on the road that help mend his spirit. Several people offer him food and shelter without accepting payment, such as the slave who feeds him at his own peril and warns him of the dangerous roads to avoid, and the goatwoman, who helps heal his physical and psychic wounds. His movement toward healing is a slow one, however: "he would like to love the world as it was, and he felt a great deal of accomplishment for the occasions when he did, since the other was so easy. Hate took no effort other than to look about."

At times, the struggle between hope and despair causes him to want to "sprout wings and fly," to live separate "among the tree limbs and cliff rocks," high above "the society of people … observing the bright light of common day." The goatwoman becomes a symbol of the kind of solitary life for which Inman thinks he is suited, but after being with her for a time, he realizes the unbearable sadness of such a life. Her kindness, coupled with Sara's tenderness toward him, strengthens his resolve to continue his journey and get back to Ada.

After her father dies, Ada also must struggle to survive physically and emotionally; however, she has no knowledge about running a farm or about supporting herself. Her loneliness and inability to adapt to her surroundings fill her with a sense of helplessness and despair. At this point, nature appears to echo her emotional state as she looks toward Cold Mountain after her father dies: "The prospect from the reading chair confronted her with all the major shapes and colors of her current position. Through the summer, the landscape's most frequent mood had been dim and gloomy," in sharp contrast to her world in Charleston. Yet, Ada soon learns that "survival had such a sharp way of focusing one's attentions elsewhere," from her past life to the realities of her present.

Ada recognizes that she will not survive the coming hard winter unless she learns to be self-sufficient, but she has no idea where to start. Fortunately, in much the same way as strangers help Inman, kind and resourceful others help Ada find physical as well as emotional security. The Swangers provide aid when they give Ada food and, later, when they send Ruby to Black Cove.

Ruby is instrumental in teaching Ada how to make the farm operational as well as in helping her foster a deep awareness and comforting connection to the world around her. Before Ruby came, Ada had exhibited an openness to Black Cove, determining that she could find "a satisfactory life of common things" there along with "the promise of a more content and expansive life." Ruby helps her realize that promise as she teaches her to shed the superficial world of Charleston society for the natural world of the farm.

Ada at first balks at the backbreaking work necessary for survival, but with Ruby's insistence that the two share duties equally, she slowly gains physical and emotional strength. While she learns the "tiresome business" of "simply living," she also comes to appreciate the beauty of her surroundings. Ada discovers that one of the benefits of rising early to begin chores, besides the obvious one of having enough time to complete one's work, is to see a sunrise: she watches as "the light from outside would rise and fill the room. It seemed a thing of such wonder to Ada, who had not witnessed many dawns." Ruby teaches Ada that "to live fully in a place all your life, you kept aiming smaller and smaller in attention to detail," appreciating and caring for customs and natural laws. Ada is not fully content, however, until she is reunited with Inman.

When the two finally meet on Cold Mountain, it becomes evident that the emotional damage they both have endured has not been fully healed. At first, Ada does not recognize the "blasted and ravaged" figure before her, "yearning for food, warmth, kindness…. his mind scoured and his heart jailed within the bars of his ribs." Although Ada has learned to be self-sufficient and independent, she acknowledges that her world has been "such an incredibly lonely place." Their coming together on the mountain, however, provides each finally with the fulfillment for which they have been searching. Ada finds that lying beside Inman is the "only cure" for her loneliness, while Inman, who "had been living like a dead man" finds "life [suddenly] before him, an offering within his reach." The two spend their last evening together contentedly envisioning their future on the farm at Black Cove.

What Do I Read Next?

• William Bartram's Travels and Other Writings (Library of America edition, 1996) contains the book read by Inman during his journey home that chronicled the author's own travels through the Carolinas. Bartram, one of the earliest American nature writers, carefully gathered details of the landscape that he supplemented with his own drawings.
• Stephen Crane's naturalistic novel, The Red Badge of Courage, originally published in 1894, provides a fictional account of the Civil War and examines the complex ways that the participants responded to it. In his characterization of Henry Fleming, a young Union soldier, Crane explores the disillusionment soldiers feel from military action and questions concerning the nature of honor and courage.
• Frazier's Adventuring in the Andes: The Sierra Club Travel Guide to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, the Amazon Basin, and the Galapagos Islands (1985) is based on his travels to South America.
• While doing research for his novel, Frazier consulted Phillip Shaw Paludan's Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (1981), which focuses on the North Carolina mountaineers who were unsuccessful in their attempts to avoid involvement in the conflict between the North and the South.

Ironically, it is Inman's renewed sense of humanity that ultimately destroys him. After he is able to defend himself against Teague and his men, he faces the one last member of the Home Guard—Birch. When Inman hesitates, reluctant to kill a boy, Birch kills him.

Frazier suggests that Inman, however, has achieved his goal—the restoration of his soul at the end of his journey home. His ability to find his way back physically and emotionally to Ada provides a sense of closure to the novel, which is reinforced by the focus in the final pages on the strong sense of community shared by the rest of the characters. Inman is also there with Ada through their nine-year-old daughter, who becomes their testament to the endurance of the human spirit.

Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on Cold Mountain, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

Ed Piacentino

In the following essay, Piacentino comments on "cross-racial bonding," unity beyond race, and a sense of home in Frazier's novel.

Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, a book about Civil War Appalachia and the writer's first novel, has enjoyed a phenomenal popular and critical success since its publication in 1997. A best seller, Cold Mountain won the National Book Award, the Book Critics' Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; in addition, a film version of the novel, directed by Anthony Minghella, is under production.

Its merits widely acclaimed by contemporary reviewers, Cold Mountain has been perceived in many contexts. While James Polk has called it an "American Odyssey," John C. Inscoe regards Inman, the novel's co-protagonist, as an "Appalachian Odysseus." To Malcolm Jones, Cold Mountain is veritably a "page turner that attains the status of literature," and John B. Breslin, who likewise considers the book's literary merit, accurately praises it as an "exquisite diptych: in Inman's story, an unstinting epic of war and its ravages, on and off the battlefield; and in Ada's, an account of life's stubborn refusal to surrender to either man or nature's relentless onslaught." William R. Trotter, who has written about guerilla warfare in Civil War North Carolina, celebrates Cold Mountain as "great and haunting novel, almost mythic in the depth of its power to evoke people, landscapes, and the mood of the time in which it is set." And Jane Tompkins, who calls Cold Mountain a "story of a search for love and healing," sees the book as sharing affinities with the popular Western, its "hero stoic, reticent, and lonely, a lovingly portrayed landscape, disaffection with institutions and dogmas …; and a spirituality expressed through the worship of nature."

Among academic critics, many of whom often have an aversion to books that achieve popular status, Cold Mountain has received scant attention, but the few academics who have written about Frazier's novel have recognized its artistic dimensions. Kathryn Stripling Byer perceives the book as exhibiting a "poetic vision," which, she notes, contributes to "its luminous texture, illuminating its wealth of history, local detail and character," and, in drawing on Ursula Le Guin, like a "medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us." Paul D. Knoke, who briefly examines the novel's crow symbolism, also explores, in a collaborative essay with Bill McCarron, some of the structural interrelationships provided "through a … combination of parallelism (where characters, scenes, and symbols ‘double,’ prefigure, and are reduplicated by other characters, scenes, and symbols) and antithesis (where events and symbols demand dual antithetical interpretation)." And finally Knoke, the critic who has written about Cold Mountain most prolifically, perceptively and meticulously charts the precise time frame and identifies the places in North Carolina through which Inman, Frazier's physically and spiritually maimed Confederate soldier, journeyed in his effort to return home after deserting the war.

Many readers of Civil War novels authored by Southerners would agree with Mel Gussow that Cold Mountain is a "Civil War novel with a difference," since many facets of the book show that Frazier elected not to showcase the familiar stereotypes and repeat the scenarios commonly featured in earlier best sellers such as Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936). Rather than glorifying the heroism of men fighting in war, Frazier followed a different path. In his words, "when you grow up in the South, you get this concept of the war as this noble, tragic thing, and when I think of my own family's experience, it doesn't seem so noble in any direction. To go off and fight for a cause they had not much relation to: that's the part I see as tragic" (qtd. in Gussow, F1). In describing the key differences between Cold Mountain and books of earlier chroniclers of historical fiction about the Civil War in the South, historian John C. Inscoe points out:

The war depicted here is indeed very different from the war … which Robert E. Lee experienced. There are few if any plantations, slaveholders, or slaves on this home front. The many characters who people Frazier's saga are far removed from those who made up Margaret Mitchell's or John Jakes's fictionalized Confederacy. With very few exceptions, these people are poor; leading lives of quiet—and often not so quiet— desperation. For all participants, the war has become one of disillusionment, of resentment, of desolation, and of brutality as they engage in a primal quest for sheer survival. ("Appalachian Odyssey," p. 333)

In a recent essay "A War Like All Wars," Tom Wicker, who does not regard Cold Mountain as being exclusively about the Civil War, notes rather that Frazier's book is a novel of war—"any war in any time—and what it does to men and society." Nor does Wicker regard Inman as a deserter, seeing him instead as resembling the character in Ernest Hemingway's "A Very Short Story" who "made a separate peace." Moreover, Wicker perceptively observes that Frazier's principal interests, "are with a world nearing the end of a calamitous war, with a society in devastation, and with people who seem mostly to want the battle to be over so that their men can come back and rebuilding can begin."

Yet there is another important aspect of Cold Mountain that makes it a different variety of Southern Civil War novel: Frazier's portrayal of race relations. In his portrayal Frazier features cross-racial bonding with some frequency and in doing so reflects a sentiment that similarly echoes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s emotional appeal for human rights, racial equality and social harmony, which he expressed in his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial on the one-hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. In contrast to the situation that existed in the years before the Civil War when slavery and a constant fear of the eruption of slave rebellion provided the white Southern writer with the impetus for what Leonard Cassuto describes as the "manufacture of bucolic Southern fantasies …, peopled with Sambos because they can easily fit within its parameters," Frazier, in Cold Mountain, presents a perspective more reflective of the attitudes of the post-Civil Rights era. During this time, the hopes expressed in Dr. King's widely influential speech were beginning to be realized in American society. While it can be claimed that Frazier's novel seems directed to a contemporary readership whose views on race relation were more liberal and more humane than those of many readers of the pre-Civil Rights era whose attitudes had been conditioned to accept segregation and racial prejudice, Frazier was not violating historical plausibility in his handling of race. Admittedly, he cautiously avoids populating his book with dehumanizing racial stereotypes or resonating a bigoted bias that many Southerners of the Civil War period would likely have felt toward African Americans. But in choosing to follow what may at first seem an ahistorical course, Frazier featured in Cold Mountain a viewpoint toward race common among Southern Appalachian inhabitants who typically did not own slaves and who did not readily support slavery, an attitude, as will be noted later in this essay, that is consonant with historical plausibility. Moreover, the book, as we will see, celebrates the need for humanity, connection, togetherness, and harmony, values that Inman, the co-protagonist, finds in William Bartram's Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Choctaws (1791) and that he likewise associates with his southwestern North Carolina home, Cold Mountain.

Some of the basic socio-historical facts about Civil War western North Carolina that Frazier seemed to be aware of and that provided the context for influencing his development of the storyline in Cold Mountain were the relatively fewer slave owners and slaves in this region than in other parts of the South, the lack of widespread popular support for North Carolina's secession from the Union in the state's mountain regions in 1861, the loss of enthusiasm by mountain residents for the war when realizing it would last much longer than they had anticipated, the shortages of food and male labor, and the threats of Federal military raids.

In attempt to establish a rationale for the cross-racial bonding that pervades and recurs in ColdMountain, we must take into account the novel's historical context. Inman, the novel's co-protagonist and a Confederate deserter, resides in the southwestern North Carolina mountains, a region where there were few slaves, and in his life there prior to his enlistment in the Confederacy, slavery was never a part of his experience. Such an attitude is consistent with Inman's upbringing and with the principal historical Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive accounts of the pre-Civil War and Civil War eras in the Southern Appalachians. Moreover, as Inman makes clear, in the chapter titled "the doing of it," in a frank conversation with a goat woman—a hard but kind woman in whom he feels comfortable confiding—neither the perpetuation of the "peculiar institution" nor persons whose way of life depended upon slave labor was ever his motivation for joining the Confederate cause. As the goat woman observes Inman's wounds, she asks him: "What I want to know is, was it worth it, all that fighting for the big man's n——?" He responds, "That's not the way I saw it" and then goes on to tell her that he neither owned slaves nor did he know anyone who did. When the goat woman inquires further, "Then what stirred you up enough for fighting and dying?" Inman candidly explains why he and other North Carolina highlanders fought in the war:

I reckon many of us fought to drive off the invaders. One man I knew had been north to the big cities, and he said it was every feature of such places that we were fighting to prevent. All I know is anyone thinking the Federals are willing to die to set lose slaves has got an overly merciful view of mankind.

It is cynicism such as this that Inman, while still convalescing in the hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina, displays in Chapter One as he reminisces about his home region—in particular, the summer when he and Swimmer, a Cherokee friend, were sixteen, wondering now if Swimmer too is fighting against the Federals, a common link that they possibly share as adults. In this, the first instance of cross-racial bonding in Cold Mountain, Inman does not show the condescension and prejudice one might expect to see in a society comprised primarily of a low-class white racial majority in an encounter with a minority other. Instead, in his recollection, Inman exhibits compassion for and understanding of a person of color, actually seeing Swimmer, not as an anachronism, a recycled noble savage figure, but, as McCarron and Knoke point out, as a "spiritual guide." In recalling his initial meeting with Swimmer and a band of Cherokees from Cove Creek, who had come to Balsam Mountain with a herd of cows to find available grazing land, Inman and a group of white men from Catalooch, whose cows are also grazing these same lands, regard and treat the Native Americans respectfully as equals. In describing the activities that Inman and the Catalooch whites engage in while in the company of Swimmer and his fellow Cherokees, Frazier emphasizes that discrimination is nonexistent, that no color barriers separate the two races to prevent them from interacting:

The two groups camped side by side for two weeks, the younger men playing the ball game [lacrosse] most of the day, gambling heavily on the outcomes. It was a contest with no fixed time of play and few rules so that they just ran about slamming into each other and hacking with the racquets as if with clubs until one team reached a set number of points scored by striking the goalposts with the ball. They'd play most of the day and then spend half the night drinking and telling tales at fireside, eating great heaps of little speckled trout, fried crisp, bones and all.

As McCarron and Knoke insightfully note, the competitors' "slamming" and "hacking" in the lacrosse game is "never with malicious intent" and "what might have looked like a ‘war’ to an outsider was instead, and paradoxically, a casualty-less vehicle for ‘peace,’ the bonding of a friendship between whites and Indians." Interestingly, in the gambling activity, which the lacrosse matches has prompted, the Cherokees win the spoils, "the Catalooch party [losing] to the Indians everything they could do without and things they couldn't—fry pans and dutch ovens, sacks of meal, fishing poles, rifles and pistols."

When viewed on the basis of the one-to-one relationship that develops between Inman and Swimmer during this brief summer interlude in the "high balds" on Balsam Mountain, the shared home country of both young men, the so-called "bonding of friendship" between a white and a red man is thematically significant. This is especially true if we consider this friendship within the context of Inman's subsequent experiences (either direct, observed, or heard about) in cross-racial bonding later in the novel. Even though Inman considers some of Swimmer's folk explanations "dismal," he comes to hold him in high esteem and to regard his new Cherokee friend as possessing intuition and insight superior to his own. In fact, Swimmer's keen knowledge of the mysteries of the spiritual world attests to this. Convalescing in a Raleigh military hospital, existing in a physical and spiritual void at the time, Inman remembers a folktale Swimmer had once related to him, a story about a place of refuge and renewal, a "far and inaccessible region," where human beings could retreat temporarily to escape the foulness of this world, and "in that high land the dead spirit could be reborn." This "healing realm …, a place where all his scattered forces might gather," but a place Inman has never seen, he comes to associate with Cold Mountain, his home. Though one would be inclined to think that Inman might readily dismiss Swimmer's story about a "world invisible," a "better place" as spurious, as a superstitious folk tale of a primitive culture, he accepts his friend's beliefs about this "healing realm" as authentic, as worthy of consideration. Because of his high regard for Swimmer, Inman subsequently comes to perceive the Cherokee's beliefs as relevant to his own immediate needs of restoring wholeness to his "lost self," both to his war-ravaged body and to his disillusioned, "blasted away" spirit, the latter causing him to feel "lonesome and estranged from all around him." The common link between Swimmer and Inman, then, is one formulated on distinctly human grounds. Inman's malaise, his wounded body and his traumatized spirit, which contribute significantly to his loneliness, disenchantment, and despair, is a basic one that may be experienced by any human being, regardless of racial, ethnic, socio-economic, or cultural differences. Moreover, Swimmer's remedy to find a "healing realm," where one can find a comfort zone by restoring contact with the friendly community of his home, offers a workable anodyne for Inman's malady.

Inman's recollection of this instance of cross-racial bonding seems to provide the main impetus for his decision to desert the war and to return home to Cold Mountain. But even more importantly, his reflections on his friendship with Swimmer make Inman a different kind of hero. As Kathryn Stripling Byer explains, "unlike the classic hero, Inman is not at the solitary center of the story, nor would he wish to be. Relationship is what he desires, not heroism" (p. 116, my emphasis). It is relationship, forming human connections outside one's self, that Inman desperately needs before he can be restored to some semblance of wholeness, of a healthy and balanced life, which, in his mind, he comes to associate with home. In his friendship with Swimmer, Inman discovers the importance of acknowledging otherness by crossing the barriers of racial discrimination. And as a resident of Southern Appalachia and of the yeoman class, Inman is somewhat marginalized himself, a factor that likely enables him to accept and to connect with Swimmer who, as a Native American, has been similarly marginalized. Inman's experience in cross-racial understanding and friendship with Swimmer may suggest by association a feeling akin to being in a safe place, removed from those things that destroy the body as well as the spirit. In addition, the memory of their bonding, coupled with Swimmer's tale about the existence of a "better place," a "healing realm," offers Inman the same kind the security and consolation that he had formerly associated with home.

In the chapter titled "like any other thing, a gift," Inman, after he has actually begun his homeward journey, encounters a racially mixed group of gypsies, who also help him to see the kind of resocialization and re-orientation process that will best serve him as he attempts to reintegrate into the society of his home. In initially observing these gypsies, a "jumble of people wearing about every thing of skin there is," he speculates that they are "outlaws and Ishmaelite as himself. Show folk, outliers, a tribe of Irish gypsy horse traders all thrown in together." Yet Inman feels a common bond with these multi-racial vagabonds, despised outcasts like himself, who similarly do whatever expediency demands for survival. As Inman notices, these gypsies use deception, transforming old horses so as to disguise their real features and defects, making them to appear young and vibrant. A veritable clinic in applied racial and ethnic equality, they engage in these and other duplicities for the benefit of all the members of their society. Discounting the morality of their actions, Inman, who neither narrow-mindedly condemns the gypsy clan's fraudulent behavior nor their social practices, bonds with them almost immediately. Moreover, they accept him without condition or suspicion, and "they [take] him in with apparent generosity," feeding and entertaining him, taking care of his basic needs and otherwise making him feel "at home." Interestingly, Inman observes and is attracted to a young, beautiful gypsy woman, and "something in the darkness of her hair or the way she moved or the thinness of her fingers reminded him momentarily of Ada." While apparently inconsequential, this encounter shows that the connection that Inman perceives between Ada, the woman he loves and to whom he wishes to return, and this gypsy woman functions to accentuate for him the principal reason he desires to return home to Cold Mountain.

Yet Inman learns another vital lesson from his interlude with the gypsies—one that reinforces and reverberates his earlier relationship with Swimmer—their acceptance and practice of racial equality. These societal outcasts, an anomaly in their humane ethic and liberal racial attitudes, are comprised, Frazier writes, of a "big, grey-bearded Ethiopian who had a regal bearing" and "a little menagerie of Indians of several makes, a Seminole from Florida, a Creek, a Cherokee from Echota, and a Yemassee woman." Both the Ethiopian and the Native Americans are showmen. As performers, the Ethiopian was "dressed in purple robes …, [and] was portrayed to have been in his youth the king of Africa" and the Indians were drummers, dancers, and chanters. The ritualistic act of eating, which brings Inman and the multi-racial gypsies together, reaffirms their observance of the equality that they advocate: "The Ethiopians and the Indians joined in the meal as if they were all of a color and equals. They took their turns speaking, and permission to talk was neither sought nor given." In a gesture of unity, indicative of their bonding, these gypsy showmen take a drink from the same bottle and likewise share in recounting stories about their life on the road, the road, as they see it, being a "place apart, a country of its own ruled by no government but natural law, its one characteristic [being] freedom." In one sense, then, the way of life the gypsies follow represents their own sense of home, a communal domicile predicated on unequivocal acceptance and an egalitarian ethic. For Inman, his experience with the gypsies provides an important lesson in integration with a different culture and the mutual benefits derived from the acceptance of diversity in favor of singularity.

Cross-racial bonding in Cold Mountain also involves an encounter between Ada, the novel's co-protagonist and the woman Inman loves, and Ruby, her companion in equal living who teaches Ada "self-confidence …, compassion, ‘other-centeredness’" (McCarron and Knoke, p. 278), and a group of war refugees from neighboring Tennessee whom they befriend. Their husbands away from home and engaged in the war, the three white women refugees, who between them have half a dozen children in their care and two dutiful slaves to assist them, desire to re-connect with family in South Carolina. Collectively, these refugees, regardless of racial, class, or age differences, share the common plight of victimization and homelessness, a predicament forced upon them by self-serving Federal marauders, who, one of them asserts, "make women and children atone for the deaths of soldiers." In graphically detailing the atrocities of the Federal troops, one of the women reports: "The Federals rode down on us and robbed even the n—— …. They took every bit of food we had been able to raise this year. I even saw one man filling his coat pockets with our lard. Dipping by the handful." The Federals also steal their jewelry and burn their home. The reunion with their South Carolina relatives will provide, these refugees undoubtedly hope, some semblance of family identity, order, and peaceful accord, in short, the home feeling that the war has despoiled. Yet in the course of their journey through the mountains, when these war-ravaged travelers become lost, Ruby and Ada, moved by compassion, offer all their visitors, including the slaves, food and shelter, providing for them a safe and temporary home and place for renewal. "When supper was ready," Frazier writes, "they called in the visitors and sat them at the dining-room table. The slaves had the same fare, but ate out under the pear tree."

While long-standing social custom may account for the slaves eating separately from the white women and children, Frazier does not belabor this point. Still, he is consistent in mentioning it, for, in his initial description of the refugee group, he does casually interject a horrifying possibility, saying that the "pair of kind slaves, who hovered about the women as close as shadows, might just as easily have cut every throat in the family any night as they slept." Even so, this does not appear to be a prominent fear in the minds of the white women refugees, who, out of the necessity of survival, appear to have cultivated a bond of mutual trust with their slaves and seem comfortable in their company. Moreover, the women's minds seem focused not on the potential eruption of racial violence or perhaps massacre at the hands of their slaves but rather on reaching their relatives in South Carolina safely. Their intended destination with family will, they hope, provide for them a new home, offering the sense of security and comfort which presumably they had formerly associated with their home in Tennessee before the war displaced them. In raising the notion of the possible insidious intentions of the refugees' slaves, Frazier may only be offhandedly acknowledging the unsettled feelings of Ada and Ruby, neither of whom is accustomed to seeing strangers of any color in and around Black Cove. Perhaps too, Ada and Ruby may privately feel that their own isolation has been violated by the sudden appearance of outsiders. With the arrival of the refugees, whether Ada and Ruby admit it or not, they have been forced to confront, albeit vicariously, the reality of the disruption of home life and the kinds of losses concomitant with it that can and do occur when the activities of war directly affect people's lives. While such thoughts may be disturbing, Frazier presents no further indication that any hostile act on the part of these women's slaves, such as the one he casually mentions, would ever occur.

Despite this one discomfiting conjecture, which, I repeat, never materializes before the refugees depart for South Carolina, nor as far as we know during the reminder of their journey (which Frazier chooses not to develop), he quickly restores the same sense of comfort and trust, features of genuine and healthy relationship, manifested in Ada and Ruby's earlier hospitality in their first encounter with these homeless travelers:

Ada and Ruby saw the travelers off to bed, and the next morning they cooked nearly all the eggs they had and made a pot of grits and more biscuits. After breakfast, they drew a map of the way to the gap and set them on the next leg of their journey.

This final hospitable act simultaneously foreshadows and parallels the novel's next instance of cross-racial bonding when a slave befriends Inman, who has miraculously survived the home guard's mass execution of Confederate deserters.

The scene of Inman's bonding with the yellow slave, a man of a hospitable and humane disposition, occurs soon after wild boars uproot the wounded Inman, whom the home guard executioners have buried in a shallow grave and have left for dead. Weak and disoriented and trying to decide the best route to follow in continuing his westward journey to Cold Mountain, Inman sees a yellow slave coming down the road toward him on a steer-drawn sled loaded with watermelons. Inman's encounter with the yellow man begins on a note of surprise and comic relief when the slave, upon first seeing Inman, colloquially exclaims: "They Lord God amighty, … You look like a dirt man." Yet the slave, who quickly perceives Inman's weakened condition, tosses him a melon, which he ravenously devours. Further, the slave gives Inman a ride on his sled, taking him to the farm of his owner and hiding him in a barn on the premises.

During Inman's recuperation, this slave and other slaves make Inman "feel at home," offering him safe refuge and showing him many kindnesses in much the same manner as Ada and Ruby did in assisting the war refugees from Tennessee. They feed him, helping to renew his strength, clean his clothes, provide a secure domicile for him, and otherwise protect him from disclosure. Yet the hospitality of the slaves does not end here. Once Inman's health is restored and he seems ready to travel again, the yellow slave, cognizant that dangers await Inman, alerts him that Confederate patrols are on the roads, searching for Federals who have escaped from the nearby Salisbury prison. As he warns Inman, "You try to go through there, they'll sure catch you up, you're not careful. Probably catch you even if you are." The slave's unsolicited and gratuitous words of warning not only attest to his compassionate character but also affirm Inman's trust in him, prompting Inman to rely exclusively on the slave for accurate information regarding the safest route to follow in resuming his homeward journey. According to the yellow slave's keen knowledge of the lurking dangers in the vicinity and special advantages that may be of benefit to Inman during his westward trek, he cautiously advises Inman to "cut north. Go toward Wilkes. Taking that heading, there's Moravians and Quakers all the way that will help. Hit the bottom of the Blue Ridge and then cut south again following the foothills. Or go on into the mountains and follow the ridges back down to your course." Added to all that he has already done for Inman, the yellow man, again in a demonstration of his admirable humanity and other-directedness, equips Inman with substantial food. In addition, the slave even spends considerable time, as Ada and Ruby had done for the Tennessee refugees, patiently and meticulously drawing a map with useful notations to direct him safely in his travels. This map, "all detailed with little houses and odd-shaped barns and crooked trees with faces in their trunks and limbs like arms and hair [with] a fancy compass … in one corner …, and notes in a precise script to say who could be trusted and who could not," serves as a first-hand, reliable rendering of what the yellow slave experientially knows about the region to the west that extends to the edge of the mountains. When Inman, who is noticeably appreciative of the slave's genuine humanity and assistance, tries to offer him money for his many kind services and discovers that he has none, the yellow man, in keeping with his consistently admirable character, tells Inman: "I might not have took it anyway." It appears that both Inman and the slave accept and understand each other on a basic human level. In doing so, they recognize the commonality of their human connection and therefore bond unconditionally without apparent preconceived bias or suspicion. In the slave's eyes, Inman, regardless of his color or affiliation, is a human being in need. In this instance, the more advantaged of the parties— the yellow slave, likely at some past time a victim of dehumanization himself as a member of an oppressed race—freely aids the disadvantaged Confederate fugitive.

While one might be inclined to wonder if the yellow slave represents an updated version of docile and faithful retainers such as those Thomas Nelson Page portrayed in some of the stories of In Ole Virginia (1887), this is not the case. In no way whatsoever does Frazier's slave resemble Page's fawning black retainers. Instead, the yellow slave exhibits a personal identity of his own. In Inman, the slave recognizes a fellow outcast (rather than an enemy), and he assists Inman without compromising his personal interests and feelings in the process. Nor does Frazier insinuate that the yellow slave represses resentment that he may feel toward the Confederate deserter. In short, in emphasizing this black man's gratuitous behavior toward a Southern white man, Frazier shows no interest in resurrecting the "lost cause" ideology, popularized by Page, with its emphasis on African-American stereotypes favoring inferiority, subservience, complacency, and absolute loyalty to the white man. Instead Frazier's apparent intent was to mold his slave character into a likable human being of genuine and endearing sensitivity.

After all, the yellow slave's kindnesses to a Confederate deserter, a fugitive from justice, are beyond the call of duty and actually pose a potential danger to his personal security should his master, other slaveholding Confederates in the area, or the home guard find out about them. Moreover, the slave could have shown indifference to Inman's plight and could have ignored the wounded soldier entirely, leaving him to die on the road where he found him. By being his brother's keeper, however, the slave becomes an agent in helping Frazier advance the novel's thematic intent by reawakening the war-conditioned Inman to a valuable life-affirming lesson: the importance of living in harmony with other human beings and helping them when they are need. This same lesson Inman carries out himself when he subsequently elects to assist Sarah, the widow of a Confederate soldier, the mother of an infant child, and a victim of Federal thieves, whom he encounters later in the novel. Importantly, during his brief sojourn with Sarah, Inman gains a clear sense of what a marital relationship actually involves. Adopting the role of Sarah's surrogate husband, Inman becomes her sympathetic confidant and sounding board (listening to and communicating with her), sleeping companion (though not sexual partner), and protector—all of which anticipate the principal functions that he would be expected to perform in his eventual return home and subsequent marriage to Ada Monroe.

The final instance of cross-racial bonding in Cold Mountain, found in the chapter "exile and brute wandering," is not a part of either Inman's or Ada's direct experience. Instead, it concerns a former relationship between Odell, a young white man and a rich planter's son from south Georgia, and Lucinda, an octoroon house slave with whom he had fallen in love. Odell tells Inman, who sympathetically listens to his sorrowful story of illicit and thwarted love, that though he was married himself at the time when he fell in love with Lucinda, he "loved her far past the point of lunacy, for as everyone knew, just to have loved her at all was a mark of an unsound mind." Then when Odell informs his father, Lucinda's owner, of his love for the octoroon, his father immediately sends her away to the nearby farm of a non-slave-owning white man, who works Lucinda as a field hand. Despite this setback that the separation causes, Odell remains unwavering in his love for the slave woman and even undermines his father's intentions to keep him and the slave apart. In retaliation, Odell resorts to lies and deception so as to continue to see Lucinda. Consummating his love with her and eventually getting her pregnant strengthen the bond between the two. Yet in accordance with the statutes regarding interracial marriage that would have prohibited a legal union between Odell and an African-American slave, Odell's father adamantly refuses to sell Lucinda to his son, and in an effort to terminate the relationship between two lovers permanently, he sells Lucinda, apparently sending her to Mississippi. Physically separated from the woman he loves and their child that she may still be carrying, Odell repudiates his family, home, inheritance, and community. And he leaves his home never to return again. Furthermore, publicly dishonored through his attempts to transgress racial boundaries, Odell takes to the open road, becoming an itinerate peddler, whose main objective is to find Lucinda and to reunite with her. This reunion, as he apparently sees it, will alleviate his personal loneliness and sense of homelessness, restoring some semblance of wholeness to his shattered existence. While his efforts to accomplish this goal have proven futile, he remains steadfast in his quest to reinstate a bond with this woman of color, yet a bond that society considers illicit and forbidden. Even so, Frazier leaves us with the impression that Odell will not relinquish his search, that he will continue to look for Lucinda, indefinitely if need be. For Odell it seems that Lucinda has become an unattainable ideal. On the one hand to find and marry her would surely destroy any possibility for him ever to regain his former birthright and status and the good favor of his privileged family; but on the other, a union with Lucinda would initiate for him the possibility of renewing what he once possessed with his estranged family—a viable relationship and its benefits—in short, the values essential to creating the security associated with home. Though at this time, women of mixed racial heritage were victims of prejudice and racism and were often regarded as sexual objects, Lucinda, an octoroon, could have, if she so chose, passed for white; and she and Odell could conceivably have lived together as husband and wife, finding a new home where no one had knowledge of her racial composition.

While it appears that in his search for Lucinda, Odell will persist and as a consequence will continue to remain alienated and homeless, he does experience another opportunity for cross-racial bonding, but of another kind and on another level. This unanticipated bonding experience is precipitated by Odell's compassion for another human being in need. In his travels, he observes first hand many atrocities against slaves, the most thematically significant being a suffering and helpless slave woman who has been incarcerated in a cage of beanpoles, likely as a punishment for some undisclosed transgression, her exposed flesh and body parts becoming carrion to ravenous buzzards. In a scene somewhat paralleling that of the wounded Inman being assisted by the yellow slave who saves his life, Odell, overcome by pity for this slave woman, wondering perhaps if she might be his beloved Lucinda, desperately but unsuccessfully attempts to rescue her. Though he frees her from the cage and gives her water, Odell, during his indecisiveness about what to do for her next, vacillates; and the slave "vomited blood and died." Her death, which the well-intentioned Odell could probably not have prevented, even had he acted more quickly and decisively to give her further care, echoes his unsuccessful attempt to cross the color line, to break down the seemingly impenetrable barriers segregating races, and to marry Lucinda. In both cases, Odell's failure to act in a timely manner, the consequence perhaps of having been raised in a society that considered African- American slaves as chattel, may have in part prohibited him from carrying out his intentions successfully.

Odell's story of cross-racial love and compassion for the oppressed and afflicted seems to have significant impact on Inman. Odell's unwavering desire, persistence and determination to reunite with Lucinda, the woman he loves, teaches Inman that the power of love surpasses all fear and danger and seems to provide an impetus for Inman to continue his own journey home to reconnect with Ada Monroe. Moreover, Odell's unrelenting quest to find Lucinda parallels Inman's own tireless dedication to returning home to Ada. And their respective quests encourage in both men the practice of other-directed sensitivity. The ultimate significance of the encounter between these two men, however, is that Odell's attempts to follow the dictates of his heart rather than to conform to the racial politics and social customs of the South's patriarchal culture seem to rekindle and reinforce in Inman, if only indirectly, his own difficult pursuit of recovering the values of home, humanity, harmony, love, and togetherness—all of which he seems to associate with his return to Cold Mountain.

Inman, of course, does eventually reach Cold Mountain and does reunite with Ada Monroe. And while the time that they spend together in their reunion is relatively short, Inman, as McCarron and Knoke state, does nevertheless "consummate the healing of his wounded spirit in a sexual liaison with Ada which will result in the birth of a daughter who will insure his legacy." Thus Inman's death, as McCarron and Knoke further note, is due "not to the meaningless violence of a politically motivated war hundreds of miles away, but [results from his desire] to protect his ‘family’ on the homefront." Functioning in this role as a man who has been restored to a way of thinking and acting consonant with being at home, of feeling one with his Appalachian culture and achieving a sense of unity with the woman he loves and plans to marry and with whom he will share his future, Inman is killed. He dies simply because he cannot, when the situation demands it, readily and quickly revert to the mindless savagery to which his war experience had previously conditioned him. Now with a renewed and strengthened sensitivity, which the bonding experiences of his journey home have rejuvenated in him, Inman cannot become again the person that he once was. With the sudden appearance of the home guard, even though Inman "recognized himself back in the familiar terrain of violence," he refrains from reacting instinctively and therefore violently, as he has often done earlier in his journey, hoping, Frazier tells us, "not to have to shoot" a young Confederate home guardsman who challenges him. As a consequence of his sensitivity, Inman lets down his guard, and the youthful guardsman fatally wounds him. It seems understandable that Inman, a new Inman, who has begun to be restored to a sense of comfort and security derived from being on home ground again, appropriately dreams, as he lies

dying in Ada's arms, "a bright dream of a home." His dream, which has an enticing and solacing serenity about it, suggestive of the charm of pastoral ambiance, conveys a sense of unified cohesion, of all things interfusing into what appears a perfect harmonic whole:

It had coldwater rising spring rising out of rock, black dirt fields, old trees. In his dream the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all the seasons blending together. Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plants blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves red as October, corn tops tasseling, a stuffed chair pulled up to the glowing parlor hearth, pumpkins shining in the fields, laurels blooming on the hillsides, ditch banks full of orange jewelweed, white blossoms on dogwood, purple on redbud. Everything coming around at once. And there were white oaks, and a great number of crows, or at least the spirits of crows, dancing and singing in the upper limbs.

The vision that the dying Inman sees in his dream, then, becomes not one of divisiveness, disparity, and meaningless violence but of the reconciliation of opposites, coalescing into what seems a perfect harmonious whole. In describing how this tranquil moment might appear to a passing observer, Frazier clearly conveys that the scene affirms togetherness and exudes tranquility: "A scene of such quiet and peace that the observer on the ridge could avouch to it later in such a way as might lead those of glad temperaments to imagine some conceivable history where long decades of happy union stretched before the two on the ground."

While Inman's dream may be interpreted as his discovery of a "heaven on earth" (McCarron and Knoke, p. 383), of the kind he remembered that his Cherokee friend Swimmer once told him about, it also seems analogous to the kind of hope for togetherness, community, understanding, and ultimately racial accord that Dr. Martin Luther King proclaimed in his "I Have a Dream" speech. King closes his speech with a prophetic vision commemorating liberation, solidarity and unification, and equality, which he predicts will occur "when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands" (my emphasis). Inman's dream too resonates with images connoting merger, the synthesis of disparate and contradictory elements, such as "all the seasons blending together [and] apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring …, [with] everything coming around at once."

Cold Mountain reverberates some of the same ideals of King's speech by featuring situations involving cross-racial bonding and the values of a peaceful loving home concomitant with it, both of which are predicated on the notions of the acceptance of differences and togetherness, that seem generally analogous to King's optimistic vision of the coalition of different races, religious denominations, and the like. After all, Inman has been exposed, directly or indirectly, and Ada, to a lesser extent, to situations that afforded them the opportunities to cross barriers, especially racial barriers, and to learn and/or participate first hand in such experiences. As we have seen, in addition to his bonding with the Cherokee Swimmer, Inman also attentively observed and has been affected by the practice of harmonic communal living among a racially diverse gypsy band; the sensitivity and other-directedness of the yellow slave who fed, sheltered, and assisted him to find a safe route home; and finally Odell, whose persistent dedication to finding and to reconnecting with an octoroon slave woman is followed, upon his failure to accomplish that goal, by his discovering another sense of bonding in his willing display of compassion for the "other" in his efforts to help a suffering slave woman. And Ada and her companion, Ruby, who seem to harbor no racial prejudice, bonded with, helped to renew, and otherwise assisted the homeless war refugees and their slaves from Tennessee, whose intent was to connect with relatives in South Carolina. Underlying all these events, one may discover the key to understanding the broader ramifications of Cold Mountain. In the context of King's "I Have a Dream" speech, the trope of cross-racial bonding, which occurs with some frequency in Cold Mountain, underscores one of the novel's central themes: the need for cohesive community, social stability, and togetherness, a need most frequently actuated in the willingness of the central characters and those who guide and assist them to accept, to embrace, and ultimately to emulate behavior that encourages human bonding and that correspondingly promotes the sense of the values conducive to harmonic home life.

Source: Ed Piacentino, "Searching for Home: cross-racial Bonding in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain," in Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 1, Winter 2001-2002, pp. 97-116.

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Frazier, Charles, Cold Mountain, Vintage Books, 1998.

——, "How the Author Found the Inspiration for His Civil War-Era Novel among the Secrets Buried in the Backwoods of the Smoky Mountains," in salon.com, http://www.salon.com/july97/colddiary970709.html (accessed May 28, 2006).

Gardner, James, "Common ‘Cold?’" in National Review, December 31, 1997, pp. 54-55.

Heddendorf, David, "Closing the Distance to Cold Mountain," in Southern Review, Vol. 36, No. 1, Winter 2000, pp. 188-95.

Holt, Karen C., "Frazier's Cold Mountain," in Explicator, Vol. 63, No. 2, Winter 2005, pp. 118-21.

Miller, Laura, "Charles Frazier's Majestic Civil War Novel, Cold Mountain, Evokes a Harrowing Odyssey and a Lost Way of Life in the Blue Ridge Mountains," in salon.com, http://www.salon.com/july97/coldintro970709.html (accessed May 28, 2006).

Review of Cold Mountain, in Publishers Weekly, May 5, 1997, pp. 196-97.

Further Reading

Foote, Shelby, The Civil War: A Narrative, Vintage, 1986.

In this trilogy that was adapted by Foote and Ken Burns into a popular PBS mini-series, Foote chronicles not only the historical facts of the war, but brings a novelist's sensibility to his characterization of many of those who were affected by it, which makes them come alive on the page.

Knoke, Paul, and Bill McCarron, "Images of War and Peace: Parallelism and Antithesis in the Beginning and Ending of Cold Mountain," in Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 52, Spring 1999, pp. 273-85.

In this article, the authors show how the novel's main themes are illustrated by the design of the opening and closing chapters. This design, they claim, contrasts images of war and peace and so establishes the main characters' struggle to move away from the first and toward the latter.

Ross, John, The Smithsonian Guides to Natural America: Atlantic Coast & the Blue Ridge Mountains: Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Virginia, North Carolina, Random House, 1995.

Updating and expanding Bartram's guide through this region, Ross presents a comprehensive view of the natural landscape of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Wagner, Margaret E., and Gary Gallagher, The American Civil War: 365 Days, Harry N. Abrams, 2006.

This book gathers together over five hundred photographs, lithographs, drawings, cartoons, posters, maps, and letters from the war, covering a wide range of subjects, including politics, battles, slavery, and the treatment of women and civilians during this period.