JARRETTSVILLE
JARRETTSVILLE
By Cornelia Nixon
If a successful work of fiction is an illusionist’s trick, then surely successful historical fiction requires a kind of double deception. Just after the Civil War, a distant ancestor, Martha Jane Cairnes, made national headlines after she shot and killed her sometime lover, Nick McComas. With the steady hand and steely nerve of a practiced marksman, Martha gunned Nick down on the porch of the barroom at the local hotel. The ensuing trial blended all the elements that, then as now, thrilled and fascinated the prurient American imagination: illicit sex, betrayal, murder - and the specter of race, since local rumor held that Martha had also had a liaison with a black man.
While Nick was a Union Army veteran, Martha and her family had been Confederate sympathizers. Their town, Jarrettsville, lay in northern Maryland, just a few miles below the Mason-Dixon Line, occupying its own strange no man’s land between North and South. A slaveholding state, Maryland had nonetheless remained in the Union while clandestinely sending thousands of men to fight for the rebels. Nick McComas’s murder took place, perhaps not coincidentally, on the very day that he and other pro-Northern townsfolk gathered to celebrate the anniversary of Appomattox while their pro-Southern neighbors (and, in many cases, kin) fumed on the sidelines.
Nixon, who teaches creative writing at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., first heard the story of Martha Cairnes’s crime as a teenager while returning to the West Coast from a trip to old family farms back East.
In preparing to write her novel, Nixon returned to investigate the long-forgotten drama. She ably conveys the dark atmosphere of Reconstruction, which, in a place like Jarrettsville, could be more brutal - and even, at times, more bloody - than the wartime period itself. Compared with the states of the vanquished Confederacy, Maryland felt only a minimal federal presence. A few pages later, on the other hand, the dialogue plunges into mucky 19th-century cliché when Martha is referred to as a “perfect bud of Southern womanhood.” Even more cringe-producing, Nixon’s African-American characters, though sympathetic, often speak a kind of Uncle Tom dialect. Not that the white characters in “Jarrettsville” are much better. While badly rendered history, like a forged painting, may pass undetected for only a little while, writing like that is timeless. You could find the book here.
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