Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on July 11, 2023

Set in Louisiana during the Civil War, Flags on the Bayou is a departure from the crime novels that James Lee Burke usually writes. While the novel reads like a thriller, many of the crimes that inform the novel are crimes against humanity — slavery, the wholesale slaughter of war, enforced poverty, sexual abuse of women. Yet circumstances make key characters into killers, setting up a crime story about two women who must run from the law, women who (in a nineteenth century version of Thelma and Louise) would rather die than tolerate more abuse.

Near the end of 1863, Confederate soldiers are in retreat. By virtue of the Emancipation Proclamation, there are no more slaves, but not all plantation owners agree. Slaves continue to work in the fields while slave catchers continue to round them up, whether or not they have been emancipated, to sell them at slave auctions.  

Hannah Laveau is a (former) slave who lost track of her son at Shiloh. Hannah might be a witch. God might be talking to her. She might have mutilated and killed plantation owner Minos Suarez after he raped her. She wanted to kill him but isn’t sure whether she did. She might have done the same to her jailer.

Pierre Cauchon, a constable in charge of Negro affairs who is widely regarded as white trash, considers it his duty to bring Hannah to justice, but he must deal with the humiliations he has endured from Wade Lufkin, Hannah’s (former) owner. A duel with Lufkin scars Cauchon’s face but does not solve his problem. Nor does it resolve Lufkin’s tender feelings about Hannah or Cauchon’s about Darla Babineaux, a (former) slave owned by Suarez who refuses to work in the fields again. Wade and Cauchon are both tormented by guilt about the harm they have caused to others, just as they are tormented by love.

Florence Milton is a teacher and an abolitionist. Her skin is the right color to earn respect in the South, but she is regarded as a criminal because she works to help escaped slaves find their freedom. Her gender makes her a target regardless of her political beliefs.

Two characters, both brutal and crazed, represent the worst of the Union and Confederate officers. Colonel Carleton Hayes is a character who, more than any other, embodies evil. He commands hundreds of irregulars, fighting his own battles by unconventional means. He has slashed and burned his way through the war, destroying a Texas village because a woman spat on one of his men. Yet he considers himself an exemplar of southern manners and decorum. Captain John Endicott kills and rapes indiscriminately. Other soldiers say that Endicott does not represent the Union but they do nothing to stop him.

Burke is one of my favorite writers. His characters are complex, his stories move at a steady pace, and his prose is astonishing. His narration and dialog are always quotable:

Colonel Hayes: “There is no equal to poor white trash when they get their hands on a Bible.”

Hayes: “War is a confession of failure, and its perpetrators are the merchants of death, not because they are killers but because they never had the courage to live a decent life.”

Cauchon: “With regularity, North and South, we give power to people who have no interest in us.”

Cauchon: “You don’t need to seek revenge against your enemies. The bastards eventually fall in their own shite.”

Cauchon: “Never let them tell you that there is rhyme or reason to war, lest you join the lunatics who have perpetuated its suffering from the cave to the present.”

Burke never writes a novel based on a simplistic view of the world. He recognizes good and evil and understands the vast area of gray that separates them. Soldiers and officers from both the North and the South committed atrocities during the Civil War. Soldiers fought for pride more often than they fought for ideology. Soldiers from the North looted plantations and confiscated livestock that owners needed to feed their children. Soldiers from both sides raped women. There was no glory in the Civil War, no matter how often its battles are reenacted or its officers are commemorated.

Burke considers Flags on the Bayou to be his best novel. I think he said the same thing about The Jealous Kind (2016), a novel that I would probably put at the top of the list, but Flags on the Bayou belongs in his top five. It brings the tension and pace of a thriller as it encourages the reader to contemplate the moral issues that surround war in general, and the Civil War in particular.

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