For Purple Mountain Majesties (or Black would work just fine)

The image of a mother trying to protect her baby from most certain death is an age old story. We have seen it in The Bible with Mary and Jesus, Harry Potter, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. These are all stories we are familiar with, but in The Yares of the Black Mountains, I believe that a mother trying to protect her baby from death is used as a symbolic representation of the times.
As we discussed in class, Davis wrote The Yares of the Black Mountains a few years following the civil war and not surprisingly the country was still in a shambles. This is also the first time that we have seen a novel stepping away from the big city atmosphere and going back to the heart of America. So, with all of this being said, I would like to address Davis’ use of baby Charley to represent a sick nation and mother Denby as our heroine/lady liberty.
We know that the mother is heading south because she is hopeful a change of scenery will catapult her baby to recovery; ‘“I doubt very much whether the cloud-effects will be as good as in the White Mountains. The sky is too warm.” This was said thoughtfully. “He has one stomach-tooth almost through. The balsam-air will be such a tonic! We’ll go up if it is on foot, won’t we Charley?” And she buried her face in the roll of blanket’ (p.240). Here is this woman, a former New Yorker who is traveling with her sick baby to the south to find healing. I do not know why I did not see it sooner, but Davis’ symbolism is awfully blatant.
Finally, I found it interesting that the Yare men decided to abstain from the civil war fighting. “They were the only men anigh hyar that stood out fur the Union from first to last. They couldn’t turn agen the old flag, you see, Mistress Denby.” “They should have gone into the Federal army and helped to free the slaves,” cried the widow with rising color, for she had been a violent abolitionist in her day. “Waal, we never put much vally on the blacks, that’s the truth. We couldn’t argy or jedge whether slavery war wholesomest or not. It was out of our sight. My lads, bein’ known as extraordinar’ strong men an’ powerful bear-fighters, hed two or three offers to join Kirk’s Loyal Rangers in Tennessee. But they couldn’t shed the blood of their old neighbors” (p.260). They did not want to turn their backs on the country, but at the same time did not want to kill their neighbors. I’m not sure if I have ever seen or heard of such a scenario as people being neutral during the civil war, but it certainly does make Davis’ case to use baby Charley as a symbol of a healing nation more plausible. What a better place to nurse a sick country back to health than in one that is Confederate and Union neutral.