Review of White Doves at Morning by James Lee Burke:

In White Doves at Morning there is the wedding of two of my most favored things when it comes to reading, novels by James Lee Burke, and a period in our nation’s history that I frequent repeatedly, the Civil War. And there is the added touch that two of the central characters of the story are actual ancestors of the author, Robert Perry and Willie Burke. At the outset of White Doves at Morning we are on the cusp of the most brutal conflict in our nation’s history between the north and the south over the issue of slavery, with the latter playing a major part of the storyline through two characters, Flower Jamison, a slave herself, and Abigail Dowling, a transplanted abolitionist from Massachusetts. Like other novels by Burke there are the villains that embody the evil of that time, most notably Todd McCain, the town’s hardware store owner, and Rufus Atkins, a plantation overseer, as well as ambiguous characters like the slave holding, plantation owner, Ira Jamison, who seems to be just a product of the south’s societal norms. Burke covers in this novel many of the events that held sway in those turbulent years. He takes us through the brutality of war with the battles of Shiloh and the Shenandoah Valley; the hardship of a northern prisoner of war camp; the evil of slavery itself; the efforts of the underground railroad to ferry slaves to freedom; and the horror of the white supremacist groups that plagued the south in the aftermath of the war while humanizing it all through the eyes of his main protagonists. White Doves of the Morning is riddled with tragedy. At times you just want to turn away your minds-eye while certain brutalities are being depicted and pick up the story when something honorable is taking place. But Burke is anything but a romanticist. He sugarcoats nothing. None of his novels will ever find their way to the Hallmark Channel in which everything portrayed is through the lens of rose-colored glasses. Burke is a realist. He chronicles humanity as the mixed bag that it is. There are good people and there are some really, really vile ones. And it is together they occupy the stage of human history. With that in mind the wonder of Burke’s novels, as well as human history, is that there are moments of triumph as well. For example, despite all that happens to her in White Doves at Morning Flower becomes a teacher who lifts numerous former black slaves out of ignorance and into lives with dignity. We all live with such a hope, that in the end the good triumphs over the bad. But Burke gets us to that end only through a purgatorial journey. Which is to say that White Doves at Morning may not be a pleasant read but it is a worthwhile one. Reviewed by Richard Dick, Library Assistant, O’Kelly Memorial Library