Dead Reckoning

I have complicated feelings about this book.I take no issue with having a character in 1867 who has a Confederate backstory. Nor with that character being slow to trust Northerners and especially the Army. Jett's Louisiana plantation home was destroyed by the Union Army before the story begins, and that's her trauma history she has to grapple with in order to work together with a Northerner and an Army scout. That's part of Jett's character development I really liked, actually—by the end, she still refers to Gibbons as a fool yankee but she's learned how to make peace. And that's great!But. And this is a very serious “but.” This book includes the myth of Black Confederate soldiers. I have just begun reading [b:Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth 44577407 Searching for Black Confederates The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth (Civil War America) Kevin M. Levin https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1561937934l/44577407.SY75.jpg 69188809], and it has attuned me to instances of the myth that I wouldn't otherwise have remarked upon It's a testament to how pervasive the myth is. I don't think it's a case where the authors deliberately set out to rehabilitate the image of Confederates as not-racist, but that's what effectively happens in novels when you repeat a historical myth of a racially integrated Confederate Army. Suffice to say, the Confederate Army utilized the labor of free and enslaved Black people in camps, but those Black people were neither soldiers, nor trusted with weapons, nor regarded as equals by the whites around them. White Southerners during the war certainly believed that the enslaved Black people in the Confederate encampments were “loyal” to their cause, but when a soldier tells you that the enslaved bodyservant he took to the Confederate Army encampment is loyal and perfectly happy about the enslaved status, you shouldn't accept that at face value.Jett as a white Southerner in 1867 who grew up on a small Louisiana plantation would most likely have known that the Black people in Confederate Army camps were there as servants, and that most were enslaved. Jett's backstory includes positive feelings about a Creole woman enslaved by her family, but that's the extent to which this book remarks on slavery. It would be consistent with history for Jett to have unexamined ideas about slavery like this, but it is not consistent for Jett to simultaneously have grown up around slavery as something normal AND to believe that enslaved people could be trusted not to revolt when given access to weapons, without having abolitionist sympathies.White Fox's backstory is of being born in a white family and having been orphaned young and raised by a specific named Native American group that found him. He doesn't feel like he fits in with white people, and the group that raised him no longer exists by the start of the story. His character has some stereotypical mysterious-Indian elements and is quite flat, but I don't feel comfortable saying any more than that as a white person.I enjoyed the constant banter between Gibbons and Jett. I especially liked Gibbons' character as an eccentric daughter of a rich eccentric father who was the kind of eccentric that forgot to enforce gender roles.