www.thomasesimmons.net Published by TouchPoint Press
Represented by Loiacono Literary Agency
For aficionados of Vicksburg and Civil War history, a book by Gulfport native Thomas E. Simmons may pique your interest.
By Accident of Birth was published in December 2015 and details the life of the fictional Quinn family from the Civil War’s Siege of Vicksburg through World War I.
It begins with a prologue set in 1915, near the beginning of World War I, when Bethany Quinn is contacted by a representative of the British Crown inquiring about a stash of weapons warehoused in a sugar mill she owns in Cuba.
The call causes Quinn to think back over her tortured life and she re-reads after many years the diaries of her mother, Annielise Quinn, and that of a close family friend who helped raise her, Dr. Theodore Perkins.
Quinn, whose birth and life are nothing short of an extraordinary tale — maybe too extraordinary for some readers to take seriously — is the product of the horrors of the Siege of Vicksburg.
Vicksburg residents who study Civil War history will be interested in reading Simmons’ portrayal of times during the siege. The story interweaves its fictional characters with historic events of the time. Simmons takes great pains to accurately portray life of the times and includes a bibliography of source materials with the book.
Simmons’ attention to detail, like his descriptions of life for Confederate troops in the trenches dug in the bluffs above the Mississippi River and life for the city’s former elite who were forced from their homes into caves dug around the city in an effort to stay safe during the almost constant shelling by Union soldiers from gunboats on the Mississippi, is heart wrenching.
The Quinn family chose to remain in their Vicksburg townhouse as the siege began, rather than return to their plantation, Shamrock, located south of Vicksburg on the road leading to Natchez.
The Quinn women — matriarch Nannie and her daughter Annielise, along with newly-freed Arabella, who has served the family as its house slave and helped raise Annielise — make their way back to Shamrock after the siege, only to find it burned to the ground. Through sheer grit and determination, the ladies, along with the only remaining former slave left on the plantation, the elderly Nicodemus, start anew.
Soon after the ladies return to Shamrock, they discover Annielise is with child, thus the strange circumstance of the birth of Bethany.
Bethany would later make her way to Cuba, where she was the charge of an uncle, Jonathon Quinn, a gunrunner, Cuba.
Quinn lives her life with constant guilt because of the circumstances of her mother’s pregnancy with her and because of the consistent role war has played in her life.
While reading the novel can at times seem cumbersome because of Simmons’ effort to stay true to the language of the time by using words like ‘lugubrious,’ ‘pestiferous’ and ‘connubial,’ the story is captivating and will keep readers up well past their typical bedtime.
By Accident of Birth is Simmons’ fourth book. Publication of a sequel, The Last Quinn Standing, is expected later this year.
- By Jan Griffey, The Vicksburg Post