Category Archives: South Carolina

Novel Adjacent : Caesar and the Blue Jays

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Noodling around with cover ideas

I don’t know about other writers, but in the course of writing my novel (set in South Carolina, 1737 to 1744), I wrote tons of extraneous passages. Sometime I wrote essays to clarify my knowledge about history. Sometimes I focused on secondary characters to get a better sense of them even though they didn’t figure prominently in the story. For a fair amount of “side pages,” I didn’t know why I wrote them or even that they were necessarily extraneous.

Anyway, here’s a scene I wrote four years ago featuring a secondary character named Caesar. It’s November 1744 and Caesar remains on the Lucas Plantation with a dozen other slaves. Eliza Lucas has gotten married and moved and Saffron, Saffron’s daughter, Maggie, and Indian Pete have run away, trying to reach a maroon sanctuary near Cane Creek, west of Charleston. The scene refers to his unrequited crush on Melody (one of the main narrators) and mentions how he was hobbled for an attempt at running away (that’s when they slash your Achilles tendon, if you don’t know).

Ashley River

He knew to look for the flattened grass chutes where the alligators slide in and out of the creek. Kept an eye out, too, for water moccasins — particularly as he ducked under branches where the snakes liked to sun themselves. Caesar walked slowly in any case, what with the slashed tendon on his left ankle.

Today, Sunday, no task. Mo and Hercules had gone fishing, taking the cypress raft hidden in the reeds east of the cabins. Mo knew the best places, Herc along for the ride. If they were lucky, there’d be chud for dinner.

He looked west — the direction Maggie had run and then Saffron, and then weeks later, Indian Pete. He traced an imaginary line from his trapped heart to their free bodies. It calmed him somehow. He tried to picture the maroon community at Cane Creek. Did they sing? Grow okra? Make benne wafers?

Of course he knew about the place, they all did. Been hearing about it for years, in fact. But ever since Saffron, Maggie, and Indian Pete had high-tailed it in that direction, it seemed more real. The substance of dream going from flimsy osnaburg to dense pluff mud.

He had another purpose that quiet morning. It was to observe the place where two drowning victims had been pulled out of the water last week — a white boy and his tag along. One of the Archer sons and Drake. Drake was the best fiddler in the Low Country, so his absence would be felt by the enslaved up and down the Ashley River, the next hullabaloo quieter, marked by the loss of him.

Word had it that the bodies were found clutching each other, one to the other. It was easy to understand why, in terror, a white boy and a grown black man might embrace for comfort, no matter how dull and stupid the white reactions! To them, a scandal. But what was less easily understood was the cause. What had flipped the boat and sent the two to their watery graves? Had to’ve been a gator and not necessarily a big or mean one either, just a hungry one. But he’d heard the bodies were intact?

To look west toward Cane Creek, as Caesar did again now, was to bump into the substance of freedom. Not a star barely visible in the night, too far off and lonesome to matter. Not a sack of coins buried with the sketchy hopes of buying manumission. But something more like a panther crying out — a haunting screech easily heard by all. “Freedom. Freedom.”

“Caesar! Caesar!”

Hobbled near to lame, there was no possible way for him to outrun patrollers or outwit the hounds. He might be foolish in love, moony still for Melody though she’d been gone for two seasons now, but not about what his body could or could not do. He could sow rice and weed it and harvest it and polish it and he could aerate the indigo vats with the long carved paddles. But the only reason he was still alive was that he’d stopped trying to run. That, and he was overseer’s favorite cussing target and wanted him around. Words harsh and vile were always better than the cow hide, but over time the shaming added up — like debris during freshet, when scattered leaves and branches turned into an impromptu dam.

One day one word was gonna sink Overseer’s pettiauger. Caesar would strike so fast, Mac’d never see it coming. And what with the Lucas family gone now, who would arrange his execution?

Maybe he COULD hightail it. After all, he remembered the braids on Saffron’s crown — how the turn near her ear signaled the lightning-struck tree at the head of the Choctaw trail.

He knew hunger, so he didn’t worry about that.

He hawked a pearl of spit into the creek. Resigned. “Forget it.” It’d be better to burn down the newly built barn than strike Overseer. The loss of two consecutive barns might do MacIntyre in as good as any blow to the head.

The longing to be free pulsed almost like another heart in his ribcage. If it weren’t so very familiar, so very right and real, the other heart might feel like an intruder. But the longing to be free could never be the thing that was out of place. Ever.

Slate sky. Cool air. Six months since all was upended. White lady married and moved. Mistress sailed off to the West Indies, taking with her the one woman both hearts ever loved. Melody. Who will be there to comfort her when she acutely misses Moses? Who will be there to wink and smile at the receipt of a coded letter from Philadelphia? Her son — alive and free! Phoebe, of course. Phoebe would be there.

He stood in the reeds near the new barn. It cast a bulky shadow away from him, away from the creek. It would never seem real to him, this barn. Instead, it would stand always as an imposter, a fake built on the poetic wreckage of Saffron’s flaming goodbye. Good lord, that’d been a day! Mac’s face so red it was as if he’d swallowed the fire. No mere reflection of the crackling conflagration, not the heat of his Highland rage arising, but fire consumed and eaten and then combusting behind the freckled planes of his face.

Now it was November. A Sunday. No task. A blue jay squawked past his shoulder and then wheeled and landed on the dock. Funny how some things endured: the dock, the tabby path to Porch House, tripods holding stew-pots over fires on the street, the quiet of sleep. Another jay zipped past. Landed.

Caesar pointed his chest west again in a direct line to where he imagined Cane Creek and the Free Wilds to be. So many possible outcomes! Maggie could’ve made it, but not Saffron or Indian Pete. Indian Pete could’ve made it and neither Saffron nor her daughter. If only one was to succeed, it would make sense it’d be Indian Pete what with his PeeDee father, the land in his blood. Maybe all three made it but the maroons had moved on — scared up into hills or slaughtered by some feckless and determined patroller wanting the bounty of two pence per scalp (with ears attached).

Caesar knew he’d never make the attempt, not hobbled as he was. Not unless he could steal a horse and these days there were only two on property and what with Overseer being so proper attached, he’d sense an absence before a single, shuddering nicker of escape was made.

No, Caesar was stuck, like so many.

Being stuck was one of the very least affronts of slavery, but it still counted, and like shame, its unbearability accrued over time.

Both jays flapped off. Caesar was abandoned yet again. He had no wings, no horse, no pair of properly operating feet. Here he was on a Sunday in November under a slate-grey sky. He could stay out of trouble so that Overseer didn’t brand his face with an “R” or castrate him. He could maybe go to his grave with both ears still attached to his head. These were not nothing.

McCleod Plantation

***

Another post about maroon communities.

Good thread on SC history

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It’s a long thread but interesting. The term “maroon” comes from the Spanish meaning, “untamed.” It is not, as one might think, a reference to skin color. In my historic fiction manuscript, three characters run away to a maroon community in Cane Creek. This was a real place in the swamps west of Charleston.

Black History, a selection

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From The 1619 Project, EPISODE TWO: “Rape was so prevalent during slavery that today 1/4 of the genetic makeup of Black Americans can be traced back to Europe through the paternal line.”

Colonial governments made descent of children of enslaved women matrilineal in order to ensure that any children they bore were slaves (even the mixed race children, say, of their owner).

The episode goes on to examine the lopsided health care that contemporary Black women receive, tying the shameful conditions directly back to slavery.

FACT: Black women die in childbirth at THREE TIMES the rate of white women.

FACT: Black infants die at TWICE the rate of whites babies, a discrepancy that disappears when the OB is Black.

FACTS: Black patients are under-treated for pain, as if there were biological differences between Black and white people. Furthermore, their life expectancies are shorter and they’re often blamed for their health issues.

Slave owners always had an economic interest in the reproduction of their slaves, but after Congress banned the importation of Africans in 1808, it became an even more important way to preserve and build wealth.

In the amazing novel WASH, by Margaret Wrinkle, the white slave owning protagonist hires out the enslaved character named Wash for the purpose of procreation. Keeps meticulous records. Is paid for the “exchange.” One of many poignant moments occurs towards the end when Wash burns that ledger and lets those flames then take a barn down.

I know from my research that in South Carolina in the mid-eighteenth century, slave owners believed that breeding Africans with Native Americans would produce stock better adapted to winters.

Breeding. Stock.

And BTW, another source of wealth for early colonizers as to round up, kidnap, and sell Native Americans to slave markets in the West Indies. Native Americans were not favored as slaves in South Carolina because they had family in the area and knew the landscape better than anyone, heightening the chances of their escape.

A long-winded memory share

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K and I went to Charleston five years ago to celebrate my 60th birthday (Did you say FIVE YEARS AGO?)

One of the places we toured was Boone Hall Plantation.

I was reminded of the tour this morning because as I was driving to pick up my new glasses I listened to most of an NPR interview with Nikole Hannah-Jones talking about her enormously influential 1619 Project.

I still have the 2019 NYTimes Magazine

In the interview, Hannah-Jones talks about the anodyne history offered in public schools. How much is missing. How Black history is American history is Black history. And how certain words either romanticized slavery or further demeaned the enslaved.

One of those words was “plantation.” It’s a word that calls to mind Tara of Gone with the Wind. It makes us think of long, beautiful live-oak-lined allees (which Boone Hall has), instead of snake-infested rice fields and all kinds of human misery. The better term, she suggests, is “labor camp.”

When K and I arrived at Boone Hall, they were setting up chairs for an outdoor wedding. I was appalled and said so on Facebook. There I was schooled by a local docent / historian who said that without the income produced by such affairs, many significant historic sites would’ve been turned into condos and golf courses. Okay, but still.

A Boone Hall employee sitting on a chair outside the first of many slave dwellings proudly announced that Boone Hall was “the second most romantic setting for a wedding in America.”

Without thinking, I said, “What’s number one — Auschwitz?”

If I’d been thinking, of course, I would have named an American setting. Perhaps Riker’s Island?

That’s it. That’s the memory.

Small add on — the first time I ever saw an eagle was at Boone Hall.

This popped up on my Instagram feed moments after I posted.

when rabbit holes are “work”

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You may recall that my manuscript consultant suggested an epilogue. How about 1758? That’s the year Eliza and her husband, Charles Pinckney, return to South Carolina after a lengthy stay in England. Charles dies in July. Malaria claimed a lot of lives in colonial America.

Prior research had been pretty laser-focused on the years 1738 to 1744. With many historic tomes, in fact, I just stopped reading at 1745. I barely read Eliza’s letters after her marriage in ’44.

Well that’s not entirely true. I read them two or three times, but I didn’t MINE them and their footnotes for personal events and tone and history.

So I had to ask: what was Charles Town like fourteen years after my original narrative ended? Also, because one character flees to Philly, what was the City of Brotherly Love like in 1758?

Imagine my glee — yes glee! — to learn about an early abolitionist who published the very first unequivocal position against slavery in the western world! His name was Anthony Benezet and he was a Huguenot-turned Quaker. The Quakers adopted the proclamation in Philadelphia in 1758. *

I found a Library of Congress lecture by one of Benezet’s biographers, Maurice Jackson, and listened to it in its entirety (those of you who know me understand how rare that is).

Why isn’t he better known?

His pamphlet or Slave Almanac was later copied in large measure by better known abolitionist John Wesley and relied upon by the likes of Granville Sharp.

I noodled around Ben Franklin’s early career as a printer (he was out of the business by 1758) and his then equivocal stance on slavery — or at least his unwillingness to attach his name to those early anti-slavery pamphlets.

The other thing to know generally was that the French and Indian war was going on. It was the reason why Charles and Eliza Pinckney had returned to South Carolina. They wanted to secure or sell their properties.

Fun fact: the Join or Die flag originally referred to the necessity to cooperate in the fight against France and only later was coopted by the Revolutionaries battling Britain.

* The proclamation was approved at a Quaker Yearly meeting in 1758 but not printed until 1759.

In other news, the wisteria is blooming and I got my hair cut. New glasses ordered. All systems go!

And I’m making a tunic. Ha! I’ll let you know how it goes.