One of the best aspects of writing historic fiction is going down rabbit holes. Hey! It’s research! And, since you never know what information is gonna turn out to be important, no rabbit hole is too weird.
For instance, writing The Weight of Cloth, I found a record of Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s will, which of course listed the enslaved “property“ that she was bequeathing. To see names of people written out like this was one of many moments that drove home the inhumanity of chattel slavery. But also, the testamentary disposition provided me with a list of names, and I used many of them for secondary characters in the book.
In another rabbit hole, I found the terms of Sarah Rutledge’s father’s will, which informed how I crafted her character. These are just two examples.
On Saturday (Nov 8), I found a PhD thesis written by an archaeology student about the Fairbanks household in Dedham, Massachusetts. In it, he mentions that either Ebenezer Fairbanks Senior or Ebenezer Fairbanks Junior (Jason’s father and brother) (or both) enlisted to serve in the Revolutionary War. The very next day on Sunday, the magazine section of The Boston Globe covered Ken Burns’s upcoming documentary about the Revolutionary War. There was mention of an Ebenezer serving. Now his Ebenezer wasn’t from Dedham, but the echo of Ebenezer soldiers in less than 24 hours was a moment of synchronicity that made me sit up and pay attention. Moments like these are always affirming.
So that’s the thing in writing historic fiction — historic fact is both limiting and propulsive.
Nottoway Plantation burned to the ground this week (week of May 11, 2025).
Reactions have been mixed.
Here is an Instagram response from food historian and all-round mensch, Michael W. Twitty, author of The Cooking Gene, A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South.
I shared an upclose look at the problem in this post, where I recalled my abhorrence at a witnessing a wedding being set up at Boone Hall Plantation near Charleston.
TL;DR A local historian pointed out that absent wedding income the historic site would’ve been turned into a golf course.
I saw fingerprints of enslaved brick makers in the structures there, so I can attest to the power of preservation. Still how to square the dissonance?
Compare: grinning selfies (real or staged) in front of the conflagration or reposts of whiny white laments with the caption, “Cry harder, Scarlett.”
Here’s a powerful poem read on FB this morning.
And then there’s this, posted on FB by the founder of The Slave Dwelling Project, Joseph McGill.
Another place to celebrate is Whitney Plantation, a historic site that does not rent its space for weddings and parties.
What are your thoughts? In spite of the historic preservation ideas that underpin some of the noncelebratory responses reported here, I’ll admit to finding the photo of the classically-constructed Southern Big House on fire extremely satisfying.
If you haven’t heard, Ava DuVernay has a new film out based on Isabel Wilkerson’s book CASTE. DuVernay made the interesting decision to center the telling of this book’s important messages around the figure of the author herself. I can’t wait to see it.
This interview with Lawrence O’Donnell aired last night (1/25/25).
One notable takeaway is that DuVernay did not produce ORIGIN through standard Hollywood channels because she believes getting this movie in front audiences this year really matters.
Writing this I was reminded of a small series of collages I made featuring a magazine photo of her a while back (photo probably from Vanity Fair). There was no attempt to represent the content of her work. It was more a visual celebration of the lushness of creativity and also the beauty of her curves. December 2022.
I’ve been meaning to watch her movie Selma for a dog’s age and since I want to watch it before posting notes from our trip there, maybe today’s the day.
It’s raw and rainy here and I am inexplicably tired though, so maybe tomorrow’s the day.
In other collage news, I’ve been noodling around with more cover and title ideas for my novel.
Title: Calico Burning? / SC marsh photo mineMy photo of McLeod Plantation behindMy photo of the famous Angel Oak
The novel has two important scenes featuring a calico dress hanging from a live oak tree, one in which it is set on fire. I worry that being so (intentionally) similar to images of lynching that it is too triggering to even consider. What do you think?
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. Sometimes I wrote to clarify my knowledge about history. Sometimes I focused on secondary characters to get a better sense of them. For a fair amount of “side pages,” I didn’t know why I wrote them or even that they were necessarily extraneous.
SPOILERS!
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
Caesar and the Blue Jays
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 on occasion 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. 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 structure 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 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.
Statue outside the National Memorial for Peace and Justice
Site of The Legacy Museum and the six -acre National Memorial for Peace and Justice (aka the Lynching Memorial). These were the main reasons for making the trip and they did not disappoint.
Outside the Legacy Museum
Photos were not allowed inside the museum, so I’ve embedded one of their Instagram posts.
The excitement started before we even entered the exhibits. A hubbub. Early — not even 9:30 am — and ticketed entrants spilled out of the foyer, many more waiting outside. I would’ve loved to know where people had traveled from to be there.
The museum is huge and comprehensive, covering the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, the prison pipeline, and more. Every inch of the museum is designed to appeal to both emotion and intellect, offering the visitor images, text, and audio. Some exhibits were duplicated on both sides of a small space and entries were timed, so you really could take in the displays (or try to). Other exhibits were cavernous, like the area with replicated runaway slave notices stretching 15 feet up and wrapping around stand-alone display walls.
It’s too much to convey here but let me at least describe the entry and first exhibit.
After passing through security, you enter a small dark room with one wall dedicated to a video of the ocean. It’s probably twenty feet tall. The waves are coming at you. Crashing and swelling. You feel a sense of scale — both the enormity of the ocean and the smallness of your body. And then, projected onto the waves you see a few statistics about the slave trade. Numbers of bodies kidnapped. Numbers of lives lost in transit. The scale of the tragedy is almost impossible to take in.
Next up, right after the waves, probably my favorite space. Again, it’s small and dark. This time water is projected onto the floor. It’s a luminous blue gridded with white light and it washes over the floor and then recedes. Mirrors amplify the effect. On the floor, as if emerging out of the ground or water: clay heads and busts. They are life-sized. Some are in chains, some wear iron-spike collars or ripped tunics. Others are naked. All express agony or bewilderment. Each is distinct and you cannot stop looking at them. The sparkling water washes over them then recedes, illuminating them and then leaving them in darkness. It’s astonishing.
Scattered throughout the interior are viewing rooms. In one room, there was a video about the artist who made these clay forms. Kwame Akoto-Bamfo. He is from Ghana and you can read about his work here.
The outdoor memorial also uses scale to convey the mind-bending levels of violence perpetrated by white people on Black people. The shed is huge. The down-hanging blocks represent counties, with names of known lynching victims etched upon them. They are not organized by state and so you get this dizzying impression of murder being everywhere — an unavoidable and relentless violence.
D is from Georgia and so photographed her county.
Photo by Doris Tennant
The site is not a static memorial. Each block hanging in the shed has a duplicate version stacked up out on the lawn. If a county is prepared to go through a process of public acknowledgement, they can take their block to their county and post a landmark. The plaques below are copies of such acknowledgments. They are not formulaic. I got the impression each was informed by a thorough and deep community process.
