Category Archives: historic fiction

Bibliography — Historic Fiction, Colonial SC

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The following list captures most of the sources read (all or in part) over the last many years as research for the novel I’m calling The Weight of Cloth. I have another notebook to go through though and very few of the websites I consulted are here yet, so it’s not complete.

Ashton, Susanna. I Belong to South Carolina. Univ of South Carolina Press, 2012.

Blier, Suzanne Preston. The Royal Arts of Africa: The Majesty of Form. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1998. Print.

Brown, William Wells, et al. The Great Escapes. Barnes & Noble, 2007.

The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns. By Ken Burns, Geoffrey C. Ward, and David G. McCullough. Prod. Ric Burns. PBS, 1990.

Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina, 2004. Print.

Carawan, Guy, and Candie Carawan. Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life? University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Carney, Judith Ann. Black Rice. Harvard University Press, 2009.

Craton, Michael. Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1997.

Douglass, Frederick, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

Eaton, Clement. A History of the Old South. Macmillan, 1966.

Edgar, Walter B. South Carolina. Univ of South Carolina Press, 1998.

Eglash, Ron. African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1999. Print.

Ellis, Joseph J. American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. New York: Random House Large Print, 2007. Print.

Eyiogbe, Frank Baba. Babalawo, Santeria’s High Priests: Fathers of the Secret in AfroCuban Ifa. Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications, 2015. Print.

Farrow, Anne, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank. Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery. New York: Ballantine, 2005. Print.

Farrow, Anne. The Logbooks: Connecticut’s Slave Ships and Human Memory. Print.

Feeser, Andrea. Red, White, and Black Make Blue: Indigo in the Fabric of Colonial South Carolina Life. Print.*

Flint, India. Eco Colour. Allen & Unwin, 2008.

Fox, Tryphena Blanche Holder, and Wilma King. A Northern Woman in the Plantation South: Letters of Tryphena Blanche Holder Fox, 1856-1876. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1993. Print.*

Gates, Henry Louis. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers. New York: Basic Civitas, 2003. Print.

http://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/henry-louis-gates-jr-lecture

Gillow, John. African Textiles. Chronicle Books, 2003.

Glymph, Thavolia. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print.*

Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2008. Print.*

Haulman, Kate. The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2011. Print.

Hart, Emma. Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-century British Atlantic World. Charlottesville: U of Virginia, 2010. Print.*

Higginbottom Jr., A. Leon. In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process, The Colonial Period. New York, Oxford University Press, 1978. Print.

Hoffer, Peter Charles, Cry Liberty, The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739. Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.*

Hurmence, Belinda. Before Freedom, When I Just Can Remember: Twenty-seven Oral Histories of Former South Carolina Slaves. Winston-Salem, NC: J.F. Blair, 1989. Print.*

Hurmence, Belinda. My Folks Don’t Want Me To Talk About Slavery. John F. Blair, Publisher, 2013.

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Barnes & Noble, 2005.

Joyner, Charles W. Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. Urbana: U of Illinois, 1984. Print.*

Kenslea, Timothy. The Sedgwicks in Love: Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage in the Early Republic. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2006. Print.

Krebs, Laurie. A Day in the Life of a Colonial Indigo Planter. The Rosen Publishing Group, 2003.

Legrand, Catherine. Indigo, The Color that Changed the World, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2013. Print..

LeMaster, Michelle, and Bradford J. Wood. Creating and Contesting Carolina: Proprietary Era Histories. Print.

McCandless, Peter. Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.

McCarthy, B. Eugene, and Thomas L. Doughton. From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Narratives. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2007. Print.

McCurry, Stephanie. Masters of Small Worlds. Oxford University Press, 1995.

McKay, Nellie Y. (editor). Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Harriet Jacobs. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2001. Print.

McKinley, Catherine E. Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. Print.

Mueller, Pamela Bauer. Water to My Soul: The Story of Eliza Lucas Pinckney. Jekyll Island, GA: Pinata Pub., 2012. Print.

Mullin, Michael. Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831. ACLS History E-Book Project. 2004.

Myers, Amrita Chakrabarti. Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2011. Print.

Nelson, Louis P. The Beauty of Holiness. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Northup, Solomon, and D. Wilson. Twelve Years a Slave Narrative of Solomon Northrup, Citizen of New York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841 and Rescued in 1853 from a Cotton Plantation near the Red River, in Louisiana. Auburn: Derby and Miller, 1853. Print.

Pinckney, Eliza Lucas, and Elise Pinckney. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney. Ed. Marvin R. Zahniser and Elise Pinckney. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina, 1997. Print.

Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking, 2007. Print.

Rhyne, Nancy, and Sue Alston. John Henry Rutledge: The Ghost of Hampton Plantation: A Parable. Orangeburg, SC: Sandlapper Pub., 1997. Print.

Rhyne, Nancy. Tales of the South Carolina Low Country. John F Blair Pub, 1982.

“Rice Diversity – Educators’ Corner.” Rice Diversity, http://ricediversity.org/outreach/educatorscorner. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Rivers, Larry Eugene. Slavery in Florida, Territorial Days to Emancipation. Florida: University Press, 2009.

Rogers, George C. Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys. Norman: U of Oklahoma, 1969. Print.

Rucker, Walter C. The River Flows On. LSU Press, 2008.

Russell, Franklin. The Okefenokee Swamp. Time-Life Books, 1986.

Rutledge, Archibald. Home by the River. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941. Print.

Rutledge, Sarah. The Carolina Housewife. Columbia: U of South Carolina, 1979. Print.

Smith, Mark M. Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina, 2005. Print.

South Carolina Slave Narratives. S.I.: Native American Book, 2009. Print.

Stuart, Andrea. Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. Print.

Twitty, Michael W. The Cooking Gene. HarperCollins, 2018.

Vernon, Amelia Wallace. African Americans at Mars Bluff, South Carolina. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. 1993.

Walsh, Lorena S. From Calabar to Carter’s Grove. Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Williams, Frances Leigh. Plantation Patriot; a Biography of Eliza Lucas Pinckney. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967. Print.

Wood, Peter H. Black Majority; Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Knopf;, 1974. Print.

Wulf, Andrea. Founding Gardeners. Vintage, 2012.

Zacek, Natalie. Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670-1776. New York: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print.

Eliza Lucas – PhD Thesis

Fiction

Cloudsplitter, Russell Banks

Kindred, Octavia Butler

Sapphira and The Slave Girl, Willa Cather

Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier

The Good Lord Bird and Song Yet Sung, by James McBride

Beloved, Toni Morrison

Water to My Soul, Pamela Mueller

The Color Purple, Alice Walker

Someone Knows My Name, Lawrence Hill

Underground Airlines, Ben White

Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

The Invention of Wings, Sue Monk

Nostalgia, Dennis MacFarland

Plantation Patriot, Francis Leigh Williams

The Indigo Girl, Natasha Boyd

The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehesi Coates

Movies / TV

The Civil War (Ken Burns)

The Duchess

Amistad

John Adams – HBO series

Vanity Fair

Daughters of the Dust

Amazing Grace

Harriet

Twelve Years a Slave

Check and check

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Have I converted PeeDee to Pee Dee and PonPon Road to Pon Pon with a space? Did I switch all references to the Berber people to “Tuaregs” instead of Twuareg or Tuarog?

Have I made sure every “genteel” references refined society and not “gentiles” (oops)? Did I consistently spell lightning without an “e” in the middle and do I maybe have one too many thunderstorms?

Did I flesh out the “tag along slave” Phoebe enough for the reader to be able to see her?

Does the traumatized, silent Maggie speak early enough in the story for her late chapters to land?

Have I eliminated the second explanation of “free by courtesy”?

(if you’re curious, it’s a state of emancipation brought on by custom, not by papers like manumission papers or a will — often occurred in situations when an enslaved person was repeatedly promised that they’d be freed by will and then their owner failed to write or update their will. If that slave then acted as if they were free for long enough, they’d be considered “free by courtesy”).

I probably don’t need to add that ANY version of freedom for a Black person in the 1740’s was tenuous and subject to the violent whims of white people.

Did I eliminate enough text in the middle for the pacing to work better? Is there too much Eliza?

If my mustee character (half Pee Dee, half African), Indian Pete, is based on Prince Alston, a man described in Archibald Rutledge’s memoir, Home By The River, will it be enough to add a citation at the end?

From Home By The River: Prince Alston had a “kinship with nature as unfeigned as it was intimate.” He was “untouched by any human school of philosophy … but deeply read in the oracles of God.” Prince once plowed a field with a half wild bull that other field workers would walk a quarter mile out of their way to avoid, earning him no end of admiration.

Have I fixed all the erroneous capital H’s that I managed to insert while fixing the naming of a ship, the Hound? (Hounds show up with surprising frequency).

My dear cousin Ginny printed out the manuscript for me! With almost all the inputs, too. It will be very different to give it a read through on paper.

Thank you Ginny!

Today I woke with this thought: if we hold onto the House and flip the Senate (and trump wins), we would be able to impeach AND convict him. Given all the totalitarian strategies being employed by trump and Barr to steal the election, maybe this is the thing to focus on?

Hazel ship plus historic ship plus — sigh — Chadwick Bozeman. May he sail free.

Pin by Liz, my father’s Army picture, and from Twelve Years a Slave, Chiwetel Eijofor.

Maroons or the untamed

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I “attended” a three hour seminar with Anne Lamott this weekend. I’ll probably be talking about it for a while. She went over many of the tools explicated in her famous book on writing, Bird by Bird, but first let me say how happy I was to hear that she includes research in writing time!

Here’s a little taste of the rabbit hole I went down this week for my novel.

“Wherever Africans were enslaved in the world, there were runaways who escaped permanently and lived in free independent settlements. These people and their descendants are known as “maroons.” The term probably comes from the Spanish cimarrón, meaning feral livestock, fugitive slave or something wild and defiant.”

Smithsonian article about The Great Dismal Swamp and its long history of maroon communities. Written September 2016 by Richard Grant featuring the archeology of the intrepid Dan Sayers.

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“By downplaying American marronage, and valorizing white involvement in the Underground Railroad, historians have shown a racial bias, in Sayers’ opinion, a reluctance to acknowledge the strength of black resistance and initiative.”

It is well known that researching the history of enslaved people is difficult. For one thing, primary sources are few and far between. Then there’s white ignorance and racial animus in creating secondary sources.

Even in the instance of the Federal Writers’ Project, which collected first person accounts from Blacks who had lived under slavery, the narratives are inherently unreliable because they were recorded by white people.

Think: white person with a clipboard.

Think: Black person talking to a white person with a clipboard.

Even with the best of intentions, we can assume that white minds listening to Black thoughts and speech applied some kind of filter. And we can also assume that Black speakers shaped what they said in some way because of their white audience.

Enslaved people had little by way of possessions. A community in a remote swamp likely owned or collected even less than those dwelling “on the street” (a common naming for a collection of slave quarters).

Slave communities are nevertheless of great interest to archeologists, as evidenced by Dan Sayers in this article and by recent excavations at Monticello and Mount Vernon.

My research has also turned up references to maroon communities in the swamps north and west of Charles Town. It seems that these groups may have initially been comprised of Natives, who then welcomed fugitive slaves. The Smithsonian article posits the idea that whites fleeing indentured servitude also found their way to some of these remote areas.

Update on Second Edit of my novel: the sagging middle is getting slashed (good example of another thing Lamott talked about, the famous advice to “kill your darlings”) and the ending is being expanded.

I’m back to the pin board for the final year of chronology. (Lamott also uses this visual trick, by the way, though she described taping pieces of paper around her entire living room).

It’s important to have a map of your story SOMEWHERE. I’m not adept enough to keep it all in my head. For some stretches, this pin board had every chapter pinned to it, color-coded by POV. After a while the directory in Word on my laptop served as an outline, because I put each chapter in a separate word doc and used a consistent naming protocol that arranged them chronologically.

Right now I’m working on two large documents so until I resurrected the pin board it was a little like flying blind.

A second edit is so, so important, Lamott said, so much so that she won’t show her work to anyone until she’s done one. (oops!)

Before the second edit comes what she calls “the shitty first draft.” That’s a liberating shorthand for all kinds of things, but perhaps mostly as encouragement to forgo perfectionism or debilitating ideas about inspiration.

Another way to say it, she shared, is from Nike: Just Do It.

The heat has been brutal. Today a little less so. Do you know what it’s like walking a dog on paved sidewalks in 97 degree heat?

And lastly, I call yesterday a good day. How unfamiliar the sensation of relief twinned with hope! Biden and Harris both gave great speeches. You can view on YouTube (August 12).

PS WordPress screwed with typefont again. Ugh.

A lot of wind

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Muggy air continues. Gusty wind all day and in the last hour, rain.

Finished this. A little press will tidy the edges a bit. The fabric for the moons was dyed with indigo in South Carolina. The woven sections came after a class with Jude. I just couldn’t stop making woven rectangles for a while. The crab was stitched down a lot of years ago. It’s good to finish things, isn’t it?

But mostly, I’ve been editing. Received written comments from my editor on the last section of novel yesterday and spoke with her today.

I’ve known all along that the last bit drags. How to fix? Invent a crisis? Shorten the timeline?

I’m going with the recommendation (long-considered) of skipping a batch of years. It’s gonna help so much!

In the meantime, I need to start submitting chapters here and there with the hopes of getting part of the novel in print. It helps you get published.

The following two photos come from a tiny book called, The Art of Seeing. They were the prompts in the writing session this morning.

I’m upstairs. The book is downstairs. I’ll provide photographer’s names after dinner.

They were effective prompts.

Up before dawn

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Downstairs by four. Reading. An old Mary Stewart romance: The Moonspinners.

I have a new mental touchstone. Not quite a mantra, but close. At odd times during the day I remind myself that I am having a day that my mother did not get. She did not live to be 63 1/2. A day she did not get.

The next week, at least, will be very busy. The editor and I spoke for close to an hour yesterday. At last! We got into the weeds: chapter heading formatting, the improper use of single quotes, when to italicize.

Also addressed some content: Why Saffron has no African name when the other characters who made the Middle Passage do. Where to cut in chapters of secondary characters (Eliza’s father, Melody’s first owner). And voice. That’s a biggie. An author’s note at front was recommended to address the fact that none of the enslaved characters would have had the English vocabulary I’ve given them.