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?
We got a little snow — about an inch? It’s raining now.
Writing groups are back at it. And, the efforts toward self-publishing are beginning to cohere (open tabs on my laptop, a dedicated notebook, an accountability friend).
Yesterday I looked through my Amazon history to see when I ordered Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s letters. I started writing scenes featuring her right after that. The year: 2011. Thirteen years ago. It’s been thirteen years since I started this book.
Notes on self-publishing
Coming to terms with the idea that breaking even is a pretty good result. I never thought my writing would make me rich or anything, but really?
Next up: find three blurb writers, get a decent head shot (gonna be difficult with this flipper in my mouth), write two-sentence elevator pitch, and draft a page of acknowledgements.
Get it out, the theory has long been. Get it out and you’ll feel better. Rage, sorrow, bitter resentment, or whatever other emotion burbles just below the surface — as if to articulate say, fiery anger, was to put it to rest. But that’s not how it works, is it? At least not every time. Sometimes to spell it out and spell it out out loud lends clarity (think: Audre Lorde saying that ‘anger is loaded with information’). But along with clarity might come a bend in the amplitude, one that offends family, neighbors (if it’s summer and the windows gape open) and sends the dog slinking away to a remote part of the house. How is that helping anyone, including the one with bulging eyes and spittle on her chin?
Some tyranny tiptoes in and robs you of breath just by being silent and unbudgeable. That’s what I married into. I try to think of it as a style, to lesson its defeating force. In the face of such brutal passivity, it’s tempting to view the expulsion of rage as somehow virtuous. But it’s not. Or it’s not necessarily.
Today anticipating more big wind, more torrential rain (one might say the weather is offering its own testimony of outrage), I prepare for fury. Have I ever done this before? Maybe. Maybe the summer the black-robed liars overturned Roe v. Wade and because of a leak, we knew it was coming. (Actually, we knew it was coming listening to feckless Susan Collins’ assessment of Kavanaugh, but skip that lest it sound like bragging, even though every sane consumer of the news knew it was coming).
Let me get right to the point. Why don’t the powers that be care about my outrage? Is it just that our side owns fewer guns?
I prepare a bed to kick and jump on when the Supreme Court of the United States hands down an opinion not worth the paper it’s written on — an expected ruling that, no, Colorado does not have the right to exclude an insurrectionist from the ballot. It’ll be some bullshit about the 14th Amendment, Section 3 not being self-executing or the president not being an “officer.” Or maybe they’ll straight up dish out policy and opine about the importance of uniformity, stability, or whatever, instead of doing their goddamned job which I don’t need to remind you is to interpret and UPHOLD the Constitution.
In not doing their job, the SCOTUS will be signaling that the rage of one set of people, all on the right, matters more than the sanity of the rest of us. The “pitchfork exemption” as Timothy Snyder calls it. To rule in fear of violence means violence wins. Talk about tyranny! No tiptoeing here.
What if I start breathing fire? Climb up a water tower and let loose? Or maybe travel to Maine where some extremist is buying up land and settling in for some siege or other. Who do you think you are?
Meanwhile Justices: Don’t you dare think that ruling there is no absolute presidential immunity (an absurd and ridiculous argument) will get you off the hook on reading the Fourteenth Amendment as it was intended and as it is plainly written.
Originalists and texturalists, my ass!
The rain is expected to fall hard and in volume. The last big wind took out the Internet for three days, offering a revealing lesson about routine and connectivity that might be worth looking at but I’m not willing to do so at the moment.
What is here today, on the page, out the window? Always a worthy question and sometimes all the remedy strong emotion requires. I’ll be hungry later. There will be dog hair to swipe off the floor with the side of my hand, cooked farro to add to soup and reheat. Bath bombs arrived and that means I’ll enjoy a fragrant bath, one with orange-tinted water.
1/8 HAIKU A salt shard turns Finn into a tripod — hop! hop! — ‘til I can remove.
Three writing workshops start back up this week, two I run, one attend. The structure is good, the connections, friendships. The break was really nice too. It was one week longer than planned on account of losing the internet right before going to California.
I didn’t make soup yesterday but did today. The addition of fennel and a dollop of freshly-made pesto made this batch a little differentfrom my usual bean/tomato concoctions. Plenty by Ottolenghi the source.
His didn’t include sausage while mine used up some ancient andouille. Have no fear! I’ll survive. And if I don’t, Finn’s going down too!
Painting by Ginny Mallon (so love it!) and just received this week — two of her incredible cigar-box portraits. That’s Herman Melville on the left (with a whale inside) and Mark Helprin on the right (cats inside). I have read almost all of Helprin’s novels but never managed (shame on me!) to get through Moby Dick.
If you don’t already follow Ginny on Instagram, you should (@ virginiamallon).
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.
