Tag Archives: Eliza Lucas Pinckney

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.

Writing about writing

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This post is a prompt response from yesterday. Of five provided images, the one I responded to was of a piebald horse (not unlike the one above). I quote two poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Joyce Kilmer and for your enjoyment include the entirety of the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, Pied Beauty, at the end.

It helps to know that I am ten years plus into writing a novel in which one of the central characters is Eliza Lucas Pinckney (b. 1722) and that the other three main characters are enslaved Black women.

 

Rhombuses of Light

The morning light is sectioned
mintons and mullions
through the glass, hitting floor and
wall, bending at baseboard.
She often referred to light
as “lozenges.”

It’s the glow we like
especially when April
breezes seep past sills
and chill. But what about the
bend at the baseboard?
An easy compliance.

“Glory be to God for dappled
things,” said the poet.
Rhombuses of light
are not pied or
dappled, but when created
by a window speak
to the relationship between
solidity and light.

She repeats herself. All
those references to clouds!
It’s time to find and replace.
Thunderclouds with slate
grey bottoms, slants of
rain like an etching against
the horizon. Again, Eliza,
really?

Her friend rode a dappled
grey sixteen hands high. How I had
to look all that up, authority running
to cats and dogs and at a stretch to
the way the interior of a barn
smells and how light catches
dust and particles of hay
drifting below the rafters.
How light and gravity inform
a moment.

Imagination as authority,
not a popular position
these days.

Ripples of clouds above
the marsh, liked ruched
silk. Sunlight on creek
shining like pewter. God
in nature. We get it! Eliza
got it.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
got it.

Light will slide up the
wall as day goes on.
Sometimes the miraculous has
a predictable element to it.

All those author interviews
and how they make her
shrink. What’s on HER
bedside table? Did she
even read as a child?

The Case of the Hidden
Staircase.

But it occurs to her now,
more memory than thought,
that reading Gerard Manley
Hopkins as a teenager
opened a previously
undisclosed chamber in
her heart.

You can do that with
language? Light can
bend at baseboard
and be celebrated and in
strange syncopations?
Why does one element
mimicking another thrill
the senses? Light like
water. Sedimentary rock
like ripples of corduroy.
Memory like glass.

As a priest, he told
himself to shut up.
Figures an early hero of
mine would go to such extremes
and for all the wrong
reasons. Virginia Woolf with
rocks in her pockets.

Heroes, heroines, perhaps
best not to have them —
but how else learn how
to write, how not to panic,
how to pick at a scab and
move on?

Just once, she’d like the column
to soberly reveal an author
that didn’t read until she
was seventeen or so. Too busy
mucking about in creeks and
negotiating with terror. Why
sit still?

Music floods the chest.
A good reason for silence,
she thinks, a single window
at a time being enough,
the light passing through
glass from the east,
inching toward the center of the hall.

You mean to tell me
the rhombuses of light float down the wall
and not up as morning progresses?
The unreliability
of observation. What motes?
What barn? Memory like glass.

Eliza’s daughter was about to
turn eleven when he died. Eliza’s
husband. Harriett’s father.
The dates are there for the finding.
July 12, 1758 and August 7, 1758.

What I make of turning
eleven just after the death of
a parent is not what you will
make of the same.

Even Harriett, poor dear,
would have made several
things of a singular devastation.

She had wanted to read
“Pied Beauty” at her father’s
funeral. The altar boy
turned atheist would have
appreciated its point, even
if Longfellow and Poe were
his favored fare.

Her sister overruled the selection.
Longstanding habits
of bullying that can’t even
be attributed to grief.

“I think that I shall
never see a poem as
lovely as a tree,” he
wrote in my autograph
book — remember those? —
“But with his help, I’ve
made a Dee.”

“He fathers-forth whose
beauty is past change.”

Swapping out an altar
in the Catholic Church for the
Kinderhook Creek doesn’t mean
one has no god.
Trout fishing as sacrament.

Harriett was ten about to turn
eleven. I was 24 or 26 and the fact that I can
never remember without adding age-at-death to
one birth year and then subtracting another
birth year speaks to loss.

 

*     *     *

Poetry Fdtn link here.

Adding light, revising novel

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I’m adding light and shadow to appliqued hawk. Made her head lighter and used white poly for beak to make it pop. A scrap of fabric practically fell out of the basket and felt like a minor show of Providence.

Jude had the idea over on Instagram to darken some of the ripples around the hawk’s head. Since I like the way it adds a sense of motion, I may continue around the body as long as I have that color thread. It’ll look good flowing off the wings.

Had some gross polyester swirled with black in that basket, too. Added to tail and wings for more contrast. Light. Maybe you can see a difference with earlier incarnation, maybe not (below).

It’s nice to have company.

In the meantime, I finally talked to my paid manuscript consultant yesterday. Round three coming up. I know I’ve said this before but it bears repeating, perhaps even shouting off the rooftops: SHE LOVES MY BOOK.

I think people forget how solitary a process writing is.

House names should not be italicized. If I’m gonna talk about the elder Middletons toward the end, they need to be introduced earlier. Still sags here and there — needs tightening. Not so many descriptions of clouds, perhaps. Maybe not so much about Melody’s first owner. Explain what head rights are and how to memorialize land in Author’s Note, which starts like this:

When I began this novel, Trayvon Martin was alive and as I finished the second edit, George Floyd was dead.

The suggestion that I add an epilogue (say in 1758 after Eliza and Charles Pinckney return from a five year stay in England), will take a little more thought. That’s fourteen years after my original end. Lots of years I haven’t thought about all that much.

A six year time frame (1738 to 1744) allowed a laser-like focus. Etiquette in 1720? I don’t care! Rice markets in 1750? Also don’t care. Now I need to care. I’ll start with Eliza’s letters.

A walk with temps in the 40’s was cause for celebration this week. Daffodils shoving aside leaf debris. Snow shrugging off the curbs. It won’t be long now ’til the miracle of hyacinths.

In the meantime I am trying to answer the question (Acey’s): how do you hold your heart? Or maybe just asking it. Softly.

The collage challenge with Paris Collage Collective continues. This week: Shirley Chisholm.

More to come. I want to cut up seed catalogues and wreathe her head with flowers. In the collage above, the headstone of Harriett Jacobs served as reference to the long history of oppression, Jacobs being another Black woman who overcame so much.

Names of the enslaved in Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s will

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In the spirit of ‘saying their names,’ the names of the enslaved “property” in Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s estate are listed below. Black people were enumerated in testamentary documents along with furniture, horses and mules, jewelry and land, making clear their status as chattel.

[The names listed in bold on the list are names I’ve used in my novel (in its second edit now)].

It’s also worth noting that at the time of her marriage to Charles Pinckney (May 27, 1744), Eliza’s father included about two dozen enslaved people as part of her dowry. The record tells us that Quashee (aka John Williams) was a matter of dispute between Eliza’s father and her fiance. Both men wanted him and for good reason — he was literate and an extraordinarily skilled carpenter. Eliza’s husband-to-be won out and Quashee went on to oversee and help build the newlywed couple’s new home on East Bay.

To read more about the fascinating life of Quashee, who eventually became a free man and amassed a fair amount of property, including slaves and then vanished from the record (my theory being he became too successful for whites to tolerate), please see Andrea Feeser’s book, Red, White, and Black Makes Blue / Indigo in the Fabric of Colonial South Carolina Life.

Also note: it’s a mistake to think that slaves named after days of the week were so-named out of a heartless, objectifying inattention on the part of auctioneers and owners, much like some names were based on slave trading ships (see recent post about Phillis Wheatley). In some African cultures it was common. For instance, Cudjoe (variants: Cuffy, Joe) means Monday; Quashee, Sunday.

– Hercules – slave

· Abraham – slave

· Monday – slave

· Barack – slave

· Juno – slave

· Betty – slave

· Jim – slave

· Frank – slave

· Mary – slave

· Tyrah – slave

· Smart – slave

· Elsey – slave

· Serah – slave

· Solomon – slave

· Prince – slave

· Hanay – slave

· Rachel – slave

· Mary – slave

· Jacob – slave

· York – slave

· Fortune – slave

· Doll – slave

· Joe – slave

· York – slave

· Celia – slave

· Daphne – slave

· Joe – slave

· Cuffy – slave

· Susan – slave

· Lucy – slave

· Elsey – slave

· Milly – slave

· Peggy – slave

· Ned – slave

· Binah – slave

· Peggy – slave

· Rose – slave

· Juno – slave

· Joe – slave

· Henry – slave

· Jenny – slave

· Thomas – slave

· Jacob – slave

· Bella – slave

· Betty – slave

· Hercules – slave

· Nelly – slave

· Betsy – slave

· Pindar – slave

· Caty – slave

· Pendar – slave

· Juno Henry – slave

· Harry – slave

· Ann – slave

· Pendar – slave

· Grace – slave

· Johnny – slave

· Joshua – slave

· Tenah – slave

· Nathan – slave

· Jack – slave

· Stephen – slave

· Bess – slave

· Ceasar – slave

· Robin – slave

· Adam – slave

· Binah – slave

· Caty – slave

· Sue – slave

· Cudjoe – slave

· Doll – slave

· Hannah – slave

· Dublin – slave

· Charity – slave

· Lucy – slave

· Grace – slave

· Prince – slave

· Sarah – slave

· Frank – slave

· Harriett – slave

· Abraham – slave

· Raleigh – slave

· Celia – slave

· Coleman – slave

· Ishremael – slave

· Polly – slave

· Ishramel – slave

· Henry – slave

· Gibbe – slave

· Meene – slave

· Ellen – slave

· Bella – slave

· Maria – slave

· Gilbert – slave

Added by Lowcountry Africana · July 4, 2010

PS photo was taken at Boone Hall Plantation.

Erasure Poems

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1). Start with a source document. Mine is a letter written in 1740 by Eliza Lucas Pinckney to her father.

2). Black out some words (or select some) or both.

3). Type up and read, edit if desired.

4). Repeat. Enjoy the variations.

I followed two rules: 1) all words in the Erasure Poem must be in the order that they appear in the source document and 2) all words must remain in their original form (i.e. the same tense or person). I made an exception to rule two and updated archaic spellings.

This technique, very popular in altered book circles, is one I’ve used for collage, but never for poetry. Relative to the historic fiction I’m writing (Eliza is one of the main characters), I was curious what might be revealed — anything new or useful about Eliza or her circumstances?

All of this was inspired by a poetry reading a few weeks back at Sam Durant‘s “The Meeting House” in Concord, Mass. (an Arts and the Landscape event sponsored by Trustees of Reservations). Four poets read. One of them was 2015 National Book Award winner for Poetry, Robin Coste Lewis (pictured above), who offered an erasure piece. It was intensely moving (you can hear her read three of her poems, here).

Letter from Eliza
to her Father, 1740
ONE

Honorable Sir,

Words to express the situation
beyond expression

the fearful immediate
danger

as I must own some
advantages
such as honor, perhaps profit too.

Put in with my just cause
the love you avoid
by unjust means.

The assurance that this life
depends on Dear Sir,
you.

Injurious to imagine
Heroism.

I deserve
this time.

You always persevere
Honorable Sir.

Your Daughter

***

Letter from Eliza
to her Father, 1740
TWO

To Colonel,

I want words
from you.

The situation terrifies us.
Immediate danger.
I must own

You are sensible.

Might some advantages arise
such as honor, profit too,
mere trifles
in the balance?

A just cause in preference
to every other means.
Courage enough
to will the thought
unworthy of you.

To pretend to Heroism
should conceal fears

and affections.

Always prayer.

Your most obedient
Daughter

***

Letter from Eliza
to her Father, 1740
THREE

To Sir,

I want words under you, us
Beyond and increased

Some place to differ

There, when put in the balance

Life
A just cause
Love

You avoid the assurance
that this welfare
injurious, I deserve.

To pretend
Heroism, I conceal
perpetual apprehensions.

I am always the prayer.

Your Eliza

***

Letter from Eliza
to her Father, 1740
FOUR

I am sensible and
I esteem the fight
as well as the love

Advantages arise

These mere trifles
honored a just cause
as well as every means
to retract anything more
than I deserve.

Mama and the Almighty
The constant prayer

Your obedient Eliza