In The Flow of Time – January 26, 2025
A risk of good historical fiction is the author dumps tons and tons of research on you. My writing friends have hammered on me for that. Good historical fiction is not a recitation of facts, it’s a story. So here I am, trying to write a story. New Orleans and slavery are in the story. A feature of this universe are slave pens, euphemistically termed “depots” in the local vernacular. They are slave jails where people were held prisoner pending sale, at auction or to a particular buyer.
I know that these existed. I know where on the face of the earth some were in New Orleans. I know that the city council outlawed slave pens within the old city, for cosmetic reasons. Having slaves lined up on the sidewalk was off-putting. And then there’s the smell. Can’t have that in the faces of the good citizens. I know that that happened in 1829. (I now have a specific date, March 31). So the slave pens on the periphery of the old city really happens later. I’m writing in 1817. I do NOT know where any such is in that year. But I do know later.
This is where fact and truth diverge. That these exist, truth. What they were like, truth. That there was one between Esplanade and Peace (modern Kerlerec) on Chartres? Nope, it wasn’t there yet. I have city directories, there was an apothecary. But give it a few years, and yes, this is the actual physical location of a slave “depot.” So, in my research, good enough. It’s allegiance to the truth, and I’m writing fiction. So I put a slave depot there in the story.
Months later, here I am. I reach the point in the plot where Marie Laveaux and her uncle Josias Kerr, the Irish doctor, go to the slave pen to treat slaves afflicted with yellow fever. I’ve been working on this chapter for days, because I feel inadequate to the task of conveying the human horror. What’s the physical scene? What’s it like? How many people are there? What does it smell like? How can I write about an experience so totally foreign to my life?
Well, that’s why I write, to take you to that foreign place, to experience what other humans have. I’m most of the way there, it’s good, I’m a good writer. I can play with your heartstrings and bring tears. But is it truth? I don’t know. My solution to this is more research. Deep, deep down the hole. I’m hunting for floor plans for slave pens, for names, dates… and I discover….
Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northrup. I’d certainly heard of the title, it’s a famous movie. It is the first-hand account of a free man of color in New York State, seized/kidnapped and sold into slavery. Gonna watch the movie eventually, but I have his original book. And I’m about to go read it.
Because… first hand account. Original source. This man really suffered this fate. His own words. That should be a massively useful, give me a clue about my writing being truth.
AND THEN I discover…
In 1841 he was shipped to New Orleans for sale, and he was held prisoner in the very same slave pen that I settled on, months ago, knowing next-to-nothing.
Every now and then astonishing synchronicity appears. I have in hand the first person account of a man who–24 years later–was in the place I’m trying to imagine. He will tell me the truth. It gets better.
Onboard ship on the way to New Orleans, one of his comrades died of smallpox. After this shipment of slaves arrived at the slave pen, within a couple of days they all fell sick with smallpox. Says Mr. Northrup, “He would send for the head physician of the hospital. Shortly, the head physician came—a small, light-haired man, whom they called Dr. Carr. He pronounced it small-pox, whereupon there was much alarm throughout the yard.” There are a couple of references in this paragraph to Dr. Carr.
So, I see “Dr. Carr” and my spider sense goes off. In Northrup’s memoir, this is a senior physician involved with the charity hospital who treats Black people. There is, for real, a Dr. Kerr, and he’s already a significant character in the story. He’s historical, a senior physician in New Orleans, who treats Black people.
I was sufficiently intrigued, I spent a couple of hours this afternoon chasing down Doctor Carr. He doesn’t exist. I looked, in the city directory for 1842, in the US census for 1840. There is no Dr. Carr. There are many physicians listed. Dr. Kerr shows up in all the sources. He is the only one with a name a whisker away from Carr.
I am as sure as I can be, 185 years later, that Solomon Northrup was treated by Dr. Josias Elliott Kerr, a leading physician in New Orleans, who regularly treated slaves. He was married to Manette Trudeau, Marie’s white aunt. In the novel, they are the only decent people in my family. 🙂 If only Solomon Northrup had mentioned an Irish accent. 🙂
As best I can tell, Solomon Northrup dictated his memoir. The editor says his object was “to give a faithful history of Solomon Northrup’s life, as he received it from his lips.” And that Northrup “carefully perused the manuscript, dictating an alteration where the most trivial inaccuracy has appeared.”
So Kerr transmutes into Carr in the ears of the amanuensis, and here I am thinking how cool it might be to drop the real Solomon Northrup into the fictional story, along with the real Josias Kerr.
(EDIT: That may happen in Laveaux: Mother, the second book on her life. A man I know to be historical, already in the story, married into the family, Marie’s uncle, treated the real Solomon Northrup for smallpox. That’s too good to pass up.)
