In The Flow of Time – November 11, 2024
I’ve started writing the novel about Marie Laveaux. I did chapter one a while back. It’s seeing some tweaks and adjustments as I write the characters. Details appear that I hadn’t thought of, or that are beneath the level to which I dive. For example, it turns out that character Angelique is left-handed.
Where does that come from?
That particular scene is a suppertime conversation. As the characters come to life, I can sit in the room, see them as they sit. I know the chairs are wooden, no cushions, because I’m there. I’ve got faces. Grangran Angelique leans over her bowl of gumbo to make a point in the conversation. She’s holding the spoon in her left hand. Of course I made it up, it’s my imagination. But at the very same time, Angelique did this herself. No one else is left handed, only she is. It turns out, uncle Joseph has gray at the temples, despite being 30 years old. I didn’t know that. I saw it when he walked into the room.
In the next chapter, I expected a quiet celebration, a family party. Charlotte has purchased her own daughter Robinette, with plans to emancipate her. But just because, she arranges a marching band to come by, joie de vivre, music, New Orleans. I’ve done the research, it is plausible, and it’s the first introduction to a leitmotif that will permeate the story, music. That’s what I plotted.
The band showed up, planted themselves in front of the house, and this isn’t a serenade. It’s brass, and they are wailing. Everyone in the neighborhood comes out, tables, food, instant block party on a summer Sunday afternoon in between rain storms. They’re dancing all up and down the street, celebrating a wonderful event, a woman buying her daughter’s freedom. I had no plans for a block party. The characters did. It just happened, and it’s way better than what I had plotted. A writer’s motto is you must be willing to kill your children. It is equally true that you can let them grow.
From a dry, dull, technical perspective, I’m getting to know my people, making their words and language and back story coherent and consistent. I’m making practical choices. I’ll use French words for relationships. So Robinette and Marie are kouzin. Joseph is her oncle. The words are close enough to English to not confuse, and provide some color of local patois. A far more serious issue is/will be words for varying degrees of mixed blood, because that gradation ˆ to these people. Many of those words could be offensive today.
These are “mechanical” issues but they slow me down. Here’s an example. In the first chapter, Marie and her grandmother are at the market. The grandmother buys bay laurel leaves from an old Choctaw woman. This is all historically plausible, already in the story, just a touch of color. I’ve already plotted that the great grandmother, the herbal healer who teaches Marie, learned the Louisiana medicinal plants from the Choctaw. So the grandmother knows some Choctaw of course. So she buys the bay leaves using Choctaw.
Back into that chapter to make that tweak. It works, I want these people to be multi-lingual, to give the reader a sense of the richness of the culture and environment.
But how does she know Choctaw? The back story becomes richer. Her father, the GG’s husband, is half Wolof, half Choctaw, a métis. That’s where and how GG learns. That’s never in the story, other than as passing mention, but now it makes sense. And what does show up in the daily conversation in the family, words for food, herbs, ingredients, recipes, medicines, are Choctaw words. So, back into that conversation, make those tweaks, have the characters effortlessly swap languages. All because, for real and in the plot WAY downstream, Marie is a healer of vast renown. Despite racism, hatred, misogyny, suspicion of black magic, in the depths of a massive yellow fever epidemic the white men come to her. “Can you help us.”
A couple of weeks ago I was walking in the Montmartre district of Paris and found Marie. Did she pull the trigger to get me started? I don’t know, but not too long after I found myself typing away.
So I’m dancing with the characters, the words, the story, and as a result it goes slowly. I need to learn the new steps the characters teach me. But, the story and the characters come to life.
