In The Flow of Time – June 16, 2024
I’ve been having a blast researching my idea that Jean-Baptiste Truteau, voyageur, drinks the night away in a tavern with Meriwether Lewis, on March 10, 1804. This is a good story. From the writer’s perspective, it would be a challenge to write, given my dual timeline approach. The time in the tavern is sequential. The stories that arise are from anywhere in J-B’s life, non-sequential but consequential. Managing all that, making it flow… the writer says OOOOOOH.
BUT (ain’t that always the case) I’m reluctant to get deep into this for a couple of reasons.
One, I haven’t sold the first four. Writing is a LOT of work. Is the personal pleasure of wordplay worth it? The answer might be yes, but that’s a different motivation than getting published.
The other reason, tied to the first, is the reader’s market. My friend Elizabeth, a successful author, commented on this recently. All well and good to write for yourself, but if you want to make money at this, you write to your audience. Those few agents who have been kind enough to provide reasons for rejection are clear, that the woman’s perspective matters a great deal. My first four, GENERATIONS, is a family saga with powerful women characters. But it still, most definitely, is not “women’s” fiction.
Gateway is a story about two men in a bar, and the events in one man’s life that inform the conversation. It is quite likely that somewhere I can have a strong female character, his wife perhaps. But no matter what I do, the arc of this story is a male tale. I’m OK with that, but I suspect that narrows the audience rather significantly. I think I’d have a hard time getting this published, unless GENERATIONS sees the light of day.
SO…
(Edit: This is a learning process. Some of the discoveries here turn out to be, gasp, wrong. 🙂 )
I have started researching another family member. Her life starts in 1801, so she’s a toddler while J-B and Meriwether are emptying their cups. Her name is Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen of New Orleans in the 19th century. Yes, a member of my extended family.
My very preliminary thinking is… I doubt that I can write this story from her POV, a Creole woman in New Orleans two hundred years ago. But I could tell the story from the POV of the powerful white men she threatens. Hey, I’m an old white guy, I know these people. I’m fairly sure that an historical fiction novel about a voodoo-practicing and powerful woman making her way in a hostile world has a broader appeal than my plan for the Gateway novel. I don’t know if I can make that work. I have to learn what we know as fact about her life, and see what story I can craft out of that. Can you say research? I knew you could.
Yesterday I poked around her genealogy. I already knew how she was tied to the family, I wanted the rest of her ancestry. At the end of the day, I have six of her eight great grandparents, four grandparents, and two parents. I learned a new acronym, FPOC: a free person of color. Marie was a free woman, half black, half white. Her parents were each mixed race. She has two white grandfathers, and two black grandmothers.
Her father, Charles Laveau, the illegitimate son of Charles “Don Carlos” Trudeau dit Laveau and a black woman, Marguerite Simard.
Early research says that this Marguerite was likely from the Kingdom of the Kongo, a woman stolen from her people and her home in Africa and brought to New Orleans sometime in the 1700s, a relatively recently arrived slave. She may have been a free woman, or a slave, I don’t know yet. White men owning black women and using them for sex was pretty common. In my story-sense, this grandmother could have real influence on Marie, it’s her tie to Africa. Early indications: Marguerite Simard raised Marie. We’ll see.
So Marie is Don Carlos’ granddaughter. He was quite a figure in New Orleans and in Louisiana generally. So, this is her “notable” parentage, and her tie to the family.
Marie’s mother was Marguerite Henry, the illegitimate daughter of Henri Roche dit Belaire, and Catherine, his slave. Marguerite, although born a slave, became a free woman of color.
For Marie, both her mother and father were mixed race, and both free people of color. Both her grandfathers were powerful white men, and her grandmothers were likely powerless victims with little or no choice. It gets worse.
Marie’s maternal grandmother (slave) was the child of two slaves (Marie’s great grandparents.) Henri Roche, her grandfather, owned them both, Jean and Marguerite. They had a child, Catherine, the woman who would become her grandmother. That child grew up in Henri Roche’s house, and at some point was his sex partner. It is not likely she had any choice.
When a slave became free (by self-purchase or emancipation), he or she typically adopted the last owner’s surname. In this chase, Catherine used the first name, not the surname. That may be an indicator of her attitude. She became Catherine Henry, and her daughter Marguerite Henry.
Now, imagine you are Marie Laveau growing up in the early 1800s. Both of your grandfathers are “pillars” of the community, especially on your dad’s side. But they are privileged members of a culture that allows them and expects them to get what they want. Your maternal grandfather owned your great grandparents, then raped their daughter to make your mother.
What does that do to you? Marie Laveau was a woman of great power, magically, religiously, and politically. She was, in all caps, SOMEBODY. That could not have been an accident. She made herself powerful, and that draws me as an author.
Research begins, but my spidey-sense says there’s a story in here. Not Gateway, something else. There is a very large body of information about Marie. She has been fictionalized often. I may read some of that, but I suspect a fair amount of that stuff is superstitious dreck. There are biographies, and that’s where I’ll start.
First up: a Ph.D dissertation: “Marie Laveau, the Mysterious Voudou Queen: A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans.” That’s where my nose leads.
