Treehouse Writers

I once almost got into a fight with a Beefeater in the Tower of London when I dared suggest that Shakespeare might have been wrong about Richard III killing off his nephews.  Shakespeare’s version of the story has become enshrined as something “everybody knows.”  And “everybody knows” is a problem if you want to get something right.

I was thinking about this while re-reading Black London,* a terrific and fascinating book by Gretchen Gerzina about the history of Africans in England.  Early in the book Gerzina tells of going into a bookstore looking for material about people of color in London.  The saleswoman told her, with a touch of asperity, that everyone knew that there were no blacks in England prior to the end of WW II.  

In fact, there were so many blacks in England during the reign of Elizabeth I that she issued an edict ordering them to leave the country (it was largely  ignored).  And slavery, which we in America tend to think of as our own “peculiar institution,” was legal in England until as late as 1772.  There were African slaves in England–most of them domestics–because up until that point there had been no specific law against slavery.

What changed? A slave named James Somersett, brought by his owner to England from the Massachusetts colony, was beaten and left to die by his owner, Charles Stewart.  Instead, he was rescued, taken to the hospital, and when he was well, apprenticed as a free man.  By chance, a year or so later, Stewart saw his erstwhile slave, hale and productive, and demanded that the man be returned to him. A huge legal battle ensued, with public opinion vocally divided. The judiciary was forced to make case law, finding that, while colonial laws might explicitly permit slavery, there was no Parliamentary act or common law that made slavery in England legal, and that it was therefore illegal.

Somersett was freed, as were the 10,000 or so African slaves in England.

The slave trade continued, making port cities like Bristol and Plymouth into centers of commerce;  slavery in the British colonies flourished. But the abolitionist movement, stirred to life by the Somersett case, struggled against economic interests, and in 1807 the slave trade in England was abolished. It took almost thirty more years (1834) for the institution itself to be banned throughout the Empire.

That means that during Jane Austen’s lifetime there were black people in England.  It’s clear (particularly from Mansfield Park) that Austen was well aware of the slave trade as it was practiced in the British colonies, and her letters suggest that she was part of the abolitionist camp. Austen did not live a cosmopolitain life (she disliked London and Bath) but it is not unlikely that she encountered black Britons–those persons who had lived in England as domestics for decades, or had come to Britain after the American Revolution (many slaves were promised freedom by the Crown if they fought for England, and some took the offer and wound up there after the war–albeit not always very happily).  There was a tendency among white Britons to lump all people of color together, but at the same time freed slaves were arriving from America, immigrants from the British colony of India were arriving too. My favorite is the Bengali entrepreneur who introduced the word “shampoo” — meaning head massage — into the English language. He was considered “black.” He operated a spa (Mahomed’s Steam and Vapor Sea Water Medicated Baths) which offered a combined Turkish bath with massage (sounds great). As the British Empire spread its influence, there were more and more persons of color in England. The clerk Gerzina encountered at the bookstore may have cited “everybody” in her opinion, but she was dead wrong.

Whenever I hear someone saying “everybody knows,” I’m pretty sure I’m in for a whopping historical error.

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* Yes, I’m researching for Sarah Tolerance #5...

I don’t talk about Patreon much, but I’ve had a place there for a while. Once a month I send subscribers a short story, an old essay, a new one, some writing advice, and what’s happening behind the scenes. Everyone receives a recipe or two once a week, on the blog. Most patrons receive the short story. A lesser number (but still most) subscribe to the essay tier, and some subscribe to it at a level that means they get to choose what I write a new essay about, and so forth. This week I’d like to share with you some of my writing advice. it’s half of what’s in the newsletter, and it lets you see what that tier is about.

One of the new essays was about the colour ‘blue.’ I’d like to riff on that refrain and return to world building. Two birds, one stone.

There are some simple tools that help convince your reader that they walk in a strange world and not all of those tools involve flying cars or weird monsters. One of the easiest is colour. Science fiction TV often used to spray paint vegetation blue or orange to let viewers know “They walk in strange soil.” Writers have better choices than spray paint.

If someone returns home after a voyage (Odysseus!) and sees the familiar purple leaves and their comforting orange spots, that’s spray paint. The emotions help show the reader what they’re supposed to feel about the character and about the character’s relationship to the landscape, and the colours show that the world he sees is not ours. This gives the story some life using a few words or a single paragraph. If you want the past voyage to have changed them, you bring it into play. If the leaves are edible, even better. The character can pick a leaf and nibble it then recoil. What was sweet when they left their home has changed. If you want the landscape to have been changed by aliens (us!) invading and making it edible for our bodies, then you show this. The colour is no longer spray paint: it is integral to the story.

It’s really that simple. It works with all five senses, or with objects. Make it integral to the story by having a character interacting with it, and make that interaction show something important to the reader, or, in this case, a mini-story: noting the colour, reacting to it, tasting the leaf, reacting to it, realising that all has changed. That miniature story uses colour to enrich a landscape and bring it to life, while helping round the character out and give the reader a reminder of what has happened. Small things can have big impacts.

I stumbled upon an essay I wrote some years ago yesterday. It’s a pretty good piece, kind of funny, part of my ongoing “Raised in a Barn” series of anecdotes about my odd childhood. I finished it, was pretty happy with it still… and then the thought occurred to me: it’s weird that I do this. This being: write essays retelling anecdotes about my parents, the Barn, bats and Christmas trees and the trapeze that hung in our hallway, et cetera.

I mean, what’s the point? Writing fiction, you’re creating a world, and characters, and a narrative arc. Anecdotes may have characters and certainly take place in a world, and often they have a narrative arc, because otherwise it’s just… someone writing something that sounds like “My uncle had a frog named Bertram,” wth no therefore.

I think about this because I have been toying, off and on, with the idea of blowing my “Raised in a Barn” anecdotes up into a memoir. That’s hard because I run aground on “what’s the point,” or rather “why would this matter to anyone else?”

Memoir is a thriving subsection of American letters. Particularly popular are the “how I survived” memoirs, which range from true-life horror stories by survivors of crimes or horrific events, to “I had psychotic parents and I’m here to spill the tea” to “I left my abusive significant other, and you can too” to “I survived all that medical science could do to me, and I’m cured, but I’m still angry.” Survival memoirs can be instructional or inspirational, and some them are very angry.

Some memoirs are less about survival than they are about “what the hell happened?” Many memoirs by famous people, particularly famous women, fall under that banner. They promise the inside skinny, the truth that the news or TikTok or Instagram won’t tell you. Sometimes they’re inspirational too. And there are memoirs that are less about the author and more about evoking a time and place.

I have read memoirs that failed because they had no there there–the equivalent of talking about Uncle Fred and his frog Bertram. Books where the author (and presumably the publisher) thought there was something compelling about their story, what they lived through, saw, survived, but that missed that narrative arc. Maybe they thought it was implicit, but it wasn’t. If  I read a memoir and I don’t come out of it with a sense of what the author really wanted me to know (beyond, say Abusive Spouses Are Bad! or Running for President is Unpleasant!) I don’t think it works. 

It takes a certain mindset to write a memoir. You have to be convinced that other people will care about a story you’re telling about YOU. That requires some audacity, doesn’t it? To believe that your story will have meaning to anyone else? Audacity is a well-known tool in the writer’s kit, right there with grammar and spelling.

I spent the past weekend among family at the celebration of life for my late and entirely wonderful Aunt Julie. There was a graveside meet up (it was non-religious, so calling it a service is a misnomer) at which I spoke–and there were probably 30 or so people there, including caregivers, a co-worker, friends, and of course, family. And we all told stories about Aunt Julie and what made her so delightful, and there were tears and a whole lot of laughter. It was effortless to tell these stories, because everyone there loved my aunt. That was the point: to share the different aspects of my aunt’s life and her character and to celebrate her. The stories had meaning for everyone there.

If I’m going to write a memoir (and I haven’t talked myself out of it just yet) I need to have–not just the audacity to believe that someone is going to find meaning in it, but a narrative arc that creates that meaning.