Category: nonfiction

Apologies: I’m up against a deadline that will not budge, and so am posting an essay from about a decade ago. These days I spend more time than is healthy wondering what the era we are currently living through will be called, and how history will judge us. But that’s not what this is about.

We humans love our boundaries. Between nations, between states, between property. So important to know where you end and I begin, not?

But in history, maybe not so useful. When I was taking history classes, there was a tendency to teach historical periods and eras, as if the Plantagenets filed out in an orderly fashion one day, the Tudors clocked in, and everything–clothes, art, technology, politics–changed right then. But history isn’t a single timeline, there are huge overlaps, some of which can take me by surprise.

For instance the dapper fellow in the photo? That’s Wyatt Earp, of the O.K. Corral: major character in the American saga of The Wild West. After Tombstone he moved to California where, among other things, he was a consultant to the film industry; he and western star Tom Mix were great friends. Earp died in 1929, well into the era of electricity, cars, flight.

Sometimes I’m asked when the Regency was. There’s a simple and accurate answer: the Regency began in 1811, when Parliament enacted the Regency Bill and the Prince of Wales became a stand-in for his father George III. It ended in 1820, when George III died and the Prince of Wales became king.

But in discussing the Regency, particularly when talking about fiction, the period is a more squishy, pliable thing. For convenience’s sake, I’d say it was roughly 1795-1825, the era of England’s involvement with Napoleon; the point when the Empire style was at its height; the Romantic movement was in full blast; and technology was beginning to make serious inroads in daily life. But from another vantage point, the Regency is just a subset of the Georgian era, a blip on the way from the Enlightenment to the Victorians. It all depends where you draw the lines. And frankly, the lines didn’t matter as much if you were at the lower end of the economic spectrum: things don’t change as fast when you’re scrabbling for dinner and all your money goes for necessities rather than a new gown.

It’s easy to forget that while some people were living what we would consider a medieval life, others were smack dab in the middle of the Renaissance. To me one of the most arresting scenes in The Return of Martin Guerre (a lovely French film from a few decades ago) is at the trial, when there are the nice medieval peasants and the clergy and lawyers, all in their robes of office–and there in the audience are people who would not look out of place in the court of James I. My initial belief in my own historical knowledge (oh, I know when this is!) was knocked askew. In the same way, I love the film versions of Austen in which women are wearing clothes from several different eras–from the older woman who is still wearing a highly structured gown from 1795 to the young woman whose gown is the latest cry: high waisted, sheer fabric, Romantic draping. It reminds me that many women didn’t toss out the old gowns–they wore them, or tore them apart and remade them–because fabric and labor were not cheap. And that no one was sitting there thinking, “well, I’d better rethink my wardrobe, because we’re transitioning into the Regency, and these old rags will simply look like they belong to another era.”

My daughter has been watching Mad Men from the beginning of the series. I mentioned that (because my father worked on Madison Avenue in the 50s and 60s) it all looked rather familiar to me. And this launched us into a discussion about eras, and how you know when you’re in one. And of course, you don’t. At the time, it just seems like today is an extension of yesterday, and tomorrow will flow right out of today. At the time, even fringed suede vests might seem like the thing to do.

When I was 13 my family moved from New York City to a small town in Western Massachusetts: Sheffield.  For those unfamiliar with Western Massachusetts, it is beautiful, green, hilly and pleasant and quaint. Quaint as can be, with houses full of Colonial charm (which they come by honorably, as they date from the 1700s) and a thriving tourist economy that leans into the quaint. Along with skiing in the winter and summering outside the city in the summer, there is an opportunity for what you might call historical tourism, if you’re into that sort of thing.

At the time, I wasn’t. I was enrolled in the local high school, Mt. Everett Regional. I had come from a left-of-center progressive school in New York, which made for some pretty severe culture shock on my part (and possibly on the part of some of my classmates and teachers–but that might just have been because it was the late 60s and culture shock was everywhere) but I got a good, if somewhat less political, education at Mt. Everett, and I have nothing to say in its dispraise.

But there were things they didn’t teach. And last week I learned one of them.

An account on Threads called “History is Punk” posted a long thread about Elizabeth Freeman, who was directly responsible for the state of Massachusetts outlawing slavery. And this happened in Sheffield, and I had never heard of it until last Saturday, July 4th, when the thread posted. The New York Times Magazine had an article about Freeman this week too. Elizabeth Freeman is having a moment.

Freeman–originally known as Bett–was born in Claverack, NY, in the household of a well to do, slave-owning Dutch farmer. When she was young she was sent, along with various other household goods and chattels, to the new home of the farmer’s daughter Hannah. Hannah had married a prosperous gentleman-farmer and lawyer in Sheffield, Massachusetts, John Ashley. (The Ashley house is still there; I think I visited it once, but the emphasis at the time was all on Ashley’s place in the community and in the Revolution. I heard nothing at the time about Elizabeth Freeman). One can assume that, as a household servant, Bett did a lot of waiting on the gentlemen who came to talk with Ashley about politics–particularly about a document called The Sheffield Declaration, which is a forerunner of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was a 1773 anti-British manifesto which Ashley–and another local lawyer, Theodore Sedgewick–were instrumental in drafting.

So there is Bett, in and out of rooms where phrases like “mankind in a state of nature are free, equal, and independent.” It is pretty clear that these ideas took root. Meanwhile, Bett continued to work for the Ashleys (she had no other choice; she was their slave). Anecdotally, it appears that John Ashley was a fairly reasonable guy, but his wife Hannah was not. She was hot-tempered and treated everyone, but particularly the slaves, badly. So badly that when someone in the kitchen (most likely Bett’s daughter) used some scraps to make herself a snack, Hannah tried to hit the girl with a red-hot iron shovel; Bett took the blow on her arm. It went to the bone, and while she was treated for the wound it never really healed well.

In 1781, when the states had ratified the Articles of Confederation, Sheffield held a celebration on July 4th in the town square. Again, if Bett was there, she would have heard that self-evident phrase “All men are created equal.” The next day Bett visited attorney Theodore Sedgewick and asked him to sue for her freedom. He agreed, filing a “writ of replevin,” which demanded that property improperly held by the Ashleys (that would Bett and another slave named Brom) be returned to the rightful owners: themselves. The case was heard in the neighboring town of Great Barrington, and after legal back and forth (offered the chance to simply free the two slaves, Ashley declined; he might have been reasonable compared to his wife, but…) Bett won her case. The case became the scaffolding on which Massachusetts built an affirmative declaration that slavery was “repugnant” to the terms of the State Constitution.

Bett lived a long life: she took the name Elizabeth Freeman. She worked for wages for the Sedgewick family for some years, bought a house, and amassed enough property to leave it, and many other things, to her descendants. When she died, she was buried in the Sedgewick’s burial plot, the only non-family member there.

And it kills me that I only learned about this last weekend.

I went to High School in Sheffield. The library in Great Barrington was one of my preferred hangs. We heard a great deal about the Berkshire’s role in the Revolutionary War. But in the late 1960s I heard nothing about Elizabeth Freeman. Fortunately, things have changed since I was graduated from Mt. Everett in 1971. Freeman’s story is known and embraced in the area; in 2022 a statue was erected to honor her.

My point (aside from my general crankiness about not having heard of this before) is that history is full of stories like this, stories that don’t get told or don’t get remembered. I believe firmly that if I had stumbled over Elizabeth Freeman’s story in high school and written a paper about it, I would have been congratulated for finding it–they weren’t burying anything, it wasn’t sinister. Just… if you don’t know, you don’t go looking.

The Current Powers That Be would likely be happy if we forgot about this sort of story. Which makes it all the more important that we keep looking for them.

 

This week my thoughts are on the worst month of the year in Canberra, because that is the month I am living in right now.

It’s simple. It’s winter. There is no snow. The only holidays are school holidays and most people who take them have headed over the mountains and are currently at the beach, where it’s less cold. Last year I did this for a week and my July as so much better. This year I spent a bit more money and flew to Perth for a science fiction convention.

For northern hemisphere folks, it’s January with the memory of Christmas half a year ago rather than days ago. No snow, but much black ice.

It used to be worse. When I first moved to Canberra the only fruit in winter was stale apples and amazing oranges. The first two weeks of oranges were wonderful but it became very dull very quickly. Now we have new varieties of citrus, plus some clever folks realised that all those farms near the coast have different fruit. I bought dekopon and bananas and finger lime yesterday at the market. I can get through July more easily with dekopon and bananas and one luxury fruit.

Also, Canberrans do dinner parties. I don’t get many of those (some people are worried about disability cooties, some about the cooties that older folks bring, some about the cooties generously distributed by childless women, and far too many about Jew cooties), but those I do get make me very happy and make the month tolerable. And some friends visit me. I am about to make vast amounts of chicken soup to feed myself and those friends.

That chicken soup has a second purpose. I suspect lovage might have been replaced with celery or vice versa in some types of chicken soup. This theory is based on not nearly enough knowledge at this tage. Thanks to some Polish friends I have heaps of lovage and thanks to Fyskwick Market I have celery leaf and enough boiling chicken and etc to make two big pots of soup, one with lovage and one with celery. This is just one step of a path I began to walk when the same friends who sent me the lovage sent me (for my 60^th birthday) a 1682 book that clearly and wonderfully walks all the way through Polish court food of that time. I’m pulling together lots of things from this and from other sources and from chats with those same friends. One of my more interesting discoveries is that the antisemitism in Poland in the 1920 and 1930s led to poorer food being labelled as ‘Jewish’ in at least one city and led to some really interesting Jewish cooking techniques that were modified when families reached Australia. This chicken soup is, then, a small step in a long journey.

It’s a handy step, because its really difficult to be entirely miserable when one has excellent chicken soup.

My much news is two excellent things and one very bad thing. Let me start with the very bad.

 

What I thought was me turns out to be antisemitism targeted at so many Australians openly admitting to being Jewish. The Royal Commission is hearing submissions this week and they are uniformly shocking. You can make up your own minds and develop your own opinions from here: Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion

To cheer you up, the first good piece of news is a new fan publication celebrating Mel Brooks’ 100th birthday. I play a (very) small part in this: https://www.journeyplanet.org/uploads/1/5/7/1/15715530/journey_planet_-__issue_95_-_mel_brooks.pdf

And the last bit of news, which is such a relief… I have finished every single aspect of my PhD. All things have been approved. The university even has the library copy of my thesis. I am ABD and will probably receive the PhD itself in September. From September, please feel free to make Dr Dr Dr jokes, though, for the record, I still prefer ‘Gillian’ over ‘Dr Polack.’

I was listening to NPR (as we do when we’re in the car), where KQED Forum was doing a segment on the rise of tobacco smoking in young people. Smoking, as a social behavior, is staging a comeback.

This kind of floored me. I have personal reasons to detest smoking: both my parents were smokers when I was small, and I have the second-hand smoke damage to prove it. My father quit after the Surgeon General’s report came out–that is a saga in itself–and had chronic bronchitis and COPD for the rest of his life. My mother, who never quit, died from tobacco-related causes. And of course I saw all the anti-smoking PSAs (many of the ads that I remember well were discussed on Forum) including the one with the woman discussing how she started smoking–while smoking via the hole in her throat.

I kind of thought that this was a battle that was slowly being won, and a behavior that was emphatically in the rear view mirror. But as I listened to the panelists I began to formulate a question: is this because we don’t remember how bad smoking was, and therefore can assume that it wasn’t that bad at all?

I am old enough to remember walking in to a wall of smoke in restaurants and bars. I don’t miss that. Airplanes had smoking and non-smoking sections, but don’t kid yourself–if anyone was smoking on a plane, everyone was breathing it. My first serious boyfriend was a smoker, and while I loved him a lot, I had to get used to the taste (“kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray” has considerable truth to it). But if you haven’t had that experience, how can you know? Especially in the face of forces like the tobacco industry which have been trying to play down the dangers of nicotine for 100 years.

Certainly smoking used to be positioned as glamorous. If you look at old movies (and I love me some old movies) smoking had a gestural language. It looked cool. It could look romantic (Paul Henreid lighting two cigarettes and giving one to Bette Davis in Now, Voyager comes to mind). It could look tough. It could look louche–gangsters with cigarettes either clamped in the corners of their mouths, or dangling from their lower lips as if kept there by the power of sin. And apparently smoking is making a comeback in film and TV, telegraphing cool and chic.

It occurred to me that we have the same problem with anti-vax people. They don’t remember what the “childhood diseases” were like. I mean, I do. I had measles. It wasn’t bad enough that I felt absolutely horrible; it was accompanied by my mother’s terror that I would die or be struck blind. That leaves an impression. I also remember (dimly) the anxiety during polio season, before the Salk and then the Sabin vaccines became available. But in the years since vaccination became commonplace and these diseases receded into the rearview; measles, at least, became a sort of sitcom punchline, a funny disease that makes you break out in spots. Ho Ho.

Does this mean that periodically humans have to be reminded of how bad things can get before we permit ourselves to move forward? Or worse, that a portion of humanity will valorize the before times as better because they tangle things they don’t like in the current reality (say, racial or gender equality, and having to take thought to the environment before doing whatever they damned well please) with things that are unrelated but part of that current reality (like vaccines). I often write in historical settings, but I don’t for a moment believe that things were better then, at least not for the vast number of people who died early, and very often hungry and ill-treated. The tendency of some people, to assert that Things Were Better, or More Glamorous, or something, back when we took our chances with polio or lit one cigarette from the remnant of the last, bewilders me. I know how sophisticated Bette Davis looked with a cigarette in her hand, but I don’t mistake that for harmlessness.