Category Archives: great dismal swamp

Lydia Rees and the Role of Women

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Lydia Rees is one of the primary, some would say the primary, protagonist in my Will Rees/Shaker mysteries. I thought I would return to this work and talk about the women in the later eighteenth century.

Lydia Rees, wife of my detective Will Rees, is an opinionated and outspoken woman and an equal partner with her husband as they investigate murders and other crimes. This is not so surprising for modern times but during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a woman had no legal status. She owned nothing and in fact she herself was chattel, belonging first to her father and then to her husband. The portion she brought to her marriage belonged to her husband and literally everything she had, including her children and the clothes on her back, belonged to him. In one of the primary sources I read a woman divorced one man for another and had to marry in her shift. The clothing she wore belonged to husband number one. Fortunately, husband number two had clothing waiting for her and as soon as they were married, she dressed.

A woman could not inherit the family home unless her husband specifically named her in the will. If he did not, she became the burden of her eldest son. If they had a bad relationship he could, and did, at least according to some of the histories I’ve seen, put her out to make her own way on the road. 

This did not mean that women did nothing. Oh no. This was an agrarian world and a man could not run his farm without his wife’s labor. Farm wives kept a garden, made butter and cheese, cooked, sewed clothing, cleaned – and all of this at the same time they dealt with pregnancy and minded their children. Wives of printers and other professional men frequently helped in the shop. It is no wonder that many men from this time are buried with two, three or sometimes more wives.

Lydia is a former Shaker (or The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming to give them their proper name. Shakers was at first a derogatory nickname based on their physical services – it is a combination of ‘Shaking Quakers’.) The Shakers were a faith begun by a woman, Mother Ann Lee, and the Shaker Sisters have equal authority with their male counterparts. There are two Elders and two Eldresses, two Deacons and two Deaconesses for every Family. Although the work was assigned along traditional gender roles, women and their labor were considered of equal importance. And in a time when illiteracy among woman was high (even among men it was almost 50%), the Shakers educated the girls equally with the boys. (Girls went to school during the summer, boys during the winter.) So Lydia expects to have a say.

The reasons a woman joined the Shakers were many and varied. In A Simple Murder and Cradle to Grave, Sister Hannah (Mouse) joins the Shakers be cause she has a cleft palate and knows she will never marry. In Simply Dead, one of my women characters flees to the Shakers to escape a life of servitude to her family. Another woman, who is an ongoing character throughout, is a fugitive who has escaped servitude in the south.

The Shakers were abolitionists and accepted escaped slaves as members in their community.

Obedience to the rules and celibacy, however, both come with membership in this faith. When Lydia secretly marries her first husband, Charles Ellis, and bears a baby she is immediately expelled from the Shakers. Ellis’s unexpected death causes further legal complications. 

When a person joined the Shakers, he or she signed a document called the Covenant. In it, they agreed to surrender all their worldly goods to the community. Charles Ellis is almost a member of Zion; he has not yet signed the Covenant but everyone is expecting him to. Then he dies. Because Ellis leaves his farm to Lydia in his will, the farm the Shakers were expecting to own, she inherits.  When she marries Will Rees, the farm immediately becomes his because of the laws governing a woman’s lack of rights to own property.

Although Lydia wishes to abide by Ellis’s wishes and surrender the farm to the Shakers, Rees hesitates. Fortunately for the family. When they are forced to flee their home in Dugard, they take refuge in the farm near Zion. (The Devil’s Cold Dish).

Lydia is a very determined individual. When Rees would leave her behind in Death in the Great Dismal, when he goes south to rescue a woman from the Great Dismal Swamp, Lydia insists on accompanying him. Fortunately. Ruth will not agree to go north without Lydia’s persuasion.

Lydia is instrumental (always!) in assisting her husband solve the mystery and, in many cases, connecting with the other women characters.

Slavery in Murder, Sweet Murder

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In Murder, Sweet Murder, I continued looking at slavery in the United States, following Death in the Great Dismal and Murder on Principle. Since the importation of slaves was not forbidden until1808 (but there was plenty of smuggling through Spanish Florida as well as other slave ships that ignored the law. The Clotilda brought 110 children from Africa in 1859.), Rees’s father-in-law was still bringing in enslaved people during the Rees family’s visit to Boston.

Lydia had already fled the family home, joining the Shakers in Maine as a young woman. This is where she met Will Rees. Now her brother James, a sea captain, is estranged from their father. James refuses to engage in ‘that filthy trade’, his words. Conditions on the ships were horrific.

It is commonly assumed that slavery was wholly a Southern institution. Nothing could be further than the truth. During the Colonial period and through the Revolution, slavery was widespread. However, after the War for Independence, states such as New York and New Jersey began passing laws to abolish slavery gradually. By 1804, all the Northern states had passed laws outlawing slavery, either immediately or incrementally.

No Southern states abolished slavery although individual owners freed their slaves.

The demand for slaves increased dramatically with the invention of the cotton gin and cotton became ‘King Cotton’. The rising demand for sugar also increased the amount of land on the plantations in Jamaica and the other islands devoted to sugar. Plantations that once grew indigo and cacao switched to sugar, as I describe in the mystery. 

Both sugar and cotton exhaust the soil, so plantation owners looked west for fresh land. That, of course, amplified the conflict between the free states and the slave states and set the stage for the Missouri Compromise where Missouri entered the union as a slave state and Maine, formerly part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as a free state. 

Albany Book Fair

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I had a great experience on Saturday at the Albany Book Fair. This is one of my favorite venues. It is not far away from my home. And the Fair allows you a full day, not an hour or so. I always enjoy talking to the other authors as well as the people passing through.

Besides that, this was my very first in-person activity, which made it even more special. Usually I sell my books to the parents that are wandering through. This time, I sold several to the students wandering through. (Am I aging myself when I say some of them look like grade schoolers?)

This time, I sold two of my first book: A Simple Murder. That makes sense since a lot of us mystery readers want to read a series from the very beginning.

I also sold four of Death in the Great Dismal. Not too surprising since the swamp is such an amazing place. I took the opportunity to recommend the Great Dismal as a destination.

Goodreads Giveaway

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I have posted a giveaway on Goodreads for Death in the Great Dismal.

Rees and Lydia travel to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia to rescue their friend Ruth, a fugitive who has fled to the swamp and the protection of a village of maroons. As soon as Rees and Lydia arrive, one of the members of the village is found murdered. Rees and Lydia, as well as Ruth’s husband Tobias, are immediately suspect. To clear their names, and to leave the swamp for home, Rees investigates.

The new Will Rees, Murder on Principle

The owner of the people Rees and Lydia have escorted to safety in Maine arrives to recover the fugitives. When he is murdered, his sister and a number of slave takers arrive. Rees faces an ethical dilemma. Does he investigate and identify the murderer – who might have had very good reasons to kill the slave owner? Or does he let the murderer go free?

Murder on Principle will be released on August 3. A giveaway will be posted for the new book in July.

Read Death in the Great Dismal to prepare for Murder on Principle.

The Fugitive Slave Law – 1793

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I associated the Fugitive Slave Law with the Civil War. The truth is, however, the first iteration of the law was signed into effect in 1793, long before I would have guessed. It is important to remember that many of the founding fathers, including George Washington, were slave owners.

In Death in the Great Dismal,

when Rees and Lydia rescue their friends Tobias and Ruth, they were breaking the law. Although both Tobias and Ruth had both been born free in Maine, they were abducted and sold into slavery. (The slave takers frequently took any person of color, born free or not, for sale in the South. Occasionally, white children were stolen as well.)

Not only were escaped people subject to recapture, anyone who obstructed the slave takers were considered in violation of the law. Moreover, any child born to an enslaved mother was also considered to be enslaved. The prevailing custom was one drop of black blood meant that person was considered black, no matter how light-skinned. Rees and Lydia, therefore, could have been in serious trouble if they had been caught.

The full text of the Act is available from the Library of Congress (and online) in the Annals of Congress of the 2ndCongress, 2nd Session, during which the proceedings and debates took place from November 5, 1792 to March 2, 1793. 

The appropriate sections are 3 and 4.

By the end of the American Revolution all of the Northern states had abolished slavery or made provision to do so. (The United States abolished the slave trade in 1808.) However, fugitives could and were returned to the Southern states per the Fugitive Slave Act by men whose profession, if you will, was capturing escapees.

 This law was further strengthened in 1850 at the request of the slave states. One of the elements most annoying to Northerners was the three-fifths rule that counted every five slaves as three people and therefore gave the slave states much more representation in Congress. Although there were abolitionists prior to 1850, the revised law caused a tremendous increase in people who identified as anti-slavery.

The term Underground Railroad did not come into common use until the construction of actual railroads became widespread. An abolitionist newspaper published a cartoon in 1844 that pictured a rail car packed with fugitives heading for Canada. Use of ‘conductor’ and other railroad terms came into broader use after the 1850 law. 

Banjos in the Great Dismal Swamp

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In Death in the Great Dismal, one of my primary characters (Cinte) makes and plays and early form of the banjo. (The modern name; it had many others.)

The banjo came to America with the enslaved peoples, some scholars think by way of the Caribbean and the slaves imported by the Portuguese. In any event, there are over 60 similar plucked instruments, including the akonting, the ngoni, and the xalam, played in West Africa that bear some resemblance to the banjo. Early, African- influenced banjos, had a calabash or gourd body covered with hide and a long wooden stick neck, Usually the banjos had three strings with a shorter, drone string.

The earliest mention in the American Colonies occurred in the 17th century. The first known picture of a man playing a banjo-like instrument (The Old Plantation, circa 1785-1795) shows a four stringed instrument as described above. Banjo-playing was perpetuated in the plantations and the slave-labor camps as I describe in my mystery.

The banjo in its modern form is a melding of the old form with European influences, a flat fingerboard and tuning pegs. The pictures show both fretted and unfretted varieties. During the 1830 and 1840s, playing the banjo spread beyond the enslaved to the enslavers, Minstrels shows featuring the banjos became popular. After the Civil War, the banjos spread to drawing rooms and other venues.

The banjo was re-popularized once again during the folk revival by such performers as Pete Seeger.

American Music owes a huge debt to the men and women brought here so unwillingly and would be a lot less rich without these influences.

The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp

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In Death in the Great Dismal, I take a temporary break from Rees’s world; the District of Maine and the community of Shakers who live nearby, to send him and Lydia south to Virginia.

Rees is asked by his friend Tobias to rescue his wife Ruth from the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia. Rees and Lydia agree, somewhat reluctantly, and travel to the swamp. (The swamp still exists, bridging 100,000 acres in Southern Virginia into northern North Carolina, and has been declared a Wildlife Refuge.)

There, Tobias guides them to a small village of fugitives, who were living hand to mouth, in the depths of the swamp. Who were these people?

Well, first of all, the existence of the Maroons is true and historically accurate. The hunger for freedom was so acute that many people fled slavery, preferring to take their chances in the hostile environment of the swamp. Daniel Sayers, an archeologist, has done excavations to identify some of the sites of the villages. The village structures were built of wood and, because of the climate in the swamp, they have all rotted. There are no stones of any kind in the swamp but Sayers found remnants of post holes and pottery shards. Why were they called Maroons. No one really knows. One theory is that the name is from the French, marronage, to flee.

Although not well known until recently, the existence of these small villages is present in the historical record. Slave takers were sent regularly into the swamp to recapture escapees – with mixed success. Some of these Maroons lived so deep within the swamp, surviving and raising families, that they could not be found. The children born here grew up in their turn, and the descendent of the original fugitives did not leave the swamp until after the Civil War. They had never seen a white person.

As I describe, male slaves were regularly hired by the Dismal Canal Company to dig the canal. The overseers turned a blind eye to the maroons who worked as shingle makers, despite knowing they were fugitives, because these shingle makers helped make the quotas.

I also based my character Quaco, on an historical account of a man who, brought to Virginia on a slave ship, escaped to the swamp as soon as he arrived. He survived by hunting, and dressed himself in the skins of the animals in killed. He never learned English.

Some history of the Great Dismal Swamp

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When Rees and Lydia accompany their friend Tobias to the Great Dismal Swamp to rescue his wife, they do so as much to mend their own relationship as to help a friend.  (Marriage is challenging and Will and Rees’s relationship was tested in A Circle of Dead Girls.)

The swamp proves to be a more challenging environment, and the community in which Ruth has taken refuge, more exotic than they could ever have guessed.

            From the 1700s right up to the Civil War, fugitives from the neighboring plantations fled into the swamp to escape bondage. The swamp, which was more than a million acres at that time, (estimates range from one million to three million acres) was and is still a harsh environment. The Great Dismal has shrunk to 112 thousand acres. A Wildlife Sanctuary, it is home to deer, a large population of black bears, bobcats, more than 200 species of birds and many insects. (Insect repellent is a must.) It is a peat bog; items dropped on the thick water-soaked peat can disappear without a trace in a manner of minutes.

Suffolk Mystery Convention

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Very excited to announce that the Suffolk Mystery Convention will be held on March 6. I will send along information in a week or so.

I will be discussing my new Novel Death in the Great Dismal.

It is an appropriate choice since Suffolk is the town nearest the swamp.

It is an amazing experience to go from the streets of Suffolk and the small peanut farms nearby to the alien environment of the swamp. It is also very buggy!