Category Archives: librarians

First peek at “A Simple Murder”

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By late afternoon Rees was past Rumford and heading southeast, almost to Durham and the coast. “Time to start looking for a place to stay,” he thought, eyeing dusk’s purple fingers clawing the rutted track. He’d look for a likely farm where he could camp for the night. Maybe some kind farmer would allow him space in the barn. Hollowed out by fury for most of the day (damn his sister! How could she push David, Rees’ little boy, out?) Rees was tired enough now to fall asleep in the wagon seat.

The cluster of buildings that was Durham appeared suddenly from bracelet of woods and farms. He plunged into the small village. Choose a road, any road, he thought, noting the possibilities branching off the central square. And he saw a tavern, The Cartwheel, if no generous farmers offered him the use of a barn. He turned onto the road doglegging south and soon after he spotted a white clapboard farmhouse, rising from a thin screen of trees on the western slope. A weathered red barn rose behind it, squatting on the edges of the fields wrested from the rocky soil. Rees directed Bessie onto the narrow bridge spanning the muddy creek. Perhaps anticipating fresh water and oats and the comfort of a stall, she jerked into a weary trot.

The house was a narrow clapboard, the boards weathered gray, with a small porch jutting from the front door. At the sound of hooves striking the stony drive, the farm wife stepped out from the front door and stared at Rees curiously. He pulled right up to the small porch and clumsily climbed to the ground. Driven by rage and fear, he’d pushed on without a break all day and now his body punished him for it. He staggered, awkward with stiff joints and muscles, up

the stairs towards her. A tiny woman with gray hair, she appeared younger close up. “Pardon Mistress,” Rees said, pulling off his dusty and travel stained tricorn, “I’m on my way to the Shaker community and I wonder if you might have space in your barn where I could sleep tonight.” Wiping her hands upon her apron, she glanced at the canvas-shrouded loom in the wagon bed.

“You a weaver?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m not looking for work right now though.” He paused and then, thinking she was most likely a mother, he burst out, “My son ran away from home.” Fatigue and the emotional stew of anger and fear made him more talkative usual. “My sister said he went with the Shakers.” The woman’s expression softened.

“I’ve lost family to them,” she said. “Of course…”

“What do you want here?” demanded her husband belligerently, stepping out from the house behind her. Much darker than his wife, he was black of hair and eyes.

And black of nature? Rees wondered, eyeing the other man’s scowl. Most farmers were hospitable to a traveling weaver.

Putting her pale freckled hand upon his mahogany dark tanned arm, his wife drew him inside. Rees clearly heard the work ‘Shakers’. A few moments later the farmer came back outside. “You can sleep in the barn,” he said, pointing with his chin at the red structure. “What’s your name? Mine is Henry Doucette. My wife Jane.”

“Will Rees,” Rees said, extending his hand. “Thank you.”

“Your horse looks all in,” Doucette said, casting a critical eye over Bessie. “You’re welcome to an empty stall.”
Rees nodded his thanks and climbed back into the wagon. With the day’s journey finally nearing its end, both Rees and Bessie allowed fatigue to overtake them.  Rees wasn’t sure they could make even the short trip across the yard to the barn.

Rees got Bessie settled in with fresh water and a nosebag of oats. When he returned to his wagon, he found a boy of about twelve waiting for him with a napkin covered dish and a jug of water. “My stepmother sent this up for your supper,” the boy said, thrusting the dishes into Rees’ hands. Although fair-haired, the boy was almost as darkly tanned as his father right down to his bare feet. And of an age with David, Rees thought.

“Thank her for me,” Rees said, staring down at the plate in grateful surprise. “This is very kind of her. What’s your name?”

“Oliver. She says stop by tomorrow morning and she’ll give you some breakfast,” the boy said with a flash of white teeth.

“Thank you.” With an awkward nod, the boy fled down the hill at a run.

Rees sat down on a seat of fresh straw, his back to the wagon wheel looking upon the green valley before him. The road on which he’d arrived unwound like a silvery ribbon in the last rays of sunlight. The lowing of the cattle sounded from a nearby pasture and Bessie’s contented whicker floated out from the barn. Peaceful. Dolly would approve. He sighed. Eight years since Dolly’s death in 1787, six of them spent as a traveling weaver. Two years he struggled to keep his farm going without Dolly; two solid years. But he couldn’t do it without her. And since he made more money weaving than farming he’d offered the management of his land to his sister and her husband in exchange for raising his David with their own kids. He’d thought his eight- year old son would be safe with them while he worked. Sighing, he lifted off the napkin and dug into the stew.  For five years and more he’d gone home intermittently. Not often enough; he saw that now and he’d do his best to make it up to David.

When he tried to sleep, the rage he’d tamped down during the day flared up again, hotter and fiercer than before. He could just slap his sister!  He’d begun yearning to see David again after his experiences on the western frontier during the Rebellion two years previously, and as soon as winter ended he headed north.  Several profitable weaving commissions delayed him in Massachusetts so he arrived in Maine the summer of 1795, a year later than he expected, but he rode home with a strongbox almost too heavy to lift.

Caroline greeted him with hostile surprise. “We weren’t expecting to see you until winter,” she said.  She did not at first admit that David was gone. Instead she forced him to ask several increasingly agitated questions until he realized the truth. Then, when he exclaimed in furious disbelief,

“David’s gone? How could you allow that to happen?” She and her husband stood shoulder to shoulder and defied him.

“He’s a man grown,” Sam cried angrily. “We couldn’t stop him.”

“He’s fourteen,” Rees snapped.

“There’s nothing for him here,” Charles said. Rees glared at his oldest nephew as the boy added rudely, “Let him seek his fortune elsewhere.” Neither of his parents reprimanded the lad for his unmannerly behavior.

“He couldn’t wait to leave,” Caroline said sneeringly. He knew then that David was simply an inconvenience. He pressed them again and again until they were all shouting but all they would say was that they thought David went off with the Shakers.  Rees flung out of the house he and Dolly had shared and raced towards Durham, and the Shaker settlements near it.

Our English language – new and old idioms

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English as a language has been around for centuries. We still enjoy Shakespeare’s plays and they’re from the mid-1500s. So it should be easy to write about 1796; we’re all speaking the same language, right?

Well, yes and no. English is a living language and as such keeps changing. Think about all the new terms that have arrived on the heels of the computer revolution. And there are changes in speech patterns too. My mother frequently decried the increasing informality of conversation and the use of nouns as verbs. Just think of ‘texting’ from text. Or “I must netflix that movie.”

Medical terms like ‘mastitis’, an inflammation in the breast, wasn’t used until the mid 1800’s.  And Rex, as a name for a dog. wasn’t used before about 1820. A writer, therefore, has to be careful not to add too many anachronisms to the manuscript. Sometimes, thought, it is necessary just for the sake of clarity.

What I think is surprising is the longevity of some of the idioms we still use. ‘Strike while the iron is hot’ is one common expression. No, it doesn’t mean your mother is going to whip out the iron. It is a blacksmithing expression. Iron was shaped while it was hot and pliable by pounding upon it. If you wanted to create something like a sword from an iron rod, it would need to be heated and pounded, over and over.

How about ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ ? This one is very old. It’s been traced back to Chaucer, although the sentence structure was different and of course the spelling to a modern eye is crazy: sleepyng at least is quickly apparent. By the late eighteen hundreds both spelling and structure were the same as they are now. That’s why we can still easily read a writer like Dickens. Another old term is ‘cracker’, a derogatory term used for southern whites by the British by the 1760’s. What is the origin? Still working on that.

Then there is ‘spinning in his grave?” So evocative. But it is relatively new. The first use I can find is ‘turn in his grave’, by Thackeray in 1848.

The term ‘ne’er do well’ just turned up in a lyric by the band Incubus. It is of course a contraction of ‘never do well’. According to a blog post from the UK, Ne’er has been used in that shortened form since the 13th century, notably in the North of England and in Scotland. ‘Ne’er do well’ itself originated in Scotland and an early citation of it in print is found in the Scottish poet and playwright Allan Ramsay’s A collection of Scots proverbs, 1737.

How about mind your Ps and Qs, one of my mother’s favorite expressions. No one seems to know the origin of this one so I will list a few possibilities:

1. Mind your pints and quarts. This is suggested as deriving from the practice of chalking up a tally of drinks in English pubs (on the slate). Publicans had to make sure to mark up the quart drinks as distinct from the pint drinks.

2. Advice to printers’ apprentices to avoid confusing the backward-facing metal type lowercase Ps and Qs, or the same advice to children who were learning to write.

3. Mind your pea (jacket) and queue (wig). Pea jackets were short rough woollen overcoats, commonly worn by sailors in the 18th century. Perruques were full wigs worn by fashionable gentlemen. It is difficult to imagine the need for an expression to warn people to avoid confusing them.

4. Mind your pieds (feet) and queues (wigs). This is suggested to have been an instruction given by French dancing masters to their charges. It seems doubtful this began as a French expression.

5.  Another version of the ‘advice to children’ origin has it that ‘Ps and Qs’ derives from ‘mind your pleases and thank-yous”. OK, this sounds somewhat plausible.

So no one really knows where this one comes from but it is old enough to have been used in 1795.

Other terms I’m still working on: ‘she rules the roost.” That sounds agricultural and therefore old. How about ‘tar with the same brush.” That sounds like it comes fromt he days of tarring and feathering but I don’t know for sure. Another one I am curious about is ‘heads will roll’. From the days of the French Revolution perhaps. Stay tuned and when I find the origins I will report.

Communes – and the Shakers

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The communal style of living which is now so much a part of our picture of the Shakers was actually not a part of their beliefs. When they moved to the Colonies, however, relocating around Albany, financial stresses compelled them to living in a communal setting

f you have begun thinking of tie-dye, put it out of your mind.

Their belief in the dual nature of God; a masculine half and a feminine half, led directly to the equality between the sexes. However, the celibacy that marked them from most of the other new faiths sprang directly from Ann Lee and her experiences in childbirth. She believed that all sin came from the sexual act between Adam and Eve and that only by overcoming fleshly desires could true salvation be attained. The sexes therefore were separated, living on separate sides of the Dwelling House. Personal property was abolished as well, all the property being held communally. New converts brought with them and gave to the order all of their worldly possessions. Even though they accepted anybody, including those who were penniless, the Church became quite wealthy.  Of course when the economy in the United States shifted from farming and handcrafts to factories, the Shakers couldn’t compete and their numbers began to dwindle. Celibacy was part of the problem. Once there were governmental agencies that cared for the poor and for the abandoned children and the number of converts declined, the number of Shakers diminished rapidly.

The Millenium Church, as they named themselves, was not a democracy. All decisions came from the top down. Obedience was a strict requirement.

However, they remain once of the most successful ‘communes’ ever established.

To dye for – Red

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Madder (rubia tinctorum) has been used for centuries as a red dye. It is well known as the dye for Turkey Red or, as I mentioned in an earlier post, the red coats for the British during the eighteenth century. Wild madder yields a subtler pinky brown. Unlike many natural dyes, madder contains natural mordanting agents and does not need to be mixed with iron or tin or other materials.

When Spain entered the New World, another source of red dye became available to Europe; cochineal. ((Cochineal was already known to and used by the Aztecs and the Maya people as well as the Incas and pre-Incas in Peru.) Insects similar to small beetles live on the cactus found at the higher altitudes in countries such as Peru. A visitor to Peru will see this grayish bloom on the cacti growing wild in the Sacred Valley. It looks like some form of fungi but is actually an insect colony. Cochineal is  the blood of the female of this species and dyes vibrant red, pink and purple. I have read that the Pope’s robes were dyed with cochineal. Without a proper mordant, cochineal is not colorfast.

Spain held a monopoly on cochineal for years, making the bright scarlet very much sought after and very expensive. It was the color of the rich and paintings from this era contain frequent splashes of red clothing, wherein the subjects demonstrate their wealth and high status. Similar to the use of Tyrian purple in earlier times. This dye was discovered in antiquity and traded by the Phoenicians. It is made from the shells of the common Mediterrean Sea Snail. It was both rare and expensive (the Phoenicians held on to their monopoly for years) and became the color of royalty. It has never been produced synthetically commercially. Efforts to transport the insects to Europe failed. They were transported successfully to Australia where they caused a whole new raft of problems.

Cochineal is still used as a dye and appears in both candy and lipstick. Think of that every time you put something red on or in your mouth.

To Dye for – Indigo

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Indigo is probably the most familiar dye in the world and has a long history of use. It is thought that India was the first place indigo dyeing began use of the dye quickly spread. From the Tuaregs in the Sahara to Cameroon, clothing dyed with indigo signified wealth.

In the United States, of course, indigo gave the characteristic blue to denim (although most of the dye now used is synthetic.) Woad also yields a blue dye (yes, the same woad used by the Celts) but it is not usually as deep a blue.  Asian indigo, Indigofera sumitrana, yields true indigo.

Indigo is not water soluable and so has to be treated to make it useable. One of the pre-industrial processes  was  soaking it in stale urine. Many accounts do not mention this particular fact but the pungency of the process is regularly described. The result is known as indigo white. Fabric dyed in the indigo white turns blue with oxidation. Indigo is also toxic so there is plenty of opportunity for indigo workers t become sick. And despite the processing, indigo fades slowly over time.

I saw items dyes with indigo in the highlands of Peru. The hanks of wool were all different colors from a light royal blue to such a deep blue it was almost navy.

During the Colonial period, there were indigo plantations in South Carolina. Three harvests, the last in early December, was the goal and contemporary accounts describe both the pungency of the smell and the toll the harvests took upon the slaves. Indigo was synthesized in the late 1890’s and within twenty years or so had almost completely replaced the natural substance.

How sweet it is; honey and the Shakers

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In A Simple Murder, Lydia Farrell is a beekeeper or apiarist. The Shakers regularly used outside contractors for certain jobs and I thought it logical that a former Shaker, ejected from the community, might stay on, especially if she possessed a useable skill. Photographs of Shaker communities, obviously from later in their history, sometime show the recognizeable white hives.

Honey is the oldest known sweetener; cave paintings from 10,000 years ago show people collecting honey. Sugarcane was grown on the Indian subcontinent and became a trade item when someone discovered how to extract crystal sugar from the sugarcane juice. It traveled by the trade routes to the Middle East and from there the Crusaders took it home to Europe and the British Isles. Christopher Columbus is commonly named as the one who brought sugarcane to the New World. Sugarcane is another crop, like cotton, that had a tremendous impact on the United States. It was grown in the south and since it required tremendous amounts of labor for the cutting and processing it necessitated lots of slaves.

The Native Americans made and used maple syrup as a sweetener.

Sugar came in cones and each piece had to be chipped from the cone. Most people in the early United States used both maple syrup and honey for sweetening, especially on the frontier. Most of the Shaker communities kept bees both for their honey and the beewax for candles.

Since this was before the age of petroleum, paraffin was not known and tallow, a substance made from animal fat, was sometimes used for cheap candles instead of beeswax.

 

The wooly facts

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So, my last post concerned flax and linen. I forgot to mention that flax was also grown for its seed. The seeds produce an oil. I’ve never heard of that, you say. But you have, under the name linseed oil. Linseed oil has a long history of human use, right down to cleaning artists’s brushes.

The fibers for wool are shorter than for linen but still has to be aligned the same way. Usually that was done by carding. Some of the prints from this period show very little girls carding wool. The carded wool was then spun into yarn.

Linen was actually more commonly worn than wool; sheep were expensive and many households didn’t own the equipment with which to process the wool. Also, handling the flax and  the sheared wool took time and skill.

But what about cotton, you ask? Cotton, because of the seeds which need to be picked out of the cotton boll, is very labor intensive as well. Unlike linen and wool, it requires a hot climate. It is also a ‘heavy feeder’, and rapidly sucks the nutrients from the soil. So cotton was not commonly worn, especially by the middle and lower classes. Lawn, a very finely woven cotton, was a fashionable fabric during the Regency period and as expensive as silk. It was not until Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin that cotton became more economically feasible to produce. Because of the gin’s impact not only on cloth production but also on slavery (many many slaves were now required to grow cotton), I think a case could be made that the gin changed the world.

Cloth was consequently very valuable. Every piece of clothing was worn, by the average person anyway, until it was literally rags and then those scraps were used for other things like pieced quilts. The wealthy could purchase many changes of clothing and unlike today, when it is frequently difficult to tell who is wealthy and who is not by looking at them, in earlier times someone’s wealth and status was immediately apparent. Maybe that is why some people know crave the designer labels; it speaks to the trappings of wealth and status? What do you think?

Weaving Words

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I suspect most people never think about the origins of some of the most common metaphors in our language. Take, ‘Strike while the iron is hot’, a concept that predates Shakespeare and comes from blacksmithing (as least according to one theory). Well, weaving and spinning have given common words and phrases to the English language too, and I’ll bet most people never think of their origins or really understand what they mean.

Take ‘tow’ for example, as in tow-headed. After the flax is treated into linen fiber (more about that later) and the long fibers are removed for spinning, the short fibers that are left are known as tow. They are not blond as people think but a light grayish brown. They have to be further processed to make them useable and they were made into sacks and cords and clothing for slaves and the poor.

Flaxen, obviously from the flax plant, refers to light blond hair. Flax is a flowering plant that has been cultivated since the time of the Egyptians and processed into linen. Since that is a multi-step process that involves soaking the flax in water and beating it with specialized equipment before the linen fibers are extracted, I wonder how anyone figured it out.

We are no longer so familiar with the words for the equipment required to process the flax into linen cloth. Loom, of course, and warp (the fibers that form the skeleton of any cloth), weft (usually the crosswise threads) and shuttle we still know. But the break, heckler and scutching knife?

First the flax plants were soaked for several weeks, sometimes in a stream, sometimes in special trough dug for this purpose. When the stalks rotted, they were put into a brake or break and crushed to remove the outside stalks. Although there are some smaller breaks made for women, this process was usually done by men, and skilled men at that, as it was a heavy job. By the late eighteenth century some mills to help with this step had begun to spring up. Once the bark was removed the scutching knife, a long wooden blade, was used to beat the fibers against a board. Then the linen fibers were put through hecklers or hacklers, boards with metal prongs that helped straighten the threads. This step had to be done several times with hecklers of increasing fineness. All of this processing was done largely by men. After that the long linen fibers were ready to be spun by the household’s women

The men who were skilled at ‘dressing’ the fibers considered this a profession and during the winter went from household to household processing the fibers. Most households did not have the equipment, in fact many did not own a loom although all had spinning wheels. And that is plural, some wheels spun wool, some spun linen, some required the woman to walk back and forth with the yarn in her hands. The spinner controlled the tension.

Linen is a fiber with no give, unlike wool which has a little stretch to it. Linsey-woolsey was a cloth made with a wool warp and linen weft and offered some of the advantages of both fibers. And how, asks the practical minded woman, were these clothes laundered?

Well, usually only the underwear was laundered. There was a great controvery over which fiber to use, wool or linen. Linen won and it is a fiber that can stand hot water and ironing and grows softer with both wear and washing. So the practical housewife laundered primarily the underwear, termed ‘body linen’ in those days.

Writing and the Writing Life

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I’ve always wanted to write and wrote my first story at ten. (It was fantasy and every paragraph started with suddenly.)  Since then, I have set aside part of every day to write, and it has not been easy. Up to this point, I’ve had some limited success.

Now I discover that when you do publish, suddenly you have many other tasks beside the fun one of actually writing the story. I refer, of course, to editing and copy editing. The first edits suggested by my editor were kind of fun and I looked upon them as a free creative writing course. And boy were they helpful. I’d gone through the book about six times and there were still places where I didn’t explain something.

Copy edits are different. You look at every word, every comma, every character. Not fun or glamorous at all.

The other task writers do is talk. I’ve already had my first speaking ‘engagement’. I never mind doing this, though. I can always talk and my first time talking about my book was to a group of librarians. Since I started working in libraries at 16, talking to librarians was not a problem. I joke that I can talk to librarians with my mouth taped shut.

Anyway, learning to be a writer, as opposed to ‘writing’ is definitely a job.