Blogging Mary Bowser

Welcome to the special place in my mind where Godey's Ladies' Book meets the J. Geils Band.

Ever wonder where the phrase "fashion plate" comes from? In the mid-nineteenth century magazines like Godey's began including "plates" or pictures of the hottest fashions. Get your corset gussied up tight, ladies, because they are showing some bare elbows in Paree.

The advent of print media technology that made such plates cheap enough to reproduce (not to mention postal service that made magazine delivery more feasible) contributed to a new era of female consumerism. These plates were so treasured that women would sometimes save them and hang them as wall art (think of it as the Christie Brinkley poster thumbtacked to the teen bedroom running that J Geils soundtrack).

Women of the emerging American middle class--aspiring to be Victorian "angels in the house"--could now be told how to dress, and how to comport themselves, with charming regularity. An exciting new era, even if that baby does look a little Edward Gorey-esque. At least the young girl approaching it is armed with a saber. I'm sure everything will turn out just peachy, aren't you?

President's Day Factoid: if the main character of your novel were about to look Abraham Lincoln in the eye, how would you know what color those eyes were?

Right after the Confederate capital of Richmond fell to the Union army, President Lincoln came to see the captured city. He visited the Confederate White House, which Jefferson Davis had fled, and even sat in Davis' office chair. You *know* I was not going to miss a chance to stage a scene in which Mary Bowser meets the man with whom she'd allied herself as a Union spy.

And thanks to a detail obtained for me by a very helpful gentleman from the Lincoln Presidential Library, Mary looks the Great Emancipator right in the grays of his peepers to congratulate him on the victory.

When it comes to historical fiction, the devil is in the details.

Fear of a red tractor. That is what keeps a novelist up at night.

Remember the good ol' days when barber, surgeon, and dentist was a single occupation?

Okay, maybe those days weren't so good. But these days, everyone's a literary critic. Including Dr. Miller, who's also my dentist.

Last year, he told me about a book he'd been reading. A book he really liked. Until he got to a description of a field wherein there sat "a red John Deere tractor." He immediately put the book down, never to finish it. Because, as he put it, "everyone knows, John Deere has never made a red tractor. That was put in there by some New York editor."

Only an Oregon dentist can make New York editor sound like such an unseemly villain.

But Dr. Miller was onto something. Writers are always trying to add specificity to our descriptions, to make things more real. Except that when you get that *real* detail wrong, you have blown it big time.

As it happens, one of my New York editors, the lovely Laurie Chittenden, is originally from Virginia. She suggested that the bird's nest I'd tucked into a magnolia tree on the very first page of my novel should have gone into a dogwood, because that's the state tree of Virginia.

Now, I'm an obsessed lunatic. I'd already checked on whether magnolias grew in Richmond. But here was a bona fide Virginian making the case for dogwood. So what did I do? I emailed one of the Virginia state arborists, just to make sure that a bird would actually nest in a dogwood if it were in the exact location of the tree on page 1 of my novel. Only when he said yes did I make the change.

As you can imagine, this level of obsession takes an awful lot out of a novelist. I was reading the galleys of my book last fall, and lo and behold, I realized I'd made a reference to a straight razor. You know, the olde timey open-bladed razor that any nineteenth-century character would be familiar with. And so I took my big purple pencil (the red pen of galley proofing) and Xed it out.

Why?

Because nobody called a straight razor a straight razor, until after there were safety razors (that olde timey kind everyone's dad used). Until then, they were just razors.

I swear, sometimes writing historical fiction is like pulling teeth. Just joking, Dr. Miller!

The nineteenth-century was a period of amazing innovation. In facial hair.

Indeed, the less-than-Civil War obsessed individual may not realize that sideburns were named for Union General Ambrose Burnside. But as this quiz from the fine folks at Smithsonian.com makes clear, when it came to fantastic facial hair configurations, Burnside had stiff competition.


Another fascinating fact. Especially for *The Secrets of Mary Bowser* in which a certain handsome barber figures prominently.

Tomorrow: razors! tractors! and my dentist!

Forget the cheesesteak. In antebellum Philadelphia, it was all about the pepperpot.

Given the popularity of yesterday's rat 'n' squirrel bake-off, I thought it would only be fair to discuss the culinary obsessions of the North. Or at least of Philadelphia, where about half my novel is set.

So if you were feeling peckish in the City of Brotherly Love circa 1851, you just needed to prick up your ears for the cry, "Pepperpot, smoking hot." That meant the pepperpot vendor--always an African American woman, in the depictions I've seen--was plying her signature dish. For Portlanders, think of it as being like a food cart, but without all that bulky cart business. For the rest of you, think drive-through without all that internal combustion engine.


What was in pepperpot? A lot of meat, usually tripe, oxfeet, whatever else was cheap, and then a lot of spice.

And yes, Mary does try pepperpot when she arrives in Philadelphia. Does she like it? Let's just say regional cuisine can take some getting used to.

Today's Civil War Fact: You do NOT want to buy the Jefferson Davis Cookbook.

Why not?

During the Civil War, one of the most successful Union strategies was the blockade of the Confederacy. Which meant food shortages. At a time when people in Richmond were desperate with hunger, Jeff Davis purportedly proclaimed, "A fat rat is as good as a squirrel."

A rather distressing sentiment for his constituents, both because he was advocating eating rats, and because it reveals that he saw squirrel as some standard of culinary excellence.


(Plus he may have hurt the feelings of rats who felt judged on their body size. I can just imagine some non-fat rat hearing Davis compare its more corpulent companions to mmmm tasty squirrels and thinking, "what am I, chopped liver?")

Nothing says "America's great love of history" like a Civil War reenactment encampment. Complete with PortaPotty.


Squint and you can see it, there in the background.

How is this a fascinating fact? Um, what if I mention that during the Civil War there were no chemical toilets? So often they used streams/rivers near the encampment. But not always ones DOWNRIVER from the encampment.

Not the only reason there were so many disease-induced fatalities during the War, but perhaps the grossest one.

Spend Valentine's Day at the Pleasure Garden! The antebellum Pleasure Garden, that is.

Today's Fascinating Fact from The Secrets of Mary Bowser is not about the Civil War, per se. It's about where Mary goes for a date when she is living in Philadelphia in the 1850s. Unlike me, Mary did not get to spend her teen years hanging out at the Multiplex. She got to hang out at the pleasure garden.

Less kinky than it might sound to modern ears, the pleasure garden was a feature of many 19th-century cities. Living in Philadelphia, Mary's pleasure garden of choice was Lemon Hill.

As you can see from this photograph (downloaded from the Lemon Hill website), there is no place kids would rather be. Well, maybe that is less true now that they have the Multiplex. Not to mention the Youtube. But for Mary, it really was a hot time in the city.

It's a fact: there were no Starbucks back in the days of the Stars and Bars. Which perhaps is why you never see a portrait in which Robert E. Lee is sipping a Triple Venti Sugar free, Non fat, No foam, extra caramel, with whip caramel macchiato (btw, I do not drink coffee; I had to google to get that description. I know the punctuation is off, but I'm scared to touch it, because I have no idea what any of it means).

In fact, coffee was one of the many items in short supply due to the Union blockade of the Confederacy. At least, real coffee (you know, the kind made from coffee beans) was in short supply. So desperate coffee drinkers turned to all sorts of ersatz alternatives. The most popular of which was parched corn coffee.

Which makes you wonder what the *unpopular* alternatives were.

And so concludes today's fascinating fact.

92 more days till publication! Only 92 more facts . . . oh it is so hard to choose. Lemme know if there's a fact you'd like to share or a question you'd like me to answer. Something that has something to do with my book, not with my fantastic fashion sense (answer to that is always LEOPARD).

Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis both got plastered. Or at least their walls did.

While I was researching my novel, I was fortunate to travel to Richmond, Virginia and visit the Museum of the Confederacy. It's located in the former White House of the Confederacy, which means I toured the actual rooms where Mary Bowser spied on Confederate leaders by posing as a slave.

At one point in the tour, the guide called our attention to the wallpaper in one of the rooms, which was patterned to look like wood paneling. The guide told us the same wallpaper was used in the White House in Washington, D.C.

It seems a nation can be torn apart by slavery and by war, and yet unite around household decor. Or maybe that's the other way around? Anyway, if you have a chance to visit the MOC, definitely check out the wallpaper.

Did you know that Clint Eastwood in the campiest film EVER made?

And that it happens to be about the Civil War?

Wounded prisoner, remote girls' boarding school.



How's that for today's fascinating Civil War "fact"?

Today's fascinating fact is more of a fascinating phenom, namely the mid-nineteenth-century obsession with death and mourning. In the antebellum period, death was part of life. Families experienced the death of children. Most people died at home (rather than in hospitals). And then the Civil War brought death on an unprecedented scale.

Even before the war, mourning was a highly ritualized event.

Entire stores, such as Beeson and Son's in Philadelphia, were dedicated solely to selling mourning attire. Yes, Goth chicks, a store where ALL THE CLOTHES were black.

Godey's Ladies' Book, which was sort of the Cosmo magazine of the day, but without all the sex tips, ran articles about what to wear and do in mourning (alas, these did not come in Cosmo-quiz format).

And of course, there was the exceptionally creepy practice of wearing jewelry made out of your dead loved one's hair. And not just a single lock, like some hairy version of the Italian horn. Women wove whole landscapes crafted out of different shades of dead beloveds' hair. I have yet to see the 21st century Goth chicks take that one on.

While you await the 95 more days till *The Secrets of Mary Bowser,* you can bide your time learning more about nineteenth-century-mourning attire here: http://www.librarycompany.org/laurelhill/dressed.htm

And don't worry, I won't be wearing anybody's hair but my own on book tour. Well, maybe some of the cats' but that's pretty much par for the course.

We've had some great but TOP SECRET (appropriately enough) news about The Secrets of Mary Bowser, so me and the boys celebrated with some sushi and sake.




If it seems like this is a stretch for a Fascinating Fact about the Civil War, please consider that the Union Navy was indeed involved in an incident in the Straits of Shimonoseki during the Civil War.

So yes, the Civil War in Japan, I am totally claiming that as a countdown fact, even if there is no evidence of Ulysses S. Grant ever ate the crunchy salmon skin roll.

97 Days till Publication, and here's today's fact:

Sic 'em. Or really, *Sic Semper Tyrannis* 'em. This lovely Latin phrase is on the Virginia state seal. Which, as you might guess, is NOT what this photo depicts.


This is an image of the regimental flag of the USCT 22d, a Pennsylvania unit. USCT stands for United States Colored Troops, the units in which African Americans served during the Civil War.

There are many lovely facts about the USCT to share . . . but I wanted to start with this one: the use of the same motto on the flag as on the Virginia state seal. Oh and of course that leaves-nothing-to-the-imagination image of a black soldier in uniform taking the Confederate prisoner at bayonet point. Which would have distressed Virginia's Confederate troop more?

The image was one of several USCT flags painted by the Philadelphia artist David Bustill Bowser.

Hmmm, Bowser, where have I heard that name before? Oh, but the relationship between David Bustill Bowser and Mary Bowser is definitely a story for another day. A day that is 96 days from now!

Tune in for another fascinating fact tomorrow . . .

Great sporks of the 19th century! Sounds like a Victorian curse, but actually it's literary inspiration.
AND it's today's Fascinating Fact in the 100-day countdown.

A few years back, I snapped this photograph while visiting a bunch of plantations and other historical sites in Virginia, North Carolina, and Louisiana, to research how they represented slavery. This picture was taken in a reconstruction of a slave cabin. I doubt the glass window was original; glass was expensive, certainly more of a luxury than most slave owners would have seen as befitting a structure that they perceived as more like a barn than a home. But the unfinished walls and mismatched furnishings give us some sense of how slaves lived.

The wooden utensils especially stuck in my mind. A wooden knife--who could imagine such a thing?--probably wasn't very useful. But the other sporkish cutlery . . . that was a perfect example of the everyday experience of enslaved people. As I was writing *The Secrets of Mary Bowser,* I wanted readers to understand in visceral, specific ways what it would be like to grow up surrounded by wealth and luxury--and yet live as a slave. For example, I wrote one scene in which Mary, still a child and still a slave, is asked to sit down to dinner with a white family. She is astonished at the difference of eating food "served hot in the dining room instead of snatched down cold afterward in the kitchen," and finds "the heavy silverware felt cumbersome compared to the wooden spoons" with which she always ate.

It's only a small detail. But in some ways the small details can help us understand the enormity of history.

99 Days to Publication, so here's today's entry in the 100 Fascinating Facts Countdown:

Did African Americans own slaves? It's a good question for black history month, and the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

The short--and surprising--answer is yes. But as they like to say on Facebook, "It's complicated." Or at least more complicated than a simple yes suggests.

For one thing, the vast majority of slaveowners in the U.S. were white. And even most whites didn't own slaves. So it's important not to overplay the idea of black slaveholding. But in Virginia, where my novel is set, there were blacks who owned slaves. And although they were only a small fraction of all slaveholders, today's fascinating fact is about understanding why blacks owned slaves at all.

We're 100 days away from the publication of *The Secrets of Mary Bowser* --and to celebrate, I'm launching a 100 Fascinating Facts Countdown (tip of the hat to Heidi Durrow for the idea).

The first fascinating fact is of course the one that started me on the journey to novelist: Mary Bowser was a real person. She was born a slave, freed and educated in the North, but then made the amazing choice to return to the South and *pose* as a slave in the Confederate White House to spy on Confederate President Jefferson Davis, passing what she learned to the Union through a spy ring run by her former owner. In other words, she sacrificed her freedom to help four million slaves gain theirs.

That fascinating fact took me on a path of years of researching the Civil War, which I had actually always thought was kind of boring. As you can imagine, I was totally wrong. And whether you find history fascinating or still need to be convinced, give me a 100 days, and I bet I can win you over.

What do Jon Stewart and I have in common?

Besides a deep fear that someone will unearth photos of us from our bar/bat mitzvahs and put them on the internet? (C'mon, no one wants the word to know just how gawkward--that is not a typo, that is a word I just invented--they were at age 13)

What Jon Stewart and I have in common is we luvvvvvv talking about books about slaves in the White House.

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What do Jon Stewart and Mary Bowser have in common?

They both lived in Virginia. Stewart went to Virginia to be educated at William and Mary College in the 1980s. Bowser left the state in the 1850s, after she was freed from slavery, to be educated in the North. But there the comparison falls apart, since she went back to Virginia to become a spy for the Union army, whereas he ended up in New York doing really funny late night TV.

Still, wouldn't it be beautiful if they could come together in a seven-minute book interview segment sometime this spring?

Years ago, a guy I met in an elevator asked me What determines the value of art?

I should mention that the elevator was in a building full of Chelsea art galleries, the guy was wearing a uniform from a delivery service, and my guess is he'd just happened by some piece of art that was selling for more than he made in a year.

Let's face it: art can seem intimidating to a lot of people.

So when I was asked to do a talk at Portland Art Museum, I picked a piece I really love. I thought about how to connect it to my writing. And then I set out to get the audience as excited as I was about it.


How would you describe what you see? I asked, as we stood before Marie Watt's mixed media sculpture. Here's what they told me.

What's blue and gray but NOT studied by blacks? Great @MorningEdition NPR interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates about why African Americans are less likely to study/commemorate/obsess about the Civil War than white Americans. (You can also read Coates' smart essay on the subject at the Atlantic).

Of course, as the granddaughter of Eastern European immigrants, raised in suburban New York, I never thought I'd find myself one of those who obsess about the Civil War (and yes, visit reenactments and battlefields on "vacation") . . . But the story of Mary Bowser hooked me to think about the experience of blacks during the War. It's not just that the War ended slavery; at the time, no one knew whether that would happen. So what interested me is understanding what it was like to be black, living in a place at war, hoping it would end slavery but not knowing if that would prove to be the case.

I'm hoping the novel will leaders readers of all races to understand that experience. Free and enslaved African Americans made tremendous contributions during the War, and I think this story will be a great way to learn about that--without having to hit the history textbooks (or even spend your summer touring battlefields--which I admit is kind of a mega-history-geek pursuit). And if it encourages more people to want to study the experience of people of color, especially women of color, rather than just battlefield statistics and the names of the heralded generals, I'm sure Coates won't mind seeing the phenomenon he discusses finally start to shift.

As we gather with family and friends to give thanks and overeat pie, let us all pause for a moment to obsess about staffing at Civil War military hospitals, shall we?

Here's an article I published about Chimborazo Hospital in Disunion, the New York Times' ongoing coverage of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. The race and gender roles at the hospital show how Southern society changed over the course of the War.

Nineteenth-century literary allusion du jour:

"November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year," said Margaret, standing at the window one dull afternoon, looking out at the frostbitten garden.

"That's the reason I was born in it," observed Jo pensively, quite unconscious of the blot on her nose.

Jo March and I have so much in common: authorial aspirations, inky noses, November birthdays.

But I did not have a disagreeable birthday. Instead, I had an affair.

Although my pub date is still a few months away, last week I did the first public reading for The Secrets of Mary Bowser. Normally, stuffed sinuses are not what you want when you do a reading. But when the reading is part of an event called Oregon Jewish Voices, a little nasal tonality can be right on target.

I wasn't exactly sure how my novel--in which the main character is so not Jewish that her mother is known to break into an occasional chat with Jesus--would fit into an evening of Jewish authors. So I figured I'd let the audience decide.

I started by reading a poem I wrote about visiting a friend in Germany. The poem explores how the war (not the Civil War, that other war, the one that can be hard to talk about with Germans, but even harder to avoid talking about) shadows our interactions, even in another century. As I noted to the audience, it's pretty clearly a work of "Jewish literature." Jewish person (me!) has an experience that is shaped by, and shapes, her Jewish identity, and then she reflects on it in her writing.

Then I read the prologue and the end of the first chapter of The Secrets of Mary Bowser. Although I've done readings for other things I've published, this was the first time I'd read to an audience from the novel, and it was incredibly moving to hear their real-time responses to the characters and scenes. Almost instantly, I could feel a whole auditorium full of people being caught up emotionally by this story, which has already had me caught for so long. It was about the greatest feeling an author can experience.

A girl never forgets her first time. Especially if it happens at the Airport Holiday Inn.

Just to be clear, I do mean her first time signing a new book.

I had a very memorable two days autographing bound galleys of The Secrets of Mary Bowser at the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, which brings together bookstore staff and librarians from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. These are the geekiest of book geeks. In other words, my peeps.

And two of the very bestest peeps I got to meet are Gabe Barillas and Jim Hankey, from HarperCollins.



They're like the Ernie and Bert of book selling, albeit without the stripey shirts and the rubber duckie. If the world didn't have authors, there would be no books. But if the world didn't have Gabe and Jim and their colleagues, there would be no way for readers to get books. And wouldn't that be a very sad time at the Holiday Inn?

Had breakfast today with the smart and talented Heidi Durrow. Her first novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is the 2012 Everybody Reads pick for the city of Portland (actually for the whole county, because that's how our library system rolls).

If you haven't read the book, you should. The voice and plot are incredibly compelling. Her style is so concise and free of artifice, it's kind of like the MacBook Air--you can't believe how much it packs in.

The main character, Rachel, is the daughter of a Danish mother and a black American G.I. father. Much of the book is about her struggle to understand what this lineage means, and how it defines (or doesn't define) who she will be. I think what fascinates me most about the novel is that Durrow draws on a long literary lineage--full of European and American literary tropes and themes that date back centuries--and that in some ways, the novel is about understanding what this literary lineage means, and how it defines (or doesn't define) what twenty-first century American literature can be.

And Durrow pulls it all off without making a reader who doesn't know the literary lineage feel left out.

Just deserts means that which is justly deserved.
Whereas just desserts means skipping the entree and going right for the ice cream.

And while I am a huge ice cream fan, I'm deeply indebted to the copy editrix at William Morrow for making sure the characters who deserve a comeuppance get a comeuppance, and not an ice cream sundae. Especially since there was no such thing as an ice cream sundae in the 1850s and 60s, when my novel is set.

That is one of the most challenging parts about writing historical fiction . . . we have stuff, but also words/phrases, today that people didn't have "back then," whenever the back then of a particular book happens to be. So just as surely as Mary Bowser and Bet Van Lew weren't riding around in a Prius, they also weren't chowing down on ice cream sundaes (c. 1897) or snickerdoodles (c. 1889).

Which is too bad, because if there is anything I would enjoy after a rough day trying to undermine the Confederacy, it would be an ice cream sundae, with a side order of snickerdoodles.