Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (157 page)

You see frequent references in historical accounts to the “Haitian Navy”
Chasseurs-Volontaires,
who fought with the Americans during the Siege of Savannah. In fact, Haiti didn't exist as a polity at this point in history, and these black volunteers were actually from Saint-Domingue (later the Dominican Republic) and other places, and their background is fascinating, but not something I was able to go into during my discussion of the Battle of Savannah. The following details, however, are from the
blackpast.org
website and give a fuller picture:

D'Estaing's troops were mainly composed of colonial regiments coming from various locations such as Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue. The 800 men from the French Caribbean colonies were organized into a regiment called
Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue.
These soldiers were
des gens de couleurs libres
(free men of color) who voluntarily joined the French colonial forces. The
gens de couleur
were mixed-race men of African and European origin from Saint-Domingue. They were born free and thus were distinct from free slaves, or
affranchise,
who were born enslaved or became enslaved during their lives and then freed themselves or were freed. This distinction allowed the
gens de couleur
a higher social and political role in the French colonial West Indies. According to the 1685 French Black Code, they had the same rights and privileges as the white colonial population. In practice, however, strong discrimination by white French colonial residents impeded the
gens de couleurs
from fully exercising them.

This is not the time or place to discuss the portrayal of cultures in fiction, save to say that

1. No two people who belong to a culture experience it in the same way, and
   

2. If writers felt constrained to write only about their own experience, culture, history, or background…libraries would be full of dull biographies, and a lot of what
   makes
   a culture—the variety and vigor of its art—would be lost, and the culture would die.
   

That said, when you write about anything outside your own personal experience, you need the assistance of other people, whether you get it from books (necessary, if you're writing about historical situations and events) or from personal stories and advice.

During the last thirty-three years, I've had the good luck to come across a number of kind and helpful people who were more than willing to advise me about the details of their own culture (as experienced by them), and consequently, I think the various portrayals of those cultures have deepened and improved over the course of the writing of these books. I hope so.

When this happens, though, naturally details will vary, and as you acquire more contacts and more knowledge, you'll run into some conflicts between accounts. Given that you really can't go back and revise major events and characters in an earlier book, the best you can do is to adjust the current writing so far as is possible, and use the improved information when writing the next book.

In the final phases of writing
Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone,
I had the serendipitous honor of meeting kahentinetha bear, an eighty-two-year-old Mohawk activist, who was more than helpful in supplying me with cultural details, as well as Eva Fadden, the Mohawk-language consultant to the
Outlander
TV show. Eva and her family are the curators of the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center (
www.6nicc.com
). Both these ladies gave me fascinating information—some of which was at odds with historical accounts (all written by non-Mohawk people) that I'd used in previous books. So I used these ladies' helpful information to the greatest extent possible, and will continue to apply it (and whatever further advice they and other people give me) in future books.

As a brief example, here is kahentinetha's
*3
description of naming, which doesn't agree with the naming of Ian Murray's son in the novels. One could argue that the circumstances were quite different and that the people involved were connected with Joseph Brant and thus not living entirely within the normal cultural environment, and I think that's valid. But I did want to provide kahentinetha's information, just as illustration (and in thanks for her very elegant commentary):

Prayed—we don't pray like Christians. We gather together in our clan and describe the dream. We do not interpret the dream. We are to wait for the next dream and a sign that will give the meaning to the initial dream. Also the name is given by the people and the baby is presented to all the clans in the longhouse. When the person dies, the last night before he is buried, there is a ceremony to take back the name so he or she leaves without it. Now somebody else can use it. No two persons in the world can have the same name. The oldest person with the name can keep it but the younger person has to go back to the longhouse, wear new clothes and receive a new name.

—kahentinetha bear
(quoted by permission)

*1
Historical Note: This newspaper was published out of New Bern, North Carolina, between (roughly) 1764 and 1775;
The Cape-Fear Mercury
somewhat later, around 1783. There are no publishing records of North Carolina newspapers during the war years of the American Revolution. This doesn't mean there were no newspapers, only that any such periodicals didn't survive. Sometimes, neither did the journalists. Reportage was risky business.

*2
“Jacobin” is/was not the same thing as “Jacobite.” There's more than one meaning to “Jacobin” (there was an order of French Dominican monks so called, for one thing), but its most common meaning is/was: “a member of an extremist or radical political group, especially: a member of such a group advocating egalitarian democracy and engaging in terrorist activities during the French Revolution of 1789.” (Hence the addition of
“Anti-Jacobin”
to the newspaper's name in 1803.) A Jacobite, as presumably we all know by now, was specifically a supporter of the Stuart monarchy, headed—at the beginning—by King James III (the Old Pretender), “Jacobite” being derived from “Jacobus,” the Latin form of the name “James.”

*3
kahentinetha (her name means “she makes the grass move”) informs me that the Mohawk don't use capitalization, though she makes an exception for her blog,
Mohawk Nation News,
in order to make it more accessible to a general readership (
www.mohawknationnews.com
).

*
a collection of disparate elements