An internet acquaintance, Andi Cumbo, has written a book about the enslaved people who used to live on her family's Virginia plantation. Her working title is You Will Not Be Forgotten, and I have learned a great deal about Andi, her book, and her writing process as I've read her blog posts about the book.
One of Andi's laments was how little she knew about the people about whom she was writing. Often, all she had was a name, or variations of a name, on a list or two. Sometimes those lists would include family connections, occupations, or records of sales, but seldom anything truly meaningful. Certainly nothing personal. Her self-appointed task was to take the fragments of information she could uncover and piece them together into some semblance of a story. She wanted to ensure these people would not be forgotten forever.
I often wondered how she could possibly attempt to write these stories given such a dearth of information. What could she write but a list of unanswerable questions?
Glynis Ridley gave me a clue to a possible answer. Ridley wrote The Discovery of Jeanne Baret, the story
of the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. She pieced together the probable story of Jeanne Baret, a young woman who posed as a man to be a botanist's assistant on the 1765-68 French sailing expedition led by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville. The botanist was Philibert Commerson, Jeanne's lover and the man for whom she was housekeeper, but not wife.
Ridley's challenge in writing Jeanne's story was that Jeanne had kept no journals, and she wasn't an important enough person on the voyage to warrant much attention in the four or five journals which were kept by Captain Bougainville and other gentlemen. What attention she did warrant centered around speculation that "Jean" was really a woman, not a eunuch as she claimed.
Ridley managed to piece together a credible story based on those journals, other existing records of births, deaths, property ownership, and so on, and her research into the 18th century world in which Jeanne lived. The story she wrote was credible, but speculative.
Generally speaking, Ridley clearly identified where she was supposing what might have happened or how Jeanne likely felt about her situation. What often bothered me, however, was that after the supposition was set up and justified, Ridley then commenced with the story as if the supposition were fact.
For example, Ridley describes Jeanne as binding her breasts and wearing loose fitting clothing to disguise her female figure while on the ship Etoile. Ridley then goes on to describe several times the oozing, painful wounds Jeanne suffered under her bindings due to months of sweat and salt under wraps she couldn't remove, and how she was unable to take care of the sores. With the possible exception of the clothing description, I saw no basis for any of these assumptions other than that they made logical sense given the situation Jeanne was in and the close confines of the ship.
Jeanne's inability to care for herself is exacerbated by Commerson's lack of concern for her, or so Ridley would have us believe. Commerson is repeatedly cast as treating Jeanne like a servant, not a current or former lover, and having no apparent concern for her well being except in that she is useful to him. Again, these assumptions are generally unsupported, but possibly reasonable based on known information about Commerson's character and the society in which they lived.
I do not mean to disparage Ridley's work or the story she tells us about Jeanne Baret. The book is well written, entertaining, and informative. I would generally have to agree with the assumptions she makes about the conditions Jeanne was forced to live under and the probable emotional toll those conditions took on her. It was fascinating to see how a writer could take so few facts and yet still introduce the reader to such a complete character.
I am eager to see how Andi chose to tell her stories of enslaved persons. Will she take the assumptive liberties Ridley did, or will her book raise more questions than it attempts to answer? I hope Andi finds an agent/editor/publisher soon so we can all find out.
In the meantime, there's a headstone in the Valdez cemetery that's been haunting me. Edward H. Turner was born in Wales and died in Valdez in 1921. I wonder what his story was....
