Some More Questions

There’s a magic for me as a somewhat hidden writer (essential for my work) when a book launch brings me into connection with new people. This happened Sunday at my launch of Taken by the Shawnee at the wonderful Garcia Street Books here in Santa Fe.

Someone I’d never met before who was a part of the enthusiastic crowd that filled the bookstore to overflowing on a rainy afternoon told me about research undertaken by a California friend with a Kentucky background. He’s been looking into a dark and seldom mentioned part of Kentucky’s pre-Civil War past: slave breeding plantations.

I’ve picked up brief references to these enterprises here and there, adding nuance to the statement I heard as a child that Kentucky had no slaves. While it’s true that the particular geography and climate of the state didn’t lend itself to large cotton plantations, its situation on the Ohio made it highly profitable for slave trading, which Louisville recently recognized for the first time with a trail of bare feet in concrete along the river. “Sold down the river” carried a fearful connotation since it meant being sold to the brutal sugar and cotton plantations in the South.

But it wasn’t only slave trading. It was also slave breeding. The same limestone that is touted now as essential for the strength of million-dollar racehorse bones was also deemed essential for the strong bones of laboring slaves.

That’s as far as I can go at this point. But it seems likely that there is a great deal more to discover. And I’m interested in looking for it. Do any of you agree?

Many of you answered my first post, asking for responses to three of my book ideas. One of them was about Lady Mary Wortley Montague—her connection to the first vaccine preventing smallpox, her years in the 18th century in Turkey as wife of the first British ambassador, her escape in middle age to Italy. My dear Turkish friend, Ozlem Ezer, came up with a fascinating suggestion: a novel in letters, called The Lost Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague using her extensive letters as a starting point for letters between two feminist writers.

Intrigued, I picked up Volume One of her Complete Letters 1708-1720, edited by Robert Halsband. I opened to her letter of 1 April 1717 to the Princess of Wales which begins, “I have now, Madame, past a journey that has not been undertaken by any Christian since the time of the Greek Emperors… We crossed the deserts of Servia… a Country naturally fertile and the Inhabitants industrious, but the Oppression of the peasants is so great they are forced to abandon their harvests and neglect their Tillage all they have been prey to the Janizarys whenever they have been pleased to seize upon it. We had a guard of 500 of ’em, and I was almost in tears every day to see their insolences in the poor villages through which we pass’d.”

What would two contemporary feminists make of this in their letters? Would the destruction of Palestine figure?

At this point all is conjecture. But between the slave breeding plantations of Kentucky and the travels and perceptions of an eighteenth-century woman—which would you choose?

 

In Writing Kentucky Lady Mary Wortley Montague Ozlem Ezer Louisville