Just as Cato accompanied his brother William into the Confederate Army in Unmentionables, Elijah accompanies Ben Crenshaw into the Confederate Army in All to Pieces. It was common for Confederate officers to bring their slaves with them into the Army in order to attend to their personal needs. In most cases, the slaves did not participate directly in battles. But they were not invulnerable to the hostilities in which they found themselves.
Elijah Crenshaw is a character in All to Pieces who appears posthumously. His story is important to understanding the character of Ben Crenshaw. As Jimmy learns about Elijah's fate, his story becomes a cautionary tale.
Just as Cato accompanied his brother William into the Confederate Army in Unmentionables, Elijah accompanies Ben Crenshaw into the Confederate Army in All to Pieces. It was common for Confederate officers to bring their slaves with them into the Army in order to attend to their personal needs. In most cases, the slaves did not participate directly in battles. But they were not invulnerable to the hostilities in which they found themselves.
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Bonnie Crenshaw is Ben Crenshaw's sister. She's wealthy, attractive, eccentric, idealistic, and obsessed with Jimmy. Her campaign to civilize him plays an important role in All to Pieces.
Socially awkward, she had no friends among her peers when growing up. She forced slaves to be her friends--mixing tyranny with pitiableness. Slave owners who had great power over the lives of their slaves sometimes used that power not only to build wealth but also to meet emotional and sexual needs they couldn't fulfill through normal human interactions--a practice doomed to lead to emptiness. Readers of Unmentionables know her as Dorothy Holland. But by the beginning of All to Pieces, she's become Dorothy Askew. She and William have married and set up house in Chicago while they await the end of the war.
Dorothy plays a peripheral role in All to Pieces. Cato takes the money he and Jimmy got from Erastus and leaves it with her to keep it safe for them while they're gone. She continues her role as a correspondent. Eventually, she becomes a bridge for the written communications between Cato and Jimmy and Erastus who are scattered about the country. Dorothy also continues to feel strongly about social matters. She's an ardent abolitionist. She is destined to play a role in the women's suffrage movement that began with women abolitionists in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. Neither slaves nor women had the right to vote at the time of this story. But it wasn't until after the Civil War that the question of suffrage was taken up by society in earnest. By 1870 black males were guaranteed the right to vote with the ratification of the 15th Amendment. But not women! This photograph captures many of the qualities I ascribe to Dorothy: beauty, patience, a mixture of delicacy and strength, and a questioning mind. Although, William Askew doesn't appear as a character in All to Pieces, I expect that he'll be back in the next installment in the series.
William was raised as a privileged Southern slave-holder. Despite the influences of his brother, Cato, and his wife, Dorothy, his personality was shaped by his father, Augustus Askew, who is not the most likable of characters. William would have been raised to marry a traditional southern woman. But as we know, Dorothy Askew is no southern belle. William was humbled by his experiences on the battlefield at Shiloh. That may be why he's lying low in 1862, which is when All to Pieces takes place. But I feel certain that later, when the war is over, William will rebound with displays of the confidence and arrogance that you can detect in this photograph. One of my favorite characters in Unmentionables is Mrs. MacMurrough. She's warm and wry with a distinctive voice that I love to write. Her name is a nod to a character in Jamie O'Neill's novel, At Swim, Two Boys, which is one of my favorite novels.
I'm pleased to say that Mrs. MacMurrough is back in All to Pieces. What's more, she's back with her favorite companions, Donahue, the black cat, and Mr. Mack, her co-conspirator in the Underground Railroad. My inspiration photograph for Mrs. MacMurrough is this vintage photograph of Mary Jones, an Irish-born American schoolteacher who became a prominent labor and community organizer. She was born in County Cork, Ireland, which is also where my own great-grandmother, Anna Humble, was born. It was through Anna Humble and her daughter, my grandmother, Eliza Loyd, that I was first exposed to the Irish way of speaking. Mary Jones is commonly known as "Mother" Jones. And the magazine, Mother Jones, was named for her. Erastus Hicks has a role in All to Pieces--although he doesn't appear until later in the book.
As with each character, I draw inspiration as I write from an image of someone who looks more or less the way I imagine the character to look. Here is the photograph I've been using as a likeness for Erastus. This man may be somewhat younger than you expected. Bear in mind that his perceived age in Unmentionables was colored by the perspective of the very young Cato. In All to Pieces, Erastus undergoes a great challenge--one that tests the meaning of his life. Joe Bird is a Shawnee scout for the Union Army in Kentucky. An encounter with Cato leads to Joe’s coming out. Joe professes his love for a blue-eyed Union soldier—none other than Private Jack Robinson. Joe Bird’s character was inspired by this photo of a 19th-century Native American.
It wasn’t easy for gay men in 1862 to find each other. It required trust in instinct, some amount of gaydar, and a willingness to take risk. It would have required a great deal of trust before the topic could even be broached. But I’ve chosen to depict several such encounters in this story, because I believe the impetus of sexual desire would have propelled men to find each other despite the odds and despite the danger. I was planning to write a more G-rated story this time around, but the characters were having none of that. I'm slowly filling out the contours of one of the new characters, a slave-owning Southerner named Ben Crenshaw, who's physically modeled on the 19th century photograph shown here.
Ben is a complex character, whose behavior is unpredictable. The Unmentionables sequel, called All to Pieces, which I began to write in earnest last summer, is now 40% complete. The story takes place in 1862. In that year, no one knew how the war would end. People undoubtedly felt that their lives were unstable. There was widespread confusion about what constituted legal tender. The only means of communication with friends and relatives, the telegraph and the post office, were either closed down or unreliable in many parts of the country. The carnage from the war, reported daily in the newspapers, was overwhelming. Being immersed in that world makes it easier for me to come back to 2017, where, as troubling as the political situation is to me, it's not nearly as bad as the situation in 1862.
The plot of the new novel has me working hard to find the right point of view for the complex dynamics of slavery, homosexuality, and 19th century attitudes. This week I've been studying this picture of a Civil War soldier. He's the model for a character that Cato meets on a train from Chicago to Cairo. Private Jack Robinson, a soldier in the 74th Indiana Infantry, Company C, who ends up at the Battle of Munfordville in Kentucky. In the story, he's a simple man, who's unaware of his own beauty. |
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