The Fudge
Factor
Jonathan Carriel Confesses Instances of Authorial "Cheating" in
Great Mischief
First of all, there was
no recorded slave insurrection in Kings County, New York, in 1759. The
hysteria described in Great Mischief
is entirely fictional. However,
insurrections and panics were hardly unknown to small towns, and were common to
American cities (north and south) throughout the 18th Century. A
further reasonable presumption is that for every such disruption remembered by
history, many others of nearly equal seriousness have probably been forgotten.
(John Glasby’s relation of the horrific New York City events of 1741 in Chapter 3, by contrast, although a
fictional character’s personal “take” on the events, is based on the historical
record.)
Many primary source records about
colonial New York in 1759 remain that would throw this fantasy about “New
Utrecht” completely into the trashcan. [For readers unfamiliar with New York
City: “New Utrecht” is indeed a real
place, a township chartered by the New Netherlands in 1657 but no longer an
independent municipality. Thousands of people live today in a section of a
couple square miles that is now commonly called a “neighborhood.”] Not only are
there complete records of the clergymen who officiated, there are colonial
property and tax records which would include base information about the actual
freeholders and probably even their slaves. Thus, the specifics of New Utrecht
in 1759 could likely be assembled by a diligent researcher. Truth often being
stranger than fiction, it could well be fascinating! However, the historical
novelist draws his or her line somewhere and I, though constraining myself to
the historical datum that the population at that time consisted of
approximately 200 whites and 100 blacks, have been content to invent names,
characterizations, relationships, and structures for all 300 of them.
In deference to modern
sensibilities, the pejorative most offensive to modern ears has been eschewed
in favor of more neutral terms such as Negro, black, African, slave, bondsman,
servant, and so forth. The sad truth is that the pejorative would have been routinely used by even
the most educated and liberal-minded white Americans of the mid-18th
Century—including all our leading characters—without a second thought (but also
without the intensity of malice now associated with it). There were, I presume
though I don’t know, equivalents in
Dutch language or slang. Contrariwise,
but also untrue to actual historical practice, our hero generally candidly
refers to slaves as “slaves.” The usual,
genteel euphemism was “servant,” of course, which was a fudge at the time that neatly obscured the distinction—crucial to
the individual—between contractual service and involuntary servitude.
Chapter 1
- The Red Hook ferry is a fictional concoction operated by the fictional Jacob.
It would have made little economic sense to conduct a ferry service from the
north side of the Gowanus Creek to the southern tip of Manhattan, given the
better roads that led directly to the Brooklyn Ferry (where the Brooklyn Bridge
now stands). It is likely that our fictional Jacob will eventually realize his
enterprise is terminally unprofitable and give it up.
Chapter 4
– The Intelligencer and the Examiner are fictitious. The
New York newspapers of the period were the Gazette
and the Mercury, both of which were
weeklies.
Chapter 5
– The existence of a stocks in New Utrecht is a supposition. The idea that the
town’s Selectmen (the existence of their office also a supposition) would have some limited authority to inflict
corporal punishment is likewise putative. Stocks and pillories took many forms;
the ankle-clamp stocks described in Great
Mischief were among the least sadistic, but could still occasion permanent
injury. The 24-hour sentence is entirely fictional. (I trust it did not escape
my readers that the identical sentence imposed upon Rykert Dordrecht and Justus
Bates … constituted an irony that masked brutal injustice.)
Chapter 6
- An assumption of the novel—no more than that—is that Kings County slaves
lived in “slave quarters,” black sections of each town separated from the
masters, rather than in apartments of the masters’ houses, or in slave areas
attached to individual plantations (as frequently seen in the American South).
Recently, I’ve found one assertion to the contrary—that even in the southern,
more densely populated counties of New York, slaves were domiciled with their
masters, apart from other slaves; it strikes your author as unworkable,
uneconomic, and implausible given that flat, water-bound Long Island posed an
even greater challenge to would-be escapees than nearby New Jersey or
Westchester County. Based on the population statistics, a further assumption
has been that the local slave population, which was at its greatest proportional
height in this era, was roughly equal in males and females, and increased
primarily due to birth and longevity rather than to importation. A further
assumption is that the sale of slaves outside the locality would be an
extremely disruptive rarity. A final assumption is that slaves living in slave
communities would tend to intermarry irrespective of ownership, creating black
families subject to the whims and vicissitudes of multiple white families.
Chapter 6
- Poor Richard’s Almanac was discontinued
after 1758; no farming family would have lacked one of its competitors,
however.
Chapter 7
– The price of slaves (like the prices of wheat, muffins, potholders, smithies,
etc.), is conjectural, based on the few, radically variant prices I’ve found in
the record. I have seen prices (for healthy male adults in the colonies in the
1750s) quoted as low as £50 and as high as £300. Even though “commodity” prices
rose with the war, a six-fold increase is implausible. The £230 deal struck for
Vrijdag between Teunis Loytinck and Thomas Dordrecht, is therefore based only
on a best guess of what the market might have borne in New York City in April
1759, plus the special situations
dictated by the plot and the characters.
Chapter 11 - The
dialect of the slaves … is made up,
loosely based on such transcriptions of slaves’ statements as were ever written
down, deliberately mixed with the clumsy omissions and simplified tenses of the
uneducated everywhere. The language put in most of their mouths is doubly
fictional, of course, in that a premise of Great
Mischief is that most discussions with slaves would have taken place in Dutch!
Chapter 12 - Time of sunset: thick
fudge! Your author drafted the book
three times before realizing this plain error … which by then was too
troublesome to correct. At midsummer, sunset in New York City is at
approximately 8:30 PM, and sunrise around 5:30 AM, Eastern Daylight Time. Now of course
there wasn’t any daylight savings time in 1759; there wasn’t even standardized
time. Time would have been set by the local solar zenith. However, New York’s
location at 40 degrees North latitude has not changed, and midsummer nights
would then as now have been nine, not
eight, hours long. I decided sunrise
was on standard time and therefore would be at 4:30 AM … but forgot to make
sunset correspondingly at 7:30 PM. Anybody notice? Kudos to any reader who caught that one!
Chapter 12 – The described cleanliness of The
Arms’ facilities … is greater than that warranted by the historical record
(even considering that the Dutch were renowned as the most fastidious Europeans
of the era). Modern American travelers would be revolted even to contemplate
the unsanitary conditions common to such institutions in the 18th
Century.
Chapter 15 – Were the New Utrecht slaves permitted to keep some personal weapons
in their immediate possession? My surmise is de jure, no; de facto,
yes.
Chapter 15 - The full moon of June 1759 actually occurred on the 10th
of the month. I moved it up four days to
permit it to set an hour before sunrise on Saturday the 9th,, the
night of the murder, six days after the celebration of Pinkster. (Sorry, I know
such fejiggering risks throwing the entire solar system out of kilter!)
Chapter 19 – The precise terms that concluded indentured servitude in New York
province … are fabricated. Each colony stipulated some legal requirement
obliging the owner to present the freed servant with clothes, tools, land, or
cash upon the conclusion of the service period, and the requirements were
usually not inconsiderable.
Fudges on the Dutch language:
A
Dutch Reformed clergyman of the time was most usually called a domine, which if I understand correctly
is pronounced exactly the same as its French counterpart, dominé; to wit, doh-mee-NAY.
However, I more or less defy any native English-speaker to look at domine and not think doh-MEEN or, worse,
DOH-meen … neither of which will do at all.
Therefore I adopted the Scottish Presbyterian (also Calvinist) clerical
title, dominie, which I believe
actually did come into use in some American Dutch Reformed congregations,
though probably not until the 19th Century. Contemporary Reformed
clergymen are addressed as Reverend, the same as most other Protestants.
Kramers Woordenboek Nederlands-Engels contains two Dutch words for the English mister: meneer and mijnheer. Although I’d assumed mijnheer was more formal or more correct, Kramers defines it simply as the equivalent of meneer. So what do I know? Meneer (pronounced, I think, mayn-AIR)
works better.
A
schout (pronounced SHKOWT) is an
historical term for a bailiff or sheriff. It was certainly used in the New
Netherlands; I presume it had some basis in the old country as well.
Contemporary Dutch-speakers are mystified by the term, but I read that Kiliaen
van Rensselaer, the greatest of the 17th Century patroons, who micromanaged his
Albany-area plantations from the safety of Amsterdam, outfitted his appointed schouts with a traditional rapier,
baldric, and silver plume—to impress the local tribesmen, one imagines.
Thomas
Dordrecht and the majority of both the black and white denizens of New Utrecht
are so completely bilingual, that he never feels compelled even to mention in
what language a conversation originally occurred as he relates the story to the
reader in English. As opposed to the
bulk of the dialog in Die Fasting,
that of Great Mischief takes place
mostly in Dutch. Only when it is germane
to the plot, as when characters are unable to comprehend each other, is the
subject even raised. As a narrator, our
hero generally leaves it up to the reader to deduce what language is being
spoken. As he has related to us, Dutch
is commonly preferred in New Utrecht; however, in the presence of English-only
or Dutch-only characters, the bilingual characters generally switch,
automatically, habitually, and without fuss.
[See
Attempting to Pronounce Dutch.]
Notices
– Ordering
– Author
– Contact
