In The Flow of Time – August 16, 2024 I am starting to plot, which really means, I’m making up a story. It’s fiction! I have this truly massive pile of facts that exists in and around antebellum New Orleans. I’ll make stuff up or move stuff around to stick… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – August 13, 2024 Ah, history, she can teach a thing or two… I doubt this event will make it into the story, but… it is instructional. We flash back to June 2 1858, the Know Nothing “riot” in New Orleans. Armed men under the… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – August 10, 2024 I thought I’d try to convey the random (?) fun of burrowing down rabbit holes. I’m not taking notes about how I do it when I’m doing it. So this story is really a “like this” exposition, not a precise accounting… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – August 10, 2024 Life is full of “stuff” like music, song, dancing, games… so as part of understanding the world I’m going to write about, I look into all sorts of topics. Some are more “tangential,” not part of the central narrative. So I’m… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – August 9, 2024 I’m gradually transitioning from research. More and more, I see a tidbit, I take a note, and I start imagining how this might fit into a story that doesn’t even exist yet, except in broad outline form in my imagination. There… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – August 8, 2024 Along the way I’ve read two standard biographies of Marie Laveaux. One was very academic, a dissertation turned into book, and written through a lens of female empowerment. The other had extensive footnotes referencing parish and historical records. That’s the one… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – August 7, 2024 Underlying the evil of slavery was a very simple belief: slaves are things. Simple? White superiority – or more tellingly, Black inferiority was like the sunrise. It was there, it was always, it was so obvious it was beneath notice. It… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – August 4, 2024 There is a hole in my primary research. I need to get my head around Voudou, the amalgam of African and Catholic beliefs widespread in New Orleans in the 1800s. After all, Marie Laveau was “queen” of the voudouiennes. In that… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – July 29, 2024 Researching life in Louisiana in the 1800s I run across this, about Acadian weddings. “Sometimes the ceremony included a charivari… The custom was an old one and was particularly popular in New Orleans, until the authorities suppressed it as a public… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – July 27, 2024 The Citizens Bank of Louisiana was chartered in 1833. It began issuing paper currency. The federal government didn’t do that. The bank was so solid that its $10 notes, below, were widely used throughout the south. “However, there was in New… Continue reading
