Plus Ça Change – June 19, 2026
As noted yesterday in Antebellum Catholic Racism, I’ve returned to detailed plotting. This is my happy place. However, I have a tendency to fall deep into a rabbit hole of research and then bludgeon the reader with the results. Over time, I’ve learned to NOT do that. Two pages on how you load a cannon is overkill. The reader doesn’t care.
I’m in the middle of one such event. I have a good scene, when Gran Catherine dies. Lots of power/emotion can happen. We can drop in financial uncertainty… good. But then I go on for chapters on what the Laveaux family (Marie and Christophe) did to secure their real estate in the face of racist laws regarding inheritance. I do need some of this, but BORING. Sheesh.
So (I do some of my best work in the shower) I rethought, back to basics. The tale I want to tell is how and why Marie becomes legend, and it’s not an accident. She was an astonishing woman. Research says there are two reasons, and they make sense to all of us who are human. First, she is a genuinely caring human being. She fed the hungry, took in orphans, healed the sick better than any doctor. I’m not making it up, she did, and I think it’s a tale worth telling because we need heroines. Second, she’s devoutly religious, both Catholic and Voudou Priestess. In that latter role, she is reputed to have performed deep, powerful magic remembered to this day. Legend. Four chapters on real-estate shenanigans don’t feed either of those themes.
Fact: There is another chapter in the middle of all that, focused on the cholera epidemic in October 1832, part of a global pandemic. In 1832 this was a new disease in New Orleans and its impact was horrific. Thousands of people died within the space of a couple of weeks. The disease was endemic in the city for decades thereafter. It didn’t have a season, like yellow fever, and there is no immunity. I’ve got all the research, how she might treat it, when it peaked, when it faded.
Fiction: The plotted chapter is in the charity hospital with her uncle Dr. Kerr (who knows her skills), and the resistance of other, racist white male medical doctors to a woman of color. I might have her walk home in disgust, through a heavy rain (it really was pouring rain on Nov 7, 1832). And on the way home the poor beseech her, as Mother of her people, for help. Dunno how that’s gonna work but…
This becomes the seed. The property stuff, we’ll slip that in as background. Maybe even a chapter, it’s pretty bad. But it’s not the story. Caring for the sick is. This seed will likely become three chapters. One will be in the hospital, that’s excellent. Another will be her work among the downtrodden, the poor, the homeless, Irish immigrant, household slave, free people of color, and involve everyone in her family because she figures out an effective treatment, and she needs help. And the third… oh my.
I had a great idea of how to cement her reputation, bounced that off my darling co-conspirator, and she’s absolutely on board. THAT idea has punch, power, promise, potential. It means going back into stuff already written, bringing character Manette back into focus. The interaction between Marie and Manette (her white aunt) will take the serial reader back into Dancer, and why they are such good friends. And it will at the same time satisfy the new reader (who is reading Mother standalone) with a genuine pathos for these two women, and what Marie does at Manette’s request.
The Voudou, well I’m gonna go look at some of the legends and see what I can do. This is why I plot. Got no more excuses.
