Patrollers were equipped with guns and whips and would exert brutal and racially motivated control. In All to Pieces, the slave patrollers are motivated not only by racial hatred, but also by a profound homophobia.
Slave patrollers, also known as paddy rollers, were gangs of white men who monitored and policed slaves--looking especially for runaways and defiant slaves. During the Civil War, when most of the young men were in the Confederate Army, it fell to older men and those younger men who were turned away from the Army to take over the slave patrols.
Patrollers were equipped with guns and whips and would exert brutal and racially motivated control. In All to Pieces, the slave patrollers are motivated not only by racial hatred, but also by a profound homophobia.
0 Comments
All to Pieces introduces a new character, Mrs. Langdon, who is a Union spy. This character is modeled on a real woman named Hattie Lawton, who was part of Pinkerton's Female Detective Bureau, formed in 1860 to 'worm out secrets' by means unavailable to male detectives. During the Civil War, Pinkerton's agents became Union spies who gathered information about Confederate missions, troop positions, supplies and fortifications.
Hattie Lawton worked with John Scobell, a former slave who had been well educated. She traveled freely in the South with Scobell, who posed as her servant. Mrs. Lawton gathered information from unwitting Confederates in social settings, while Mr. Scobell gathered information from the witting slaves of Confederates--who overheard and knew a great deal. Mrs. Langdon, the character in All to Pieces, deviates from her real world inspiration--in a way that shocks and surprises Cato. This is the new logo for the Unmentionables book series. For those who've asked, the title, Unmentionables, came as a response to the fact that when the book was written in 2010 there was no record in any history books about gay African American slaves. Nor had the story ever been told in fiction. The publication of Unmentionables in 2010 marked the first time this topic was the subject of an historical fiction novel. The logo reflects the love between slaves that "dared not speak its name" and was "unmentionable."
Ella doesn't show up directly in All to Pieces, but she appears in Jimmy's thoughts at critical moments. Ella is the character through which the entire world of Unmentionables unfolded for me. I first became interested in writing when, on a lark, I attended a past life regression workshop. To my great surprise, under hypnosis I recalled living as a slave on a small family farm in Tennessee. Ella is the person whose life I recalled living. Make of that what you will, I feel certain that my interest in this world comes from somewhere--somewhere I don't fully understand. One of my strongest "memories" is about Ella's experience of giving birth, which I hope to write about in a future volume.
An important scene in All to Pieces takes place onboard a steamboat. On The Cincinnati Queen, Cato meets the Union spy Mrs. Langdon.
Steamboats and railroads were the best way to travel quickly. Steamboats were used by the military during the Civil War to transport supplies and troops--and to wage battles at sea. Both the Union and the Confederacy sought to control the waterways, including the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and the Atlantic coast. |
A Blog about writing All to PiecesPlease join my Mailing List if you'd like to be notified when All to Pieces is published. Past Posts
July 2017
Keywords
All
|