Down and Out in Upstate New York

27 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by in Events, History, Living History, Reenacting

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Other folks have covered aspects of this past weekend at Fort Ticonderoga, leaving me with little that needs adding but much to look into. Portraying a British servant is more intuitive for me than portraying an American: the hierarchy of the British is more explicit than the American, especially in a military context. We mimic the British structure, and while I considered that running a fort’s servant set might/should/would mimic that of a Big House, I wonder if that’s true.

 

Miss S, Mr. B., Your Author, and Drunk Tailor

How did a set of servants from different places, answering to different masters, interact? What  kind of rivalries developed? And who had ultimate below-stairs authority? It’s been a long time since I experienced workplace politics, so the past weekend gave me much to ponder about how the lower sorts managed– and managed up.

For me, the name of the serving game is managing the people you serve to make your own life easier. Servants had so much to do– as many of us do in real life– that the only way to manage the workload was to– well, manage the workload, or at least the person who set it.

As John Brown’s housekeeper, I ran a household of several (three+) servants and six residents. Even a household that small required extensive stair climbing and coordination, even without a working kitchen! The Browns never had more than three or four household servants we could document, which again makes me wonder about the actual number of servants a complement of New England officers would have.

Ow. That’s what my face means. Pierre was a trooper.

Thus far, I’ve found good quantification of servants in Philadelphia households in 1775, but have yet to crack the code on New England or Continental Army servants, so more hours on JSTOR await.

Paul Sandby. At Sandpit Gate circa 1752
Pencil, pen and ink and watercolor. RCIN 914329

No matter what one ultimately decides the research shows about the number of servants and their roles in an American occupied fort, I know I spent the day more immersed than I have been in a long time. Fort Ticonderoga provided a picturesque backdrop, and my body provided a four-dimensional pain experience reminding me of the tribulations of women in the <cough> period </cough>. I spent the majority the day (the part I was awake, anyway) experiencing the full joys of being  female and still fertile. The more I read about archaeology of the 18th century, particularly in the privies and trash pits, the more I think nearly everyone in the past felt pretty awful most of the time. If that hunch is correct, I nailed Saturday despite appearing in undress (which I can at least document to Sandby at Sandpit Gate).

Luxury and Fashion

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in Clothing, Events, Making Things, Research

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Sometimes this is a hard hobby to love. My hands hurt, my creativity feels dead, and there’s no place to go all dressed up. After a long, unpleasant spring, I finally feel like sewing and playing. Drunk Tailor and I definitely missed some things we very much wanted to do, but now we’re reinspired, we could take baby steps back to our normal semi-hectic pace– except of course, we are plunging back in with three events in August after a whirlwind trip to Ticonderoga.

Wedding dress in cotton muslin ca. 1797. Nationalmuseet Danmark.

With the summer heat in mind, I ordered batiste and voile, thinking I would make the Tidens Toj gown, but when the fabric arrived, it seemed that the purveyor had confused the two fabric types, so a new plan was required. Alas, the trials of costume research and falling down the fashion magazine rabbit hole for hours at a time…

1798 Gown, watercolor by Ann Frankland Lewis, 1798. LACMA, Costume Council Fund (AC1999.154.1-.32)

Next up: an open robe or wrap-front gown over a matching petticoat, trimmed in blue-and-white Greek key trim, with a pair of pointy-toed ribbon-tied slippers and a sleeveless blue silk waistcoat, in three weeks or so.

The waistcoat construction is finished, scaled up from the original garment patterned in the DAR’s “An Agreeable Tyrant” catalog. I chose to line mine, possibly from pure habit of making men’s clothing, possibly because I’m not that great a teeny-tiny hemming and require a lining to hide my sins. With gold silk cord trim and covered buttons, I think it will have a pleasantly military vibe.

For the gown and petticoat, cotton in Virginia’s August heat seems like a solid choice, though by the time the layers are on and the sun is up, it’s possible that nothing will be really cool. (The majority of the day will be spent in air conditioning, so really, anything would be okay.) The trim arrived last night, and has a body that will need batiste (and not voile) for support. The combination causes me to entertain fears that this aesthetic is a little too boat-shoes-and-belts-with-embroidered-whales for 1797-1799, but when topped with something not unlike Drunk Tailor’s militia cap, the aesthetic will tilt from yachting to the Good Ship Lollipop.

In Defense of Bad History

19 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in Events, Living History, Reenacting

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A City Shower. Oil on canvas by Edward Penny, 1764. Museum of London

Not inaccurate or badly researched history, of course, but the “Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know” kind of history.

Without wading into the murky waters of canceled reenactments (not my time periods– yet!) and the politicization of historical facts, I advocate the recreation of the “bad” people of history. Not the Hitlers and Himmlers and Stalins and Amins, but the everyday bad. The lazy. The feckless. The annoyed. The I’m-just-now-waking-up-to-the-bad-choice-I-made.

The Female Orators. Printed for Jno. Smith, No. 35 Cheapside, & Robt. Sayer, No. 53 Fleet Street, as the act directs, Novr. 20, 1768.

I think about these people– the ones who slack off while working, the ones who steal shirts, assault officers, throw bones out of barracks doors— periodically, especially when an event is being planned. It’s not that I don’t want to work, mind you: I enjoy working, even the cleaning and scrubbing of history. But it strikes me, especially in summer, that we approach the recreation of history with such excellent intentions. We will Do Our Best. We will Lend A Hand. We will be Always Cheerful.

Why? Why do we not represent the people who shirked? Why do we not represent the people who resented being told what to do, and when? Why do we not take into account our industrialized notions of labor (shifts, clocks, production levels( when we step backwards into a period where there was no factory whistle to set the pace?

painting of a shabbyily dressed family in a decaying room

The Miseries of Idleness. Oil on canvas by George Morland ca 1788. National Gallery of Scotland, NG 1836. Presented by Alexander and Lady Margaret Shaw, later Lord and Lady Craigmyle 1935

Granted, within a military environment, there are rules, regulations, clocks, and enforcers. But I cannot help thinking that the pace of labor, the speed and drive with which people tackled tasks, was different one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, years ago. Of course there were strivers and doers: the American army in the Revolution was populated by adherents to piety and discipline. But it’s clear from the orderly books that there were miscreants and slackers, too.

painting of a well dressed family in a cozy farm house kitchen

The Comforts of Industry. Oil on canvas by George Morland, before 1790. National Gallery of Scotland, NG 1835. Presented by Alexander and Lady Margaret Shaw, later Lord and Lady Craigmyle 1935

And I’m not saying everyone should be a slacker, but you know as well as I do that every workplace today has a slacker or two: the long-term federal employee who watches football at work; the retail clerk whose breaks last a little longer every time; the shelver in the library who catches a nap whilst shelf reading. There are consequences (usually) for those (in)actions, and that’s kind of the point. The slattern and the slacker of history throw into higher relief the purpose of the discipline an army (or housekeeper or master cabinet maker) is trying to maintain. When we all strive to do our best, we lose the depth of interpretation that doing “bad” history can provide.

A Six Word Story

14 Monday May 2018

Posted by in personal

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Lady Cat, AKA Lucky Edie, in her floofy prime

Six word stories. They’re foundation exercises in many writing classes, especially flash fiction classes. The most famous is probably Hemingway’s: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” So much packed into those six words, eight syllables. You can imagine a family, a room, clothes, a place of worship, a coffin, emotions. (Or a family, a room, an angry child, bare feet, and a pair of rejected multi-coloured sneakers if you’re me, who had a child who channeled his great-grandmother and thus was incredibly picky about his shoes at 16 months and refused to wear anything except solid red Keds.)

But I digress.

I have a six word story for you: My cat is dying of cancer.

Lady Cat on Sunday

Lady Cat, Lady Bird, Flirty Birdie, Lady Fat, Lucky Lady, Lucky Eatie: She has had many names since we scooped her up from the back yard of our Smith Street 3-decker in 2005 and brought her on up to the East Side (it is possible to literally re-enact The Jeffersons’ theme song in Providence). She was born under a sheet of plywood against a garage behind our house, one of three fluffy kittens born to a short-haired calico mother. She and her litter mates were like a dessert tray: one fluffy and biscuit coloured, warm, light brown; one, vanilla-cream coloured, soft ecru; and Lady, rocky road ice cream, pastry, caramel, cream, and chocolate, with a stripe down her nose like a monkey.

Lady and Socks: prelude to peace

She wasn’t easy to catch, but I managed, on the very last day we would ever be in that apartment, caught her and wrangled her into a cat crate where she spun around like the Tasmanian Devil in the Bugs Bunny cartoons. Eventually she settled down to watching me and the movers hustle the last pieces out of basement on onto a truck, and made the trip over the river and up the hill to a new, larger house.

As my son struggled with spelling homework, Lucky Lady and her arch-nemesis Whiskers (the cat who lived in the house behind us) became the stuff of legend– Whiskers more than Lady, but every week, as Whiskers stole doughnuts from dinosaurs, was stopped by the police, or generally misbehaved, Lucky Lady would often save the day, once by socking Whiskers with her powerful paw. Whiskers and Lucky saved us from second grade.

Dignity. Like Gene Kelly– and just as acrobatic.

Found feral, she was never fully tame, though she made decisions about not venturing outside in the snow again (after a night out in the cold) and she learned not to jump against the screens trying to get at Whiskers (she fell out of the first floor window once). We brushed her, and she adapted after the first few times, when she hissed and bit at the brush. She loved catnip, and eating feathers (I learned to keep my millinery supplies in a cupboard), and chewing wool (I learned to keep my wool in a cupboard). She learned, and we learned, and she is ours and we are hers.

One year, she got lasers for Christmas.

Now that she is terminally ill, we do what we can for her. She eats Trader Joe’s tuna for cats because she can keep it down; she drinks CatSure (she prefers premixed to powder mixed); we give her catnip. Sunday night she did not know what to do with the catnip, and ultimately fell asleep in the catnip without enjoying it.

Socks, checking on the Time Machine

Her adopted sister Socks (the one-eyed, wobbly, film noir-loving, Nazi-hating tabby cat known as the Howling Assistant) died last summer. Lucky Lady will die soon, too, though we will keep her as comfortable as we can as long as we can. It’s hard to say how long it will be, and I feel wrenched and torn as I contemplate what Lady must endure and how much I will miss her, the last living connection to Providence I have with me in Alexandria. She’s more than a symbol, of course; she’s an independent being. But when Lady dies, a little part of me will go, too, and the past, and New England, will seem even farther away.

Living Deliberately

08 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by in Living History, personal, Philosophy, Reenacting

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WCD: The Original

A friend of mine recently wrote about replicating the domestic life of the past (specifically the 18th century) and how much meaning that had for her.

Being so deeply embedded in the rhythms of life there, it became my home in a very real sense that has never left me.

I read that quickly, and what I read was that the place she had spent so much time was home to her because the place never left her– she carried its rhythms and seasons within her. Perhaps that isn’t quite what she meant, but that’s the risk of writing: the reader reads what they need to.

It made me think of home, and of living deliberately, and of a very bad year I had a long time ago, before I even imagined doing living history, when I thought I would spend my life making new things, like cities and buildings. (This makes me think of an album I listened to at the time, More Songs About Buildings and Food, which seemed all the more important because I’d gone to RISD, too.

Food, in a Building, in Rhode Island

The year I turned 25 was particularly bad not because a man broke my heart, though that didn’t help, and not because I had a miscarriage, though that was the catalyst that led to the man breaking my heart, but because the miscarriage shattered my sense of purpose and self. Somehow, everything that I had ever wanted to be — a sculptor, an architect, a writer– was gone, and I didn’t know what to do or how to be. (Read The Year of Magical Thinking if you want a well-written take on this kind of loss.) I didn’t know what to do next, but the man who eventually broke my heart gave me a book to help me figure it out: Chop Wood, Carry Water

Chopping wood.

Two years ago, I wrote a piece called Zen and the Art of Living History, in which I extolled the virtue of the everyday: Embrace the everyday, bring everyone back into history. Since then, I’ve thought more about how history and historic house museums can be a catalyst for change, how domestic sites can create “homes for history,” where we can have the difficult conversations that must be had to make the change I think we need as a nation, and as humans. These changes are happening, slowly, in museums and at historic sites, but even at the personal level, there’s meaning and change to be had through the business of “doing history.”

I suspect that among the reasons people really enjoy immersive, civilian (non-musket) events is because the work brings them into the rhythms of the natural world in a way that industrial life precludes or even prohibits. Consciously or not, interpreting the domestic life of the past forces us into mindfulness, into being as much as or more than doing. That’s the point of “chop wood, carry water:” to live deliberately. To cook without a clock, with only the color of the coals and the smell of the food to guide you; to notice the changing light because, as it fades, you must act to create light; to find the flaws and shifts in a floor as you scrub it, because there’s no machine between you, just your hands and a brush or a mop: all these tasks force you to be in the moment, noticing your environment, noticing yourself. You. A corporeal presence in a material world. How does that feel, moment to moment? Physically, emotionally: the challenge of living in the past is to live an unmediated life.

To go back to basics the way we do with civilian or domestic-site based living history brings us back to our base: we face our physical needs and the challenge of meeting them. We face emotional tests that help us imagine how people in the past endured– I often wonder how everyday people coped with “melancholia,” grief, and disappointment– and help us endure. It brings us home to ourselves, to our individual histories and our shared histories, and that’s what really matters. The connection to the everyday that we experience in a place in time puts us in a continuum with the people of the past, and gives us a place to be, a thing to do, a meaning. And that is what every one of us needs.