No Sweaters for Marshall!
It’s incredible the number of things we take for granted, simple things, like sweaters. It is equally impressive the number of things that have vanished, are utterly unfamiliar to us now, or have morphed into something else. One of the challenges and rewards of writing historical fiction is developing radar for what we assume to be accurate and what we discover anew.
A case in point is sweaters and peels. When writing Hold Fast, Marshall had written a fantastic piece about the two main characters freezing in their hammocks below decks. Her solution was to have them pull on their sweaters. She left me an exuberant voicemail saying just that. Alas, I had to call her back and say, “No sweaters, Marshall, a smelly, boiled, woolen, clunky jacket, yes, but sweaters were not available in that period or in that place.”
In the research process of Blue-Eyed Slave, we discovered peels, and we don’t know how we ever lived without them. Peels look remarkably like pizza oven paddles, but they are so much more. In trying to figure out what a kitchen might look like in 1764, we came upon the peel – a handy instrument to pull bread and other foods out of the chimney ovens. We imagined how deft those wielding the peel could become, especially as it’s one of your only instruments to get stuff out of the fire.
There were other comforting discoveries, like how waffle irons were a staple of the outdoor early Charleston colonial kitchen. (Good old waffles, too bad they missed the maple syrup.) In general, this process of locating and verifying the minutiae of material culture and daily life is like becoming a time traveler on a foreign assignment in a past era. Even the most mundane object tells a story: a sweater, or the lack thereof; a waffle iron; a peel.
-Bird Jones