Crafting the Event: Will It Resonate for the Modern Reader?
The critical event taking place in your historical novel may be based on a true occurrence, but that alone isn't enough to connect with your readers. The main action in the story, certainly the pivotal action that underpins the climax, must resonate with some coherent TRUTH that modern readers will understand and relate to, even if they don't know a lot about the time period in which you're writing. In other words, it must be timeless. Universal. It must leave your readers feeling that they understand something more about the human condition.
For instance, in the novel I recently completed (it's in draft form, while I work on revisions) I've fictionalized a true event, as I did in The Second Mrs. Hockaday. In this case, the true event was a double lynching that took place in 1912 in an upstate South Carolina cotton mill town. Two African American men were alleged to have committed a sexual assault against a white man while all three of them were drinking moonshine in a deserted cemetery. Was it an assault? Was it consensual? Or was it a drinking game gone horribly wrong? The truth will never be known; the black men were murdered before a trial could take place.
What is it about this event that gripped my imagination, and why does it convey, to my mind, a larger, pervasive and resonant issue that is reflected in modern lives? Let me explain.
While it can never be known precisely what happened between those two black men and one white man that resulted in violent mob action, it is clear that this alleged assault symbolized the anxieties of impoverished, white, mill-working men to a dangerous degree. Such men had been pushed off their farms in the financial depressions of the 1890s and forced into tenant farming (working on a wealthier man's land for a share of the crop). Low crop prices and unscrupulous practices by landlords drove most of these men and their families out of farming all together well before the boll weevil's arrival around 1920 made sharecropping untenable. White farmers, however, were inclined to put the blame on African American farmers competing with them. The latter were consistently paid less by landlords for the same crop, and although these prices were set by the landowners and not by the black farmers, they were blamed for driving white farmers out of business.
White men turned in desperation to the only work widely available to uneducated southern whites at the turn of the century: working long hours for low pay in textile mills. In doing so, these men gave up their last bit of autonomy. They chafed against the oppressive regimen of the mills and felt humiliated working alongside their own children and wives. When these "lintheads" or "factory crackers" were given the vote in South Carolina in 1895, they consistently threw their votes not to the politicians who sought to enact labor reforms, improve wages, and provide public health to mill families, but to crass, profane and bigoted office-holders who preached white supremacy and condoned lynchings. Industrialization had robbed these white men of their autonomy, and in doing so it had taken away their self-respect; their fear of black men usurping their position in society was more important to them than any other issue in their lives. That is why they responded enthusiastically to a governor telling them to put "negroes" in their place, and it's why the events in the cemetery in 1912, when they leaked out, enraged the locals and motivated them to lynch the two African American men accused of assaulting the white mill worker.
This dangerous situation is reflected in current American politics, and in fact, in European nations as well, where the fear by working-class whites of being overwhelmed or harmed by the dark "Other" is resulting in major political changes, and is taking precedence over all other social and economic concerns. The South Carolina lynching reflects the universal racial paranoia experienced and expressed by white men who fear the dark man being "on top."
For instance, in the novel I recently completed (it's in draft form, while I work on revisions) I've fictionalized a true event, as I did in The Second Mrs. Hockaday. In this case, the true event was a double lynching that took place in 1912 in an upstate South Carolina cotton mill town. Two African American men were alleged to have committed a sexual assault against a white man while all three of them were drinking moonshine in a deserted cemetery. Was it an assault? Was it consensual? Or was it a drinking game gone horribly wrong? The truth will never be known; the black men were murdered before a trial could take place.
What is it about this event that gripped my imagination, and why does it convey, to my mind, a larger, pervasive and resonant issue that is reflected in modern lives? Let me explain.
While it can never be known precisely what happened between those two black men and one white man that resulted in violent mob action, it is clear that this alleged assault symbolized the anxieties of impoverished, white, mill-working men to a dangerous degree. Such men had been pushed off their farms in the financial depressions of the 1890s and forced into tenant farming (working on a wealthier man's land for a share of the crop). Low crop prices and unscrupulous practices by landlords drove most of these men and their families out of farming all together well before the boll weevil's arrival around 1920 made sharecropping untenable. White farmers, however, were inclined to put the blame on African American farmers competing with them. The latter were consistently paid less by landlords for the same crop, and although these prices were set by the landowners and not by the black farmers, they were blamed for driving white farmers out of business.
White men turned in desperation to the only work widely available to uneducated southern whites at the turn of the century: working long hours for low pay in textile mills. In doing so, these men gave up their last bit of autonomy. They chafed against the oppressive regimen of the mills and felt humiliated working alongside their own children and wives. When these "lintheads" or "factory crackers" were given the vote in South Carolina in 1895, they consistently threw their votes not to the politicians who sought to enact labor reforms, improve wages, and provide public health to mill families, but to crass, profane and bigoted office-holders who preached white supremacy and condoned lynchings. Industrialization had robbed these white men of their autonomy, and in doing so it had taken away their self-respect; their fear of black men usurping their position in society was more important to them than any other issue in their lives. That is why they responded enthusiastically to a governor telling them to put "negroes" in their place, and it's why the events in the cemetery in 1912, when they leaked out, enraged the locals and motivated them to lynch the two African American men accused of assaulting the white mill worker.
This dangerous situation is reflected in current American politics, and in fact, in European nations as well, where the fear by working-class whites of being overwhelmed or harmed by the dark "Other" is resulting in major political changes, and is taking precedence over all other social and economic concerns. The South Carolina lynching reflects the universal racial paranoia experienced and expressed by white men who fear the dark man being "on top."
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