Last year I participated in a year-long project by the College of Charleston to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Emancipation and the subsequent desegregation of South Carolina schools. My book,
The Road to Frogmore, told part of that story. The project came to a close last November, but today I received a request from the director:
"We would appreciate it if you could write a reflection about your book, The Road to Frogmore. Your comments should focus on what you found to be most important about your work--share what you found to be most rewarding, most difficult, most surprising, whatever you find to be most significant to your individual experience and the project overall."
After a bit of stewing about the prospect of yet another writing project , I realized that I had already written such a reflection as an "Author's Note" at the beginning of the book. So here it is, with only a bit of editing so that the article can stand alone as part of the archive of The Jubilee Project.
THE ROAD TO FROGMORE: TURNING SLAVES
INTO CITIZENS
by
Carolyn P. Schriber
“Truth
is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.”
~Francis Bacon
The
Road to Frogmore tells the story of Laura M. Towne, who
came to a small island on the coast of South Carolina during the Civil War and
almost single-handedly created a school tha could turn former slaves into
producive American ciizens. The book is
fiction, but its story is true, and its characters are real. How can that be?
It is true because it is based on documented historical evidence. It is fiction
because I have had to use my own imagination to fill in the blanks within the
evidence.
There is no shortage of sources
material for the story of Laura M. Towne. Laura, like most of her colleagues,
kept a diary throughout the first years of her stay in South Carolina. All of
her Gideonite colleagues were inveterate letter-writers, and much of their
correspondence is still available. As a result, a researcher suffers from an
over-abundance of material evidence. Almost every event during the Port Royal
Experiment had multiple witnesses and participants. The problem, of course, is
that when nine different people write their own descriptions of a particular
event, they produce nine different truths—and all of them may be “true.” Truth
changes, depending upon who tells the story.

Diaries, too, can be untrustworthy. The
diarist tells what she knows, but she may not be able to
tell what she has chosen to forget or
what she failed to see. In Laura’s case, her diary entries
often reveal a dark side to her
character, and her fears come out to play in the dark. Her letters
can seem cloyingly sweet and cheerful.
She was very likely to write to her sisters to tell them she
was bursting with good health, that she
never felt better in her whole life. But a diary entry
written the same night may indulge in
descriptions of raging headaches, nausea, and muscle
cramps that she feared were symptoms of
terminal illness. Which one was the true Laura? That is
the question her diary and letters fail
to answer.
The Port Royal Experiment was marked by
ongoing disagreements—religious differences,
opposing political and economic
theories, and widely varying reactions to the conditions under
which they were all living. The result
was, of course, a narrative of disagreement. In a novel, the
reader wants to know how much is true,
but there is a difference between truth and fact. Facts
reveal details but can hide the truth
behind a wall of distorted mirror images. Which image is
true?
The writer of historical fiction must
take the details and transform them into a story that makes
sense. Sometimes that task demands a
new search to ascertain the “truth” and sometimes it needs
a healthy dose of imagination to make
facts understandable. In The Road to Frogmore, all the
characters are real, and I have changed
no names to protect anyone from the consequences of his
or her actions. Events are factual;
dates are accurate; outcomes fully revealed. Is the story true?
Perhaps. But it is also fiction because
it reflects my own interpretations of how the characters felt
and how they must have talked to one
another.
My greatest challenge came when I tried
to portray the slaves who were the heart and soul behind Laura’s story. The slaves
of St. Helena Island left no written record of their experiences and feelings.
Yet every time I described a crisis point in their story, I knew I was missing
an important factor because I had no evidence of how the slaves interpreted the
event. At last I chose one individual as a spokesperson for them all. That
spokesperson was Rina, the slave woman whom Laura paid to be her laundress.
Throughout Laura’s diary, she referred
to Rina in ways that suggested that this woman was a keen observer of her
surroundings. Time and again, Laura
writes, “Rina says . . .” and the following comment turns out to be a
crucial observation. Rina appears
throughout
Laura’s diary, all the more frequently
as Laura came to rely on her as a conduit into the slave
community. In my book, she functions in
the same way as a Greek chorus does—watching the action while remaining aloof
from it and commenting on the behavior of those who don’t fully understand the culture
in which they are embedded.
I must add a word about Rina and the
language she speaks. Rina, like all of the slaves in the Low Country, spoke
Gullah, a language in its own right, with its own rules of grammar, a distinct
syntax, and a vocabulary that contained both English words and words from
several African languages. It also used certain sounds that a speaker of a
European language cannot pronounce. Linguists no longer see Gullah as patois,
or a form of broken English. But for that reason, it became a daunting task to
reproduce it authentically, while making it understandable for readers of
English.
While I wrote, I kept by my side a
Gullah dictionary and a wonderful translation of De Gullah
Nyew Testament produced
by the Penn Center’s efforts to preserve the Gullah language. Yet the
closer I came to being able to recreate
the speech of a St. Helena slave, the more unintelligible it

became for readers. With the help of my
editor, Gabriella Deponte, we finally settled on a
version of Gullah that preserves much
of the authenticity of the original language while making
it accessible to speakers of English.
We started by eliminating all
apostrophes. An apostrophe suggests that there is a right way to
pronounce a word, and that the speaker
has failed to include all the correct syllables or sounds. It
privileges the English form over the
Gullah instead of recognizing that they are separate
languages. An English speaker says
“Tomorrow we are going to Beaufort.” A Gullah speaker
says “Morrow we gwine go fuh Bufor.”
Both are understandable. Apostrophes are unnecessary.
We included a few words that appear
only in Gullah, such as buckra, which means a white man
or white person. We also used the
Gullah fuh in place of an English infinitive to and replaced all
forms of going to with the
Gullah gwine.
The verb to be, with all its forms
(am is, are was, were, have been, has been, had been) appears
in only two forms in Gullah (be or
bin). A similar reduction occurs with pronouns, which for the
most part are not inflected (no
possessive or accusative forms). So a speaker of Gullah says, “He
bring food fuh we” (not “for us”).
Gullah speakers do not (perhaps cannot)
pronounce a sound that would be an unaccented syllable
at the beginning of an English word.
This happens most often with words that begin with a
vowel, such as accept, which becomes cept
or exactly, which becomes zakly. The result is a
speech pattern that always begins with
an accented syllable and produces a strong rhythm similar
to the poetic sounds of an English
dactyl.
Finally, certain common English sounds
are difficult for a speaker of Gullah. Our version
changes all fricative th sounds
to d (they becomes dey; other becomes udder). An aspirated
th
changes to a simple t (thing
becomes ting; thumb becomes tum). Similarly, most v sounds
change
to a b (never becomes neber;
very becomes bery).
With those adaptations, Rina’s voice
rang true, and she was able to speak directly to the reader, putting into her
own words the inchoate feelings of her fellow slaves. Hers is the voice that guides the reader down
the long road to Frogmore Plantation and the founding of the Penn School.