Category Archives: Death of a Dyer

Indigo

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Indigo is probably the most familiar dye in the world and has a long history of use. The first identified use is from 4000 years ago in Peru. Our word indigo, however, comes from a Greek root word meaning Indian dye since it was from India that indigo traveled to Europe via the Silk Road. The use of the dye quickly spread. From the Tuaregs in the Sahara to Cameroon, clothing dyed with indigo signified wealth.

Prior to the arrival of indigo in Europe, woad was the tradition dye. It produces a lighter blue. (One of the theories is that blue previously meant a shade similar to cyan.) In the New World, enslaved people were put to work cultivating indigo which became a significant cash crop. There were large plantations in South Carolina. (See Death of a Dyer.)

During the time of Will Rees, all of the yarn he worked with would have been dyed with these natural dyes. Indigo, by the way, was very expensive.

Indigo is not water soluable and so has to be treated to make it useable. One of the pre-industrial processes  was  soaking it in stale urine. Many accounts do not mention this particular fact but the pungency of the process is regularly described. (I used indigo a library program and when it was ‘curing’, it smelled so terrible, we all left the room.) The result is known as indigo white. Fabric dyed in the indigo white turns blue with oxidation. Indigo is also toxic so there is plenty of opportunity for indigo workers to become sick. And despite the processing, indigo fades slowly over time. Just take a look at your jeans. Denim is dyed with indigo and fades.

I saw items dyes with indigo in the highlands of Peru. The hanks of wool were all different colors from a light royal blue to such a deep blue it was almost navy. Truly beautiful colors.

Synthetic dyes have now almost taken over for indigo and the other natural dyes.

Slavery and the Will Rees Mysteries

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When I first began writing the Will Rees mysteries, I made a conscious decision to avoid jumping into that messy part of our history. Not because I didn’t think it was important, I did, but I didn’t think I was ready to navigate this serious subject. I allude to it in several books. In Death of a Dyer, for example, I mention the two people stolen from the village street by slave takers. This becomes important later.

Many books later, I wanted to set a mystery in the Great Dismal Swamp. Even now, although much smaller than it was 300 years ago, is still a pretty hostile environment. I’ve posted before about that previously. Anyway, fugitives from neighboring plantations, the escapees were called Maroons, set up small communities in the swamp. Tobias, the man stolen in Death of a Dyer, escapes and asks Rees to help recover his wife, now living in the swamp. Rees and Lydia travel to Virginia to do that and, of course, run smack into a murder.

Death in the Great Dismal forced me to confront slavery head on with characters who were so desperate for freedom they fled to the dangerous and forbidding swamp.

I continue the story in Murder on Principle. In the previous book, Rees and Lydia have rescued a couple of the enslaved people.

In Murder on Principle, the owner comes looking for them, bringing a grudge and smallpox that sweeps through the village. When he is found murdered, suspicion falls on the people Rees has brought north. I posed several ethical questions. One, if the slave owner intended to recover the people he thought of as his property, would they be guilty of murdering him or was it self-defense? How far does loyalty and friendship go in a case of murder? Are Tobias and Ruth justified in their anger at Rees for suspecting them? And finally, should Rees turn the murderer over to the constable or, considering the circumstances, let him go free? And what about the escaped slave who has lived in the north for years and is suddenly confronted with the prospect of recapture?

In Murder, Sweet Murder, I send the family to Boston. Lydia’s father has been accused of murder. Lydia, who has been estranged from her father for years, is reluctant to go and we soon learn why. He is a slave trader – despite the fact that Boston was the center of the Abolition movement.

Even though I do not address the issue of slavery in The Long Shadow of Murder directly, I feature the ripple effect of some of the actions taken during Murder on Principle. It is not just war that leaves people with PTSD but previous decisions and consequences from those decisions.

Goodreads Giveaway

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A Circle of Dead Girls was just formally released on March 3rd. (I say formally because Amazon had it in mid-February.)

Death in the Great Dismal will come out October 7.

These titles are eight and nine, respectively.

Since it has been many years since the publication of the first three in the Will Rees saga, (and also because with people kept at home because of the corona virus – COVID-19, they have more time to read) I am offering a Goodreads giveaway of A Simple Murder:

Yes, I will be giving away three books to three lucky winners. Go to Goodreads to sign on.

Dame Schools

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In several of my books, Rees’s children attend dame schools. I mention them almost without a description. (Of course I mention the schooling received at the hands of the Shakers. Boys and girls were segregated: boys were taught by the men during the winter and girls by the women during the summer.)

Well, what are dame schools?

The New England Puritans believed that Satan would try to keep people from understanding the scriptures so it was decided that all children be taught to read. In fact, the first American schools arose in New England. The Boston Latin School was founded in 1635 and the Mather School in 1639 in Dorchester.In 1642 the Massachusetts Bay Colony made town schools compulsory and other New England colonies soon followed. These were for white boys only. Common schools were established in the 1700s but a tuition was charged.

If parents could not homeschool their children they went to dame schools. Considering how busy most women were I wondered how that worked out. With that said, however, there were enough educated women in the North who could function as teachers. Usually they were widows who taught in their own home. They were paid in money but also in kind – baked goods, produce, alcohol and the like. (I imagine the abilities of these untrained teachers varied widely – from essentially a day care to a real school. But I digress.)

In the beginning education focused on reading and ‘rithmetic but soon it was the four R’s; ‘riting and religion as well. Some of the dame schools offered girls embroidery, sewing and other such graces. Dame schools went up to eight grade and most girls went no farther. Boys, however, might move to a grammar school where they were taught advanced arithmetic, Latin and Greek by a male teacher.

There was also a huge divergence between the North and the South. Planters educated their children with tutors and son were frequently sent to England or Scotland for schooling. During the early part of the 1800s, it was against the law to teach slaves but schools for white children were opened in Georgia and South Carolina (1811). Segregated schools for children of all races began opening during Reconstruction and continued until 1954 when the Supreme Court declared state laws establishing segregated schools unconstitutional.

A final note: These schools went only to the eighth grade just like the dame schools. For many rural areas of the country eighth grade school was the norm until 1945.

 

Goodreads Giveaway -Death of a Dyer

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I am giving away ten copies of Death of a Dyer, my second Will Rees mystery on Goodreads.

In this book, Rees returns to his hometown and tries to settle down. Lydia accompanies him as his housekeeper -both are not sure where their feelings might take them. David also returns home although he and his father are still at odds.

Rees has been home for only a short time when he is asked to look into the murder of a childhood friend.

9781250033963

Speaking Engagements

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I had a great talk at the Newburgh Library last Wednesday. I have two more coming up. On Sunday, October 23, I will be talking at the Orangeburg Library – in Rockland County, New York. The talk begins at 2.

The following Sunday, I will be speaking about witchcraft at my own library – the Goshen Public Library in Goshen, New York. Hard to believe but I have never spoken there. I felt shy pushing myself into a slot where I work.

Come and ask questions.

WritingTools – 1700s

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My first book, A Simple Murder, was written entirely in longhand on lined paper. I can tell you, writing in this way takes a long long time. And the finished product still has to be put onto a computer (unless one wants to type on a typewriter and that’s assuming one can even find such a tool now.)

So, for my second boo, Death of a Dyer, I wrote the entire thing on my laptop. (There are advantages and disadvantages to both but I digress.)

How far we’ve come since Rees’s time.

The quill pen and ink were the approved methods of writing at this time. But paper was valuable and ink expensive. So how did children learn to read and write? I know I had the picture of a slate in my head but Noah Webster says slates were not in common use in schools prior to the Revolution. They came into common use in the late eighteenth century so Rees’s children might have had slates. Rees probably would have used birch bark and would have made his own ink. I can only imagine how pale and unreadable some of those concoctions might have been.

But what about the pencil? Well, although Benjamin Franklin advertised pencils in the early 1700s, they did not become common. First American manufacture of pencils with a graphite core was 1812.

So the frameless slates hung on a string were actually an advance for the early students.

Most of the students were, of course, boys. It was not thought important for girls to learn to read and write, let alone cipher (do arithmetic). Her household duties were far more important. As I have indicated in previous posts, the Shakers were far in advance of this thinking, as they education the girls as well as the boys.

I don’t know if this is true but I read that the shape of the Ipad is based on the slate. Cute.