In my fourth novel, Sugar Island, Emily Harris is a glamorous young English actress who arrives in America in 1859, determined to make enough money to save her father’s theatre company. But while she’s there, her father dies, leaving her alone and, in her vulnerable state, a charming Southern gentleman, Charles Earl Brook, sweeps her off her feet and into matrimony. It’s during their honeymoon that she discovers his terrible secret: he owns a plantation in Savannah, Georgia, run by seven hundred slaves.
Like many writers, I rarely listen to music whilst I work but I found that soul-haunting and edgy blues tracks, such as Down to the River to Pray by Alison Krauss and Natural Blues by Moby, helped me write about this naïve British woman who suddenly finds herself into the lush swamps of the Deep South, and of the heart-rending misery that she encounters. I played Jace Everett’s Bad Things endlessly. It has the darkness and the dangerous charm that is at the core of Charles’s appeal to Emily, as well as an evocation of the south’s decadent glamour.
‘Mother, master gone to sell we tomorrow?
Gone to sell we in Georgia?
Emmanuel uses the song as a way of telling Emily about their slaves, which he does with relish.
I found this slave song on www.negrospirituals.com and then altered the words slightly to keep them in the dialect I used for the St Simons slaves. Originally, I was so taken with some of these lyrics, their poignancy and their way of expressing the emotions of the slaves in a way they could not, I used them frequently. My editor at John Murray quite rightly said that less is more.
Emily does her best to help the slaves, from pleading with Charles to make their lives less miserable, to cutting down a young girl who’s been strung up by her thumbs and whipped, to teaching one slave to read, which at the time was illegal. Ultimately, Charles will no longer sanction her actions and makes her choose between her freedom and her daughter.
The only other slave song now remaining is right at the end of the novel but it might give away too much of the plot to quote that one.
Once I’ve finished writing for the day, I tend to go for a run and listen to some completely head-banging, heart-pulsing music to blast me out of the Deep South, Emily’s horrific quandary and the chilling plight to the slaves – songs such as I Fought the Law by The Clash, Mr Brightside by The Killers, All My Life by the Foo Fighters and Wake Me Up When September Ends by Green Day.
This entry was posted on March 13, 2012, 11:55 pm and is filed under Undercover Soundtrack. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Sounds like an interesting story, Sanjida. And what a clever idea to reuse an old public domain slave song! Thanks for sharing.
I do this same thing when running/doing aerobics on the treadmill -the music must be loud and insistent and thumping – it pushes out the characters voices and the “Stuff” that crowds in, in this publishing/writing business.
Kat, I have a complementary soundtrack for my book – engulfing pieces that keep me in the characters’ emotions, but that would be too overwhelming to write to. When I get to that stage of a book, I don’t want to escape from it!