And another one bites the dust. The Rag Quilt, the historical fiction romance of an Amish woman, Lydia Fischer, and a Native American man, Sam in the shadow of Pontiac's Rebellion and culminating in the Conestoga Massacre is done. Well, at least the first draft is.
Early edits have been positive. I generally like it, which, for an author who just finished a piece is saying something. Since it's truly a Young Adult piece it doesn't have the same high-fallutin' language as my other books and makes few ventures into 18th century speech patterns, mostly because I don't know Pennsylvania Dutch patterns and, frankly, it doesn't read as well. Having done a few chapters of The Shunning I noticed I kind of hated the interjection of "Amish words" in the narrative. Sure it's kitschy and "authentic" but it took me out of things, so none of those.
I did have quite a number of issues in the writing of the book. Sam was, in many ways, an easy character to write, though it was odd to be writing someone who was really just a good man. Most of my male characters, while they are very likable and even heroic, are not the best people. Yes, Roger's great, I love Roger, but in reality he does lie, he does cheat, he does use violent interrogation methods, and he kills people even if largely in self-defense but let's face it, he would have shed exactly zero tears if DuBeauchene had died from the injuries he gave him. In retrospect, a sensible feeling, but it's not as if he knew what DuBeauchene would become at that time.
The trouble with Sam is that he's not the stereotypical "Noble Savage Native American" that readers do expect. His most defining traits come from his Quaker faith. He didn't grow up around Native Americans and that causes him to feel like an outsider among them, even though, to the rest of the world, he is painted with the same brush (or tarred, as it were). I can understand the kind of Native American male lead people are going to want, but that's not especially accurate to the times. Certainly there were some on the East coast at this time period who were very traditional, but a lot weren't.
The Conestoga's have largely been recorded as having lived in cabins and dressed in similar fashion to their Mennonite friends. Not really how the graphic novel "Ghost River" portrays them, but Ghost River is pretty full of inaccuracies (Delaware-style Longhouses? Really?!) and somehow manages to completely ignore Pontiac's Rebellion entirely. This does mean there is far less by way of "traditional" portrayals in my book. Not that I would mind a book about the love story between a settler and a more traditional style Native American man, that's just not this story due to the time period and location.
I did fear accidentally stepping into racial tropes like "White Savior" and even changed part of the ending so as to avoid even a shade of that. Sure, it did steal a bit of Ald's moment, but better for Sam to come up with the idea that saves them. I also worried often about balancing the racism so that it remained effective, though there was the sad reality that, in the end, not a single Paxton Boy would be charged with the massacre though the people knew who they were - such a thing can't happen where people aren't to some degree complicit and to be complicit in something that brutal... there would have to be a lot of racial discrimination already around. I did hew closely to things I knew were racist ideas/practices at the time (and some remained in our culture until the 1980's). Hopefully I managed.
I kind of started off with only a vague idea of what I was doing with characters being made up along the way, not that there's anything wrong with that, it's literally how Quentin and Dinah Underhill came to be. I needed an extra man and woman to round out the dinner party or it felt like too few and actually asked my co-worker, as I was writing, to come up with an English sounding last name. Funny how one-off characters can become so important to the plot. Seth was just shoved into chapter 2 because she had a life before she met Sam and Ald put in because, you know, he wouldn't want to be too obvious. Obviously they became rather important to the plot. Lydia, herself, was rather undeveloped, but I think she turned out pretty well given her original traits were "Amish Girl" and not stubborn, naive, independent woman who is pretty, popular, and deeply committed to her faith.
But that's what edits and sensitivity readers are for, to fix errors and oversights.
Into the breach!
