Remember When . . . The Island Was Isolated?

by Roseanna White | Sep 23, 2015 | 17th-19th Centuries, 20th Century, Remember When Wednesdays

Gracious, my blogging has been sporadic! Sorry about that, all. I came home from vacation and was completely swamped by work. A good thing, but I kept totally spacing what day of the week it was and what that meant concerning blogs. 😉

But this being me, you can rest assured I spent my vacation being geeky and collecting history books about the Outer Banks. I found myself wondering as we drove along what the islands would have been like before the big bridge was built to connect them to the mainland. Where did they get their fresh water? (Cisterns and desalination shacks.) When did electricity arrive? (The 1940s!!!)

Well, I found so many interesting tales! One of my favorites was from the antebellum days, when the Outer Banks were an oft-forgotten outpost occasionally used, even then, as a resort. One young man told a tale of arriving on the island by boat for a stay at the hotel in Kitty Hawk. He describes with awe the great sand dunes he has to hike over to get to his lodging–the most sand he had ever seen in his life, and it went all the way up to his ankles while he walked.

He and the other guests found charming the laid-back island atmosphere…which wasn’t so laid back when it came to meals. Being a sophisticated fellow, he was accustomed to supper being served at 8 o’clock or even later, but not so on the island. It was served at 6, and if you missed it, sorry ’bout your luck.

Houses on the island never had cellars, but what I hadn’t realized was that early ones didn’t have ceilings either. All the rafters were open, which this guest found lovely and pleasant when it was a matter of the frangrant breezes whispering to him…but when the wind kicked up, it would blow sand straight into the houses, filling beds, bowls, mouths, eyelids…

That’s one part of history I’m happy to leave in the past, LOL.

Most of the gentleman who came to the islands did so for the duck hunting. And most residents of the island made their living from catering to these rich folks, or from hunting and fishing and selling it to New York or Philadelphia. So it was a huge setback to island life when a law was passed in the 1920s that severely restricted hunting. This was also near the time when the government first talked of making it a national park–and so, to preserve it, they constructed beach-side sand dunes to keep the island were it was.

The problem for locals? With the dunes came a law that animals were no longer allowed to run free. As a small, insular community, islanders had to be pretty self-sufficient, which meant keeping chickens, cows, pigs, etc. But it’s not exactly fabulous pasture around there, so everyone let their livestock run free until this point–and were none too happy about this whole “park” idea when it began interfering with even their most basic way of life.

But the idea got derailed anyway. At one point after WWII they even saw oil prospectors arrive…but who found nothing. The park service did eventually turn part of the island into a wildlife preserve, and like people everywhere, the islanders adapted to the times as they changed. Eventually it was rediscovered as a vacation spot, and now, driving through the bustling towns of Nags Head, Kitty Hawk, and Kill Devil Hills, you can’t see so much as a glimpse of the island’s beginnings.

But it’s there, hidden in the more out-of-the-way places. Still whispering on those sea breezes.

Remember When . . . The Serfs Were Artists?

by Roseanna White | Apr 15, 2015 | 17th-19th Centuries, 20th Century, Remember When Wednesdays

Oh. My. Gracious.

So. As I was debating what servant POV I was going to use in the third installment of my Ladies of the Manor Series, I decided it would be fun to have it be the lady’s maid of the villain rather than the heroine. Though of course, she couldn’t just be any lady’s maid. Each of my servants’ POVs in the other two books propelled the story forward pretty spectacularly, so this one had to have a big purpose too.

So naturally, I decided she must be a Russian spy. Because, you know…of course. 😉 No seriously, it fits perfectly. My villains have made some pretty huge promises to “the Russian,” but they haven’t been able to deliver on said promises. Mr. The Russian might be getting a wee bit impatient, nyet? So obviously, he’s going to be looking into this.

Enter Miss Russian Spy. =D

Her name is Kira Belova, and in my mind’s eye she looks like this.

Elizaveta Boyarskaya, Russian actress who would be a perfect Kira

I wasn’t really sure of her story, or how to write her, so I emailed my friend who has studied Russian history for years to ask for some guidance. She pointed me to a HUGE, hefty, meaty, enthralling book called Natasha’s Dance by Orlando Figes. I read for hours over the weekend, starting out going through the book chronologically and then jumping around a bit to the different sections so I could get closer to the time period I needed.

And Kira’s story started to crystallize.

Kira comes from a family of Russian peasant stock who were, until serfdom was abolished in the 1860s in Russia, serfs. Not just any serfs though–artist serfs. What are they, you might ask? I don’t know that I’d ever heard of this practice, or if I had, I’d forgotten. But Mr. Figes wrote a lot about them, all of it so very interesting.

The noble, wealthy families in Russia from the late 1700s through the mid 1800s controlled a lot. All the land, all the people who lived on the land. They had such a huge work force that it sometimes resulted in comical things like a horn band in which, rather than teach anyone to play their horn well, they simply taught scores of them to play one note well…and then to know where in the song to play their one note. (???? LOL)

The leading families created orchestras…operas…theaters…ballets…. They had architects…artists…and often harems from among the serfs. They would select a few of their serfs and send them to academies and Imperial schools in the capital, and then those artists would work for their masters. They could achieve great fame, but only rarely did their masters let them work for anyone else or accept commissions that could earn them fortune as well. It was considered fashionable and Western (it was very desirable to be Western in Russia in that era) to have a slew of serf girls devoted to your personal, intimate pleasure. Masters could treat these girls any way they desired–and when the girls got too old to please them, they’d usually marry them off to their best male serfs and give them a dowry.

As I read about these artist serfs over the weekend, I began to get a feel for Kira’s family’s story. I decided that her babushka (grandmother) was an artist serf, who ended up wed to her master’s huntsman (the elite of the male serfs)…but only after being one of his Girls. She was a singer or actress (haven’t decided which) but also–as most Russians were–a woman of great faith. (One famous Russian writer observed that Russians, as a whole, had to have great faith in order to survive life in Russia.) She raised her family to value above all the freedom they were granted. To do what they ought. To understand, as Russian peasants are famous for understanding, the realities of life and death.

Posters for the Ballet Russe, 1911

Kira would have broken her babushka’s heart when she ran off to Paris and joined the Ballet Russe–or rather, when she embraced the life of a ballerina in the Ballet Russe, which involved having a “patron” who supported her in high style…for, of course, the cost of being his mistress. The life Babushka had hated, had so valued getting away from, and Kira chose it freely.

But Kira’s going to get her redemption story, and it’s going to be a lot of fun to write. Because through her uniquely Russian understanding of life, she’s going to bring healing to some broken places in the world of her new English mistress. She, who has an intrinsic understanding of life and death (some of Tolstoy’s final words were musings about how the peasants die), will have wisdom to offer, though she never anticipated taking on such a role. She, though a spy, will help knit together families long feuding.

Yep. So. Much. Fun. The learning, the writing, the creating. Let’s pray I can adequately capture that Russian soul that so many artists and writers made it their life’s work to shape and bring to light–a Russian soul in many ways created by those artists struggling to understand their history and cultural identity.