This novel has waited a long time to be here. I wrote it in (I think) 2014/15, then got a different two-book deal and put this novel away for nearly a decade. It was written relatively quickly, coming straight out of a place of trauma. Its first impulse was a physical feeling like the one the unnamed young woman has in the opening chapter, lying curled up in the leaves on the forest floor. Instead of letting that feeling, and the people who deny it, defeat me, I determined to make a novel out of it. So, unusually, that opening scene was always the starting place for the novel.
It began as a contemporary and completely different story, though. Then it made itself into a historical novel, a kind of revenge tragedy in which sexual violence, abduction and trauma are part of a whole culture of violence. It also became a novel about land and landscape, about masculinity. A novel about colonialism. The characters took over, as they do.
The common factor between the story I first conceived and this one is the forest, those mixed boreal woodlands of northern New England. Both were stories about isolated white communities in New England, and the terrible violence which defines them, but the landscape became a character in this one.
This is a historical novel, set in 1913, so the playlist is very different from the ones I've made for the other novels. It reaches back into various kinds of North American folk music, early twentieth-century labour history, and the dispersal of French Canadian people in the U.S. There's a lot of fiddle playing and a lot of socialism, just the way we like it.
All of these things enter into the novel, exemplified in various characters. If you want to know more about them, the Zinn Education Project is a great place to start. There are other sources listed in the back of the novel.
Anyway, here is the playlist (link)
Powderfinger, Cowboy Junkies (written by Neil Young)
The lyrics to this stayed with me all through the writing of the novel, this incredible description of a lost young man firing a gun. All those young men and all those guns that make America.
'Raised the rifle to my eye
never stopped to wonder why
then I saw black and my face flashed in the sky.
Shelter me from the powder and the finger,
cover me in the thought that pulled the trigger...'
Beu Cheval, Beau Cheval
This music exists in south Lousiana because in the eighteenth century, French Canadian colonists were herded onto transport ships by the British, then scattered around North America. Some of them ended up on the Gulf Coast. There are therefore two very different kinds of French in South Lousiana – Creole from French plantation slave owners and their enslaved workers, and Acadian or Cajun, from these displaced French Canadian farmers – and two related kinds of French folk music at the Northern and Southern borders of the U.S. I lived in south Louisiana for a long time, so this music and this language has been a big part of my life.
Things called kitchen junkets came up a lot in my oral history research. They're mentioned a couple of times in the novel. Kitchen junkets were winter parties where people gathered in someone's warm kitchen to drink, play music and dance. I imagine this music at those junkets.
Bread and Roses, The Unthanks
Great version of this classic. This song (first a poem) was composed at around the time when Cold Grace is set, and sung by women like Ila. The poem was first quoted at a labour rally following the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, in which 146 garment workers died. Most of them were those same hard-working immigrants who have always driven America's industry, 123 of them were women. The song was taken up by striking women textile workers in New England.
'Hearts starve as well as bodies
Give us bread, but give us roses
As we go marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread'
Joe Hill, Paul Robeson
This song of course commemorates songwriter and labour activist Joe Hill, who was executed in Utah in 1915. I chose the Paul Robeson version because it's the best. Also, we don't talk or learn enough about Robeson, I suppose because he was such a committed and vocal socialist. There is more talk about him in Wales than in America, I think. Welsh people remember his visits here with a lot of pride.
I Don't Want Your Millions, Mister, Barbara Dane
I had to include Barbara Dane. The song is older than this recording.
Petit Fleur, David Lindley
From the wondrous El-Rayo X, on which David Lindley performs a multi-lingual exploration of many genres of American folk music.
C'est L'Aviron, Syco Billy's String Band
T-Roy sings this song while riding in Ila's pony cart, and she sings him a song 'about a whole town that got flooded for a dam'. Anyway, isn't it beautiful?
Witches, The Cowboy Junkies
'There are witches in the hills'
This is a novel about them. This song is about that strange pull that Jeanne feels at the climax of the novel, drawing her out into the forest night.
Enjoy the novel. I think it's my best so far.
Here are Jeanne's two crows, waiting for her...
