Fiction and History
In 1988, I heard about a woman who had given birth to quintuplets in my hometown a century before and had become a worldwide sensation. Surprisingly, this had occurred just across the field from the house where I grew up. I don’t know why I had never heard the story before, but once I did, I knew it was mine. Within the afternoon I realized I was going to write a historical novel, a long one. I knew the basic situation, but I didn’t know the story. Who was this hapless family? What was it like to be a celebrity at the beginning of the twentieth century? It was necessary to imagine Christie Wheeler and her family and their community. I expected it would be a challenge to go back to the world of 1900, the turn of the century, which happened with all the hysteria and foreboding that accompany such milestones. But I soon realized that 1900 was hardly the past. As William Faulkner famously noted, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Indeed, the world of charlatans, miracle cures, lurid journalism, and celebrity culture flourished at the end of the nineteenth century, just as now. But also it was very much the world of my early childhood, when mules and horses worked the farm, when women cooked on a wood stove. My parents still spoke the language of that time, so I slid easily into the country talk of the Wheeler family in Feather Crowns. A pair of drawers might be “plumb full of holes” or someone might not have “the sense God gave a tomcat.” Talk like that doesn’t die out quickly.
—BAM