Author’s Note

 

Many of the characters in this work of fiction were real persons, although naturally I have made up a great many things for them to do, say, and write. The following dramatis personae lived, worked, and wrangled with each other in Cambridge, Boston, Watertown, and elsewhere:

Asa Gray, American botanist

Jane Gray, his wife, daughter of the great abolitionist Charles Greely Loring

Louis Agassiz, Swiss-born biologist

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Cary Agassiz, second wife of Louis Agassiz

Charles Torrey, American botanist

Jacob Bigelow, physician and Mount Auburn Cemetery founder

Henry Jacob Bigelow, physician, son of Jacob Bigelow

Lemuel Shaw, jurist

Charles Darwin, English biologist

Augustin Pyramus De Candolle, French botanist

Joseph D. Hooker, English botanist

Joseph Zealy, daguerreotypist

Richard Henry Dana, Jr., attorney and author of Two Years before the Mast

John Webster, convicted murderer

George Parkman, victim of John Webster

Cornelius Felton, Harvard Classic professor and member of the Cambridge Scientific Club

Their activities and words are entirely invented, with the exception of certain letters by Asa Gray, which I adapted to nefarious purpose. I apologize to the memory of this great, gentle genius.

There was neither a Roxanne nor a Darius Jacobs, to my knowledge, but their last name is homage to the great Harriet Jacobs, whose memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl forever changed my life when I read it in a freshman seminar at Brown University. She lived the end of her life in Cambridge and is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

The beautiful, historic (and still available!) Mount Auburn Cemetery exists, of course, though I have altered certain aspects of its terrain, history, and botany to suit my purposes; Sumner Bascomb and the other cemetery employees are entirely fictional. The Fresh Pond Hotel too existed (and was notorious for its gin), but to my knowledge the hotel never owned a tomb in Mount Auburn Cemetery. That distinction belonged to the Tremont Hotel of Boston, which closed its doors (and that of its Strangers’ Tomb) many decades ago.

The daguerreotypes of naked slave men and semi-naked slave women are all too real, though a slave named Tomyris was not among those photographed. Louis Agassiz did indeed commission the images while visiting South Carolina in 1850; the pictures were discovered in the 1990s in storage at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Agassiz was at it again in Brazil in the 1860s, apparently favoring images of naked young “native” girls.