I started researching Whisper Falls six years before I wrote a single word.
North Carolina is an amazing place to live for someone who loves history as much as I do. There are dozens of historic sites to visit within easy range of my home—as well as some of the nation’s best state museums. I’ve tramped through reconstructed gardens and musty cellars, climbed through colonial and federal-period houses, and watched re-enactors fire muskets and mill corn. At the NC Museum of History, I’ve tried on period clothing, practiced a country dance, and observed the proper preparation of tea.
After making so many visits, it was only natural that I’d want to learn more. I located a copy of Women’s Fife and Work in the Southern Colonies by Julia Cherry Spruill and immersed myself in the hard, distinctive lives of 18th century Southern women. Through Spruill’s meticulous research and painstaking footnotes, I explored what Southern women faced in their education, jobs, religion, marriage, children, homes, culture, and legal realities.
It was while reading a section on crimes and punishments that I first encountered the harsh treatment of indentured females. From those pages, Susanna Marsh was born.
Although Susanna grows up in the fictional village of Worthville, NC, the places in Mark Lewis’s world— Umstead State Park, the Raleigh greenway system, the state government complex—are real. And just like Mark, I’ve traveled to the State Archives and pored over the same two-centuries-old primary sources: wills, court records, newspapers, marriage licenses, and indentures.
Among the old documents, however, few were written by the indentured servants themselves; it would’ve been rare for them to write well enough to leave behind journals. But their stories still speak from historical sources, such as in newspaper accounts of runaways, in the inadequate laws that sought to protect them from their masters, and in the letters and journals of the upper classes whom they served. From these sources, I created the life that Susanna might reasonably have lived in the sort of small town that existed outside Raleigh at that time.
For more information on how indentured servants like Susanna Marsh might have lived and worked, please visit the Extras page on my website, http://www.ElizabethLangston.net.