Above the Salt, page 42
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First thanks go to Dra. Iêda Siqueira Wiarda, formerly with the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress, who recorded my work for the archives after a talk I gave in 1997. She directed me to Ron Grimm in the Maps and Geography section to discover a curious exhibit: “Celebrating the Portuguese Communities in America: A Cartographic Perspective, Presented by the Library of Congress and the Embassy of Portugal,” where I was introduced to the immigration story of the Madeiran Protestants of Illinois. The following year, Iêda invited me to present “From Madeira to Illinois: Stories of Survival and Disappearance of the Portuguese Protestants” under the sponsorship of the Hispanic Division. I owe dear Iêda a debt of gratitude.
Enormous thanks forever to my stellar agent, Ellen Levine. This project that has taken over fifteen years would not be alive without her, and her care and passion for my work never wavered. Audrey Crooks was an absolute delight to work with, too. Ellen delivered the manuscript to an ideal home at Flatiron Books/Macmillan. Upon reading my book, executive editor and publisher Megan Lynch wrote the sort of note writers dream of getting, and from that moment, her support of my story and of me has been a life-renewing joy. To the entire Flatiron team, unending thanks: Bob Miller, president/publisher; Marlena Thorsen Bittner, vice president and director of publicity; Kukuwa Ashun, editorial assistant; and Greg Villepique, copy editor. Thank you, Cat Kenney, Katherine Turro, Emily Walters, Jeremy Pink, Eva Maria Diaz, Donna Noetzel, Elizabeth Hubbard, Kelly Gatesman, and Stephanie Torres. Thank you, Rex Bonomelli, for such a gorgeous cover. Thanks as well to Rich Green of the Gotham Group, Ana Ban of Trident Media, Carmen Serrano at LeYa in Portugal, and Tânia Ganho. I’m grateful to Leslie Shipman, longtime friend and founder of the Shipman Agency for authors.
This work is supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where I was a Fellow (2006–2007). My research assistants, Jason Lazarcheck and Ece Manisali, created the birdsong communications for, respectively, John Alves and Mary Freitas Moore. Jason did invaluable sleuthing on Ancestry.com. What a fine group of Radcliffe colleagues: Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, Megan Marshall (who suggested making anagrams with John’s surname), and Major Jackson, my kid brother. (Allegra, I’m grateful for your reading of fortune cookies.) Thanks to the late Judith Vichniac. Liz Bradley, thank you for your computer assistance and for mentioning my godmother, Clementina Vaz, from a generation not allowed to marry legally, when you wed your wife.
As serendipity would have it, I came to the fellowship with a copy of Don Harrison Doyle’s The Social Order of a Frontier Community (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983) only to find that fellow-Fellow Marjorie Spruill, a brilliant scholar, especially on women’s history and suffrage, was married to him. Many of Don’s tenets in this beautifully written volume opened my eyes to a fresh look at the myth of American culture being about community rather than the ability to move on. He directed a spotlight on the tug-of-war between individualism and commerce versus boosterism, community, and charity. This theme in my novel would not exist without his enlightened work.
How I miss the late Lindy Hess, who ran the Radcliffe Publishing Program. Not incidentally, her ability to point people in the right direction included ushering me toward Christopher Cerf, and marrying him remains indisputably the best move of my life.
It took some years from viewing the exhibit in the map room of the Library of Congress to writing first pages, which I did with the support of the MacDowell Colony for the Arts (January 2005) and during my tenure as a Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard University (2003–2009).
Drew Gilpin Faust, a renowned Civil War expert, spent her final year as president of the Radcliffe Institute when I was there. When I discovered in the papers of the Veterans Administration that John Alves had, along with others in his company, received a twenty-day punishment, without any mention of what they had done, she directed me to Trevor K. Plante of the Old Military and Civil Records at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. In yet another uncanny gift from the universe while working on this novel, I arrived at almost the same time as double-Pulitzer-winning historian Alan Taylor, whom I’ve counted as a friend since the time we were both professors at the University of California at Davis. He voiced a variation of Trevor Plante’s comment that my trying to find what my character might have done was a needle-in-a-haystack search. Except that after three hours of undoing the pink ribbons around the documents I requested somewhat at random about Illinois companies, I found it. Boys who had survived Shiloh and Vicksburg were throwing “cotton blow” and other debris at each other and refusing an officer’s command to desist, and they were court-martialed and sentenced to twenty days of incommunicado punishment. A singular moment was getting to wave this document under the nose of a friend who happens to be one of the best historians and researchers in the world. Alan said, “Welcome to the dark side” and wondered if I would give up being a novelist in favor of history. I told him no, I would rest on these once-in-a-lifetime laurels. The “Wishbone-Backbone” plaque is an Easter egg for him.
My research made substantial headway because of David J. Langum, Sr., who awarded me a Foundation and Travel Grant via the Langum Project for Historical Literature, allowing me access to the Langum Family Papers and de Mattos Family Papers at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Among the treasures this yielded was a diary of the Reverend Doctor Robert Reid Kalley. David is a descendant of one of the key ministers during the difficulties in the Portuguese Presbyterian community over baptismal doctrine and is the author of António De Mattos and the Protestant Portuguese Community in Antebellum Illinois, published by the Morgan County Historical Society and Production Press (Jacksonville, Illinois, 2006). He put me in touch with Deborah Kleber, who ran a website on the Madeiran exiles, whom I met at the Hotel Campo Grande in Lisbon.
I was warmly welcomed in Madeira, especially at the Arquivo Regional da Madeira, by Dra. Fátima Barros and Leonardo Pereira, who did ample work with the Xerox machine. Dra. Alexandra Canha and her staff at the Biblioteca Municipal do Funchal unearthed key material for me. Both these departments were housed in the Palácio de São Pedro in Funchal. Thanks also to the historian Dr. Alberto Vieira, Director Regional dos Assuntos Culturais at the Região Autonoma da Madeira and Centro de Estudos de História do Atlântico, where I was referred by Dr. Gonçalo Di Santis. Additional help was provided by the Centro do Emigrante, Quinta Villa Passos, with Dr. Gonçalo Nuno; O Departamento de Cultura da Câmara Municipal do Funchal, with Dra. Teresa Brazão; and the Biblioteca Estrangeira, with Dr. Carmo Santos.
What are the odds that Illinois College would offer a teaching fellowship to support writing projects? They exclaimed in surprise over my sending them work featuring their college and Jacksonville in general. Thank you, Cindy Cochran, for driving me around town, and thanks to her colleagues Lisa Udel, Bob Koepp, Betsey Hall, Nick Capo, and Beth Capo. (Thanks for the entertaining tour of the haunted sites.) Thanks to my allies in the Illinois College Bookstore, Linda Cunningham, Robin Oberg, and Candy Norville, who dug into their own supplies of printing paper when the orders ran late.
I received huge help in my research, with special thanks to: Greg Olson of the Jacksonville Journal-Courier and Steve Hardin, owner of the Samuel Adams House on West College, a classic example of Greek Revival architecture, one of the historic homes of College Hill. Steve and I talked about the town’s history for hours. (I believe the house has since been sold.) Sharon Zuiderveld, director of the Jacksonville Public Library, and Chris Ashmore were paragons of patience. Director Carolyn Eilering facilitated a story-changing tour of the Illinois School for the Deaf, a moving institution that continues Jacksonville’s old aim to be an Athens of the West by creating prominent facilities of care.
Welcoming me to their homes were several descendants of the original Madeiran immigrants, including Mary Hathaway, Jean Bowen, and William (Bill) DeFrates. Jean set up meetings with descendants and put me in touch with tour guides of the town’s Underground Rail system. Mary was generous with letting me copy pages from original Portuguese Bibles and hymnals and other newspaper clippings. Bette DeSilva, Wallace (Jack) Pat Jackson, and Barb Baker also enlightened me about the original colony.
Thanks to Rand Burnette, chairperson of the publications committee of the Morgan County Historical Society, Dan Dixon of the Springfield Genealogical Society, Jane Van Tuyle at Jacksonville High School, Loretta Widdows, caretaker at the Duncan Mansion, and Mary Francis Alkire of the Jacksonville Historical Society. Dr. Lawrence W. Zettler, professor of biology at Illinois College, engineered trips to the prairie to spot orchids, showed me the ghost-orchid perfume experiments in the IC lab, and educated me about the environment. I was stunned by the raining down of cicadas, and he remarked on my good fortune to be there for their hatching after thirteen years of dormancy, a reminder that research requires presence, that the feel of a place on the skin, as Walker Percy once put it, cannot be acquired at a computer. In a further instance of that, Guy and Edie Sternberg at the Starhill Forest Arboretum in Menard County, the official arboretum of IC, led me on a tour and gave me the impressive tome Country Life: A Handbook of Agriculture, Horticulture, and Landscape Gardening by Robert Morris Copeland (Boston: Dinsmoor and Company, 1866).
One more instance of the magical turns that enlivened my research: At John R. Paul’s Prairie Archives Bookstore on the old Capitol Square in Springfield, I stooped to tie my shoe and came eye level with a mimeographed booklet listing the businessmen of 1849, a surprisingly lighthearted source of names, personality details, and occupations.
Among the many sources in Springfield was Wayne C. Temple, chief deputy director of the Illinois State Archives, who met with me at the Capitol Complex, did research even after I left Illinois, and gave me a copy of his useful The Taste Is in My Mouth a Little…: Lincoln’s Victuals and Potables (Mahomet, IL: Mayhaven Publishing, 2004). I received an in-depth private tour of the Lincoln household thanks to historian Tim Townsend and curator Susan Hakke. Thank you to Linda Garvert for assistance with the Sangamon Valley Collection at the Springfield Public Library and Heather Tennies at the Lancaster Historical Society. The Illinois State Historic Preservation Society in Springfield was a moving source of actual letters, diaries, and assorted materials from Union soldiers; I delved into the Wallace-Dickey Collection, the Augustine Vieira Papers, the Preston Shumway Papers, and the diaries of Mortimer Rice.
At the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Cheryl Schnerring, the manuscripts manager, Debbie S. Hamm, manuscript associate, Dennis E. Suttles of Genealogical Research, Mary Ann Pohl, Lincoln Collection cataloguer, and Glenna Schroeder-Lein of the Manuscripts Department were extraordinary participants in my discoveries. The 1849 issues of the Illinois State Journal had numerous articles on “The Coming of the Portuguese from the Island of Madeira, Portugal,” found in the Doris M. Sanford Memorial Collection. When I asked if I could see Mary Todd Lincoln’s authentic cookbook, it was eagerly brought up from the vault. We admired that the dessert pages were sugar-stuck together. Most significantly, I asked to see “The Home of Lincoln” guestbook from October 1919, to verify (citation of newspaper source is in the next paragraph) that John Alves was so overcome as an old man visiting the Lincoln household in recalling a love named Mary that his hand shook too awfully to sign his name, and the playwright John Drinkwater did the honors for him. There it was, verbatim: His memory and testimonial were impeccable.
Eileen Lynch Gochanour and Wanda Warkins Allers are bracing examples of the value of organizing and compiling historical materials even if they are not mainstream-published. Without their many volumes on the Portuguese exiles in Sangamon and Morgan Counties, I would not have stumbled across the history of John Alves—they faithfully gathered items about the original exiles and their descendants and included a featured interview with him in a 1920 Salt Lake City Tribune. Some of their compilations include: The lst Portuguese Presbyterian Church of Jacksonville, Illinois 1855–1860, The 2nd Portuguese Presbyterian Church of Springfield, Illinois, and The Gathering of the Portuguese.
Thanks to the staff at the Newberry Library in Chicago, where I found useful articles and maps.
A partial list of other useful sources: O Apostólo da Madeira, by Michael Testa (Igreja Evangelica Presbiteriana de Portugal, 1863); An Island Story: The Scots in Madeira, by James W. Purves (Edinburgh: Church of Scotland Publications, date unlisted); Uma exposição de factos, by Robert Reid Kalley (pamphlet); Perseguição dos Calvinistas da Madeira, by João Fernandes Da Gama (São Paulo, Brasil: subsídio para a História das Perseguições Religiosas, 1896); Sherman’s Forgotten Campaign: The Meridian Expedition by Margie Riddle Bearss, (Baltimore: published for the Jackson Civil War Roundtable by Gateway Press, 1987); Sherman’s Mississippi Campaign, by Buck T. Foster (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006); The History of Hurlbut’s Fighting Fourth Division … of the Fourteenth Illinois Infantry, by James Dugan (of Company B.,14th Illinois), (Cincinnati: E. Morgan & Co., 1863); Thoughts, Essays, and Musings on the Civil War, an excellent blog on the Meridian Raid by bobcivilwarhistory.blogspot; Soldier Life: In the Union and Confederate Armies, edited and with an introduction by Philip Van Doren Stern (New York: Gramercy Books, 1961); Illinois in the Civil War, by Victor Hicken, foreword by E. B. Long (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1966); One Year at War: The Diary of Private John A. Shultz, compiled by Hobart L. Morris, Jr. (New York, Washington, Hollywood: Vantage Press, 1968); Civil War: A Narrative, Fredericksburg to Meridian, by Shelby Foote (New York: Vintage, 1986); The Story of a Common Soldier, by Leander Stillwell (Kansas City, MO: Franklin Hudson Publishing Co., 1920). This touching volume aided my Shiloh scene, including his amazement at the sight of mistletoe.
Also consulted: Images of America: Springfield: A Reflection in Photography, edited by Edward J. Russo, Curtis R. Mann, and Melinda L. Garvert (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2002); Images of America: Jacksonville Illinois: The Traditions Continue, edited by Betty Carlson Kay and Gary Jack Barwick (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 1999); Historic Morgan and Classic Jacksonville (1885), edited by Charles M. Eames and Harvey W. Milligan, with an introduction by Professor Harvey W. Milligan (printed at the Daily Journal Steam Job Printing Office, Jacksonville, 1885); Faces & Places: A Morgan County Family Album, by Vernon Fernandes (published by the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, Production Press, Inc., 1995); The Hymnal (Philadelphia: General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America 1933, reissued in 1940); The Hymnbook of Northminster Presbyterian Church of Jacksonville, Illinois (Richmond, Philadelphia, New York: Presbyterian Church in the United States, 1955); A Window on the Past: Residences of Jacksonville, Illinois: Their History and Design 1833–1925, by Philip H. Decker, with an introduction by Helen Walton Hackett (Jacksonville, IL: published in cooperation with the Morgan County Historical Society, 1990); Jacksonville: A Survey of its Past, compiled by Dr. Ernest Hildner of Illinois College (Jacksonville, IL: Elliott State Bank, 1966); The Portuguese of Morgan County (publication of the Jacksonville Area Genealogical & Historical Society); Where the Sky Began, by John Madson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982); Morgan County, Illinois: Its Past and Present (Chicago: Donnelley, Loyd & Co. Publishers, 1878); and Morgan County: The Twentieth Century (Morgan County Board of Commissioners, 1968). It is significant that I found these last two volumes in Madeira.
At the end of laboring on a lengthy book, many things land on the cutting-room floor. The byways about the birth of baseball are gone, but thanks to John Thorn for his Baseball in the Garden of Eden (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), and for his generous, fast replies to my inquiries. Likewise, many asides were cut about Billy Fleurville (his surname is spelled in different ways in various sources), the Haitian-immigrant barber who tended to Lincoln, developed a remarkable bond with him, and bought property with Lincoln’s aid, and who died only three years after losing his son Varveel in the war. I leave it to some enterprising writer to delve into the friendship of Lincoln, Fleurville, and Elias Merriman, a fascinating physician, inventor, and wanderer in the manner of men seeking fortunes in that era—another cutting-room victim along with his wife, Susan.
