Lake in the Clouds (94 page)

My relationship with New York City (and hence this story) begins with Theunis and Belitjegen Quick, some of my earliest known ancestors, who left Holland for New Amsterdam sometime before 1640 and lived on what is now Whitehall Street, where the Spencers make their (fictional) home in this novel. Almost three hundred years later my paternal grandfather came from Italy, passed through Ellis Island, and a few years later married a good Italian girl, an orphan who had been raised at the Mother Cabrini orphanage when it was still in Manhattan. For these and other reasons my curiosity about and affection for the city are endless.

The first job of any novelist is to tell a whopping good story, and I hope I have done that here. My secondary goal is that the unsuspecting reader caught up in the lives of these characters of mine will unwittingly absorb some history, along with a new awareness and appreciation for the city and its people in all their complexity.

Truth is stranger than fiction
goes the old chestnut, and thus I sometimes found it necessary to tweak various facts behind this story to render them less incredible. For example: there was, in truth, a Mr. Cock who was the purveyor for New York City’s almshouse in the early 1800s, just as there was a Dr. Valentine Seaman. In those cases where real names caused too great a distraction to the readers of early drafts, I have amended spelling. Thus Mr. Cock became Mr. Cox and Dr. Seaman became Dr. Simon. Like all the other historical personages I have borrowed in the telling of this story, I start with the available facts and then make up the rest. This is a novel, after all.

Many events described here happened, although I have
sometimes taken the outrageous liberty of rearranging them (very slightly!) in time. Dr. Seaman (or Simon) did found the city’s Kine-Pox Institution in the Almshouse; there was a riot of free blacks outside the home of a wealthy French expatriate when she tried to evade the Gradual Manumission Act; two Irishmen did stand up to an alderman and land in jail for their trouble, causing a scandal that took place largely in the newspapers; and the Tammany Society’s appropriation of Indian customs and costume to their own ends in their annual June 12 celebration went on for many years.

The Gradual Manumission Act was passed into law by the state legislature in 1799, and following that, the institution of slavery began to slowly give way in New York State. However, slaves continued to take the risk of running to freedom, and slaveholders tried to get them back, in part by paying bounties to blackbirders. The Red Rock community and Manny’s work are based on documented “maroon societies” of the period.

The Manumission Society did in fact establish and oversee the African Free School, but the Libertas Society is a fiction. For those interested in the history of slavery, resistance to slavery, and black communities in the North, I recommend Shane White’s excellent
Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City 1770–1810,
T. Stephen Whitman’s
The Price of Freedom,
Joyce Hansen and Gary McGowan’s
Breaking Ground Breaking Silence: The Story of New York’s African Burial Ground.

Michael Howe is a composite character based on James Cheetum (editor of the
American Citizen)
and James Keltetas, a lawyer who wrote anonymously for Thomas Greenleaf’s
Journal.
Keltetas did indeed go to the bridewell for writing in defense of Irish ferrymen sentenced to hard labor for speaking back to an abusive alderman.

Most of the medical practices, treatments, and beliefs described in the story are based on documentation of the time. Debates about the cause and treatment of smallpox, yellow fever, tuberculosis, and other diseases are taken from a variety of historical sources. For example, medical practitioners were deep in a debate on the relationship between syphilis and gonorrhea, and many believed them to be different manifestations of the same disease. Just the opposite confusion reigned about
the group of related illnesses caused by streptococcus bacteria. Medical practitioners of the period did not recognize the relationship between maternal postlabor/delivery infections, strep throat, scarlet fever, certain skin infections, focal infections such as pneumonia, sepsis, streptococcal toxic shock syndrome, and necrotizing fasciitis.

Information is not always easy to find, but among the more useful resources are Thacher’s
New American Dispensatory,
Morgagni’s
Seats and Causes of Disease Investigated by Anatomy,
and the excellent
Cambridge World History of Human Disease,
edited by Kenneth F. Kiple.

I have tried to be as true to the geography of Manhattan in 1802 as the record will allow. All institutions (Almshouse, theaters, shops, the New-York Dispensary, African Free School, taverns, churches, docks, etc.) have been left in their original locations, insofar as that information was available. Developments in what is now known as the Adirondack park are less documented for the same period, and much of that part of the story’s location is based on approximation and guesswork. The village of Paradise is fictional, but it is situated on a site on the west bank of the Sacandaga with some ruins called “White House,” which may have been a single homestead or a small village.

I am especially thankful to historians and librarians for their assistance. Dan Prosterman combed through the resources at the New York City Municipal Archives for hours, and the staff at the New-York Historical Society and the New York Public Library were tremendously helpful in locating information and documents. Steven Lopata provided information on chemical laboratories, Adrienne Mayor was helpful in tracking down information about fossils and related myths in the Hudson Valley, Jim and Janet Gilsdorf continue to provide excellent medical information.

To my perceptive, watchful, and ever dependable readers and friends, Suzanne Paola, Patricia Bolton, and S/He Who Must Not Be Named, my endless gratitude. I am also thankful to the UCross Foundation for a month’s seclusion in the high desert of Wyoming in which to write, to Harmony and Loren Kellogg for support, friendship, and the gift of refuge and a house with a view. Tamar Groffman provided another kind of
peaceful space and calm guidance that made all the difference in the hardest times.

As always I am thankful to my agent and friend, Jill Grinberg, to my splendid editor, Wendy McCurdy, and to Nita Taublib for their encouragement and enthusiasm.

And of course there’s Tuck, Bill, and Beth—now and always.