So I picked up a bunch of local history books at the library recently. One is In Our Own Words: Stories of North Cambridge, Massachusetts 1900-1960. The most memorable person in the book is Ruth Jones (1895-1996), an African-American townie. She comes across as a take-no-shit person who tells you what to do because she’s experienced and smart and wise, and she knows it. She’s also incredibly smart and stubborn, in an admirable, ambitious way. In the book, she gives all these great details about cadging food from the gardens of the rich white folks and being the first black girl to graduate from Somerville High (1915) and dealing with racism when she went to Boston University in the late 1910s. In the interview, she obviously loves to tell stories and to preach.
Anyway, after I read about her and decided she was completely awesome, I wanted to work her into the story somehow. I decided I should have a vampire based on Ruth Jones in the general details of experience and character.
I haven’t worked out all the details yet [like her first name], but her last name is Whatley, and I do have a definite idea of her presence. She is single, but she is definitely a matriarch, not a mammy, but a commanding leader who treats other people like her children, not that they are stupid, but that they should do what she says because she knows best. Unlike Chow, who is an uptight parental figure as well, she’s not prim and proper and concerned with filial piety and obedience. She will curse the fuck out of you and whack you if aren’t paying attention to her.
Also unlike Chow, she has very little self-doubt. This relates to one of her favorite stories: She says that she is descended from Phyllis Wheatley, despite all evidence that Wheatley’s line died out with her unmarried son. She thinks that her illustrious poetic lineage imparts to her great literary skills, but it doesn’t. Her poetry is actually just mediocre. She generously offers it to the Plainsfolk and the Undead Unitarian Universalists in chapbooks for fundraising purposes, and they grit their teeth and accept it because it sells great with little old ladies. She does not like Mark and thinks he’s a racist because he won’t stock her chapbooks in La Biblio.
I should also probably say that she’s not too impressed with men in general. She’s not actively venomous toward them a la Pippilotta, but she thinks women are stronger. She is one of those people who takes the supposed feminine weaknesses and turns them into strengths. Like she thinks that the fact that women can bear children means that they are stronger, with more fortitude, and more powerful than men. Or that women are stereotyped as critical means they are more observant than men. She reframes feminine sentimentality and “hysteria” by saying that women are more sensitive to others’ emotions and more honest in their expressions, blah blah blah. She also thinks women are less squeamish with their own bodily functions and blood because they have to deal with menstruation and men don’t. Pisses off all the equality-minded liberals [the Plainsfolk, the South Enders, the UUUs, the Chocolatiers] with this view.
Also pisses off the liberals because she smokes a pipe. Has a reputation similar to that of Ethan Stuart and the Salem vampires: powerful, dangerous, magical, possibly a witch. Supposedly she kills people [that is, vampires] in the same manner that Ethan is known to execute people who don’t abide by his laws. Then she fertilizes her garden on their remains. While there is one view that says she kills people, there is another view that says that she is a healer type of witch who can cure vampiric maladies and help you with euthanasia. [And then she fertilizes her garden with your remains.] She’s one of those people who is talked about, but seldom seen.
I need to go find a cultural hook for her vampirism… I.e., what were the vampire-related beliefs of Africans who were imported here as slaves? How might some of those beliefs have been transformed to influence vampire-related beliefs in African-American slave culture?