A CONVERSATION WITH M. T. ANDERSON

Q: What gave you the idea for this book?

A: I grew up in Stow, Massachusetts, one of the littlest of the little New England villages that first opposed the British troops when they marched out to Lexington and Concord that spring morning in 1775. Some of my earliest memories are of the Bicentennial celebrations in 1975 — Minutemen marching on the green, President Ford delivering a speech from Old North Bridge, and a hippie in striped pants, a metallic hat, and bug wings who claimed that he was a refugee from the coming Tricentennial and that we should watch out for aerosol.

Growing up in the Boston ex-urbs, my friends and I took the history around us for granted. I got my hair cut in the town that sent the first detachment of militiamen over the hill against the British at the bridge. My orthodontist worked in a faux-Colonial building in the town where Paul Revere was captured by the Redcoats. He inserted my headgear there. The whole stretch of early American history seemed incredibly intimate, because the traces of earlier epochs were all around us. When we played in the woods or walked to the library, we could see remnants and ruins of the first settlements of the Puritans, the villages of the Revolution, the flourishing towns of the new Republic, the rise of the mills in the age of cotton. We lived casually in the past. Eighteenth-century houses were given two-car garages. Old textile mills, half run-down, were revived in my childhood and turned into industrial parks. Walden Pond, which Thoreau had written about with such rapture, was just another place to go swimming. We were used to the distant echoes of history.

Something about that struck me at the 225th anniversary celebration of the Battle of Old North Bridge. It was a huge event: hundreds of reenactors, Patriots and Redcoats, gathered at the site to simulate the battles.

I went to several skirmishes that day. I was standing in a field, watching several hundred Redcoats approach in neat, cruel lines — and like an inevitable machine, drop rank after rank and fire right at me. Then, finally, they rose, screamed, and charged, bayonets out. The effect was terrifying.

I started to think: What would it be like to be standing here — untrained — facing them with a gun I usually used to shoot turkeys? What would it be like to be standing here, not knowing that we would win? Not knowing that we would — or that we should! — separate from England at all? What would it be like to face that army, thinking of myself as a British citizen and these soldiers as my own country’s army? What would it be like to live through this revolution without the victory preordained? What would it be like to be uncertain again?

This thought stuck with me. So a couple of years later, I decided to write a book from the point of view of someone who wouldn’t know the outcome of the war and who had to make a hard choice between sides. I wanted to recapture the feeling of the unknown, the unclarity of that decision.

That’s where the idea for the book came from.

Q: What is the significance of the main character’s being named Octavian?

A: Many masters gave their slaves names associated with rulership, and in particular with the heroes and gods of ancient Rome: Cato, Pompey, Augustus, Jupiter, etc. I’m not exactly sure why this fad came about. In some cases, I suspect it was sarcastic, but in most, the slave owners were probably unaware of the irony. Just as the wealthier masters took pride in dressing their slaves in fine clothes and sumptuous livery, they probably took pride in naming their slaves grandly, too, believing that it reflected well on them if even the lowliest figures in their household were named after kings. In many cases, the owners took pride in the fact that their slaves had supposedly been chiefs or nobles in their own nation and were now reduced to humble service.

Octavian, in particular, was Caesar Augustus’s name before he acceded to the imperial crown. I wanted to give the boy in my story a name that reflected his classical upbringing and also suggested a latent capacity for rulership — a promise that he would someday use his gifts as a leader and enter into his putative birthright as a prince.

Q: Did you find any information about eighteenth-century pox parties really having taken place?

A: Yes — in fact, coming across a description of a pox party was one of the first germs, so to speak, of the book, one of the things that first gave me the idea for the story. People really did hold parties at which a doctor would infect them with a mild form of the disease and they would all suffer it together, and then acquire an immunity. Their understanding of quarantine was very imperfect, however, so they sometimes infected others in the process — which led to protests by the population at large against inoculation.

The moment I read about pox parties, I thought one would be an amazing setting for a novel: a festive month when a bunch of young people are cut off from the outside world, quarantined together, dancing minuets and running fevers.

Smallpox was an incredibly destructive and virulent killer in the eighteenth century. It was estimated around 1700 that one death out of every twelve could be chalked up to the disease; in the military, that figure was as high as one death in every four. During the Revolution, America was wracked by a smallpox epidemic, and the progress of the disease in fact deeply affected the strategies and outcomes of the war. It is horrifying but true that African Americans were used as experimental subjects in the struggle against the disease. Thomas Jefferson, for example, performed large-scale experiments with smallpox vaccination on hundreds of slaves before declaring the process safe and effective and vaccinating members of his family.

Q: What about the other experiments? Are they real?

A: Yes, believe it or not, most of the experiments pursued by the Novanglian College of Lucidity are based closely on experiments of the period. Meteorologist John Lining, for example, weighed everything he ate and excreted in an attempt to discover the effects of weather on his metabolism. John Winthrop of Harvard set out on a voyage from Boston to observe the Transit of Venus in northern climes. The demonstrations of electricity described in the novel were, in reality, undertaken by members of the American Philosophical Society and the Royal Society of London. And so on.

There also really were trials held to determine whether non-Europeans had the same capacity for learning as whites. A young Jamaican named Francis Williams, for example, “. . . being a boy of unusual lively [intelligence], was pitched upon to be the subject of an experiment, which, it is said, the Duke of Montagu was curious to make, in order to discover, whether, by a proper cultivation and a regular course of tuition at school and the university, a Negro might not be found as capable of literature as a white person.” Williams was sent to Cambridge University in England to receive a classical education. He proved himself an extremely able student and later returned to Jamaica, where he opened a school and continued to write poetry in English and Latin.

Unfortunately, even clear results in educational trials such as this one didn’t convince those who were determined to justify slavery. Despite Francis Williams’s achievements, his own colony never truly embraced him — finding him too “haughty” for a black man — and skeptics across Europe questioned the validity of the experiment. Some philosophers speculated, for instance, that Williams must have received help with his Latin compositions, or that “the noble duke would have made the experiment more fairly on a native African; perhaps . . . the Northern air imparted a tone and vigour to [Williams’s] organs, to which they never would have been susceptible in a hot climate.”

But thankfully, others argued that philosophers who decried the achievements of Williams and other black intellectuals “[should] have known that souls are of no color, and that no one can tell, on viewing a casket, what jewel it contains.”