Drawing Upon Parallel Personal Memories

According to author/editor C. S. Lakin, your first paragraph needs three things to hook your readers into the story:

1. Your protagonist (Isaac Carter),
2. A catalyst or incident (the binding out of the four orphaned Carter children at the County Courthouse), and
3. A hint of the protagonist's core need  (to keep his siblings together, to watch over and protect them).

I have researched how they might have journeyed from North Harlowe to New Bern...the route they may have taken to get to the Courthouse once arriving to the city...what the Courthouse may have looked like...

...and now, I need to recreate the emotional responses the protagonist and subordinate characters in this first scene may have had to the incident.

For this I rely on personal memories of a similar event. 

Going to the Courthouse

Hampshire County Courthouse, Northampton, MA

On November 28, 1990, nearly one month after our youngest child's death in a vehicle/pedestrian accident, my husband and I, the driver of the vehicle, our lawyers and a clerk magistrate sat down together at a closed session in Northampton District Court for a show-cause hearing.

The clerk magistrate announced that she had just come back from vacation and had not yet read the background of the case...and it looks like no one was injured. Almost in unison, everyone in the room cried out, Someone died!

We met for thirty minutes...one half hour...reviewed the circumstances, and resolved it among ourselves. Looking back, it seemed like more time than that had elapsed; and if I hadn't read it for myself in the newspaper I wouldn't have believed it.

It was an accident in the truest sense of the word, [the driver] said of Nichelle's death. It was a tragedy, he added, one that happened in three seconds, the time it took my truck to move eight feet. (Charges Ruled Out In Stroller Death, Union-News (Springfield, MA), Thursday, November 29, 1990, by Richard Bourie: Staff: Union-News.)

As we emerged from the small room upon a long, dark, narrow hall, a reporter approached us from the stairwell ahead. The questions he asked seemed trivial and intrusive. I recall a sense of annoyance that he would invade our privacy, not taking into account that we were in a public place. I answered tersely, then walked past him and descended the stairs.

Our two surviving children were not with us. I don't remember where they were...perhaps with their grandparents. That day's events preceding and following the hearing are as lost to traumatic forgetfulness as the memory of the hearing is forever etched in my mind. Even the memory of approaching the reporter is as walking through a haze, buffered by a valley of no recall.

Roughing out the courtroom scene...
And how must young Isaac Carter have felt...a fourteen-year-old young man, huddling his younger siblings about him, as they entered the courthouse. Master Temple instructed them to go with the Negro matron to the upper gallery and wait until their case was called.

The bell tolled in the cupola above, bidding the townspeople to come to court. It was a big day when the Quarter Session began. The Sheriff had rounded up a jury from among the planters and prominent men of the county, and onlookers and curiosity seekers pushed their way through the doors, hoping to get a seat in one of the plain, straight-backed benches of the gallery. . . .

I imagine Isaac felt an unnatural calm, like time was moving past him in a blur. The chatter of innumerable groups of people rose to a roar, yet muffled by a buffer of distortion. He saw people shoving, pushing, scurrying, but he felt detached from it.

And then the Sheriff entered:

Oyez, Oyez, Oyez. All manner of persons who have any thing to do before the Honorable the Judges of the Court of Common Pleas, Orphans' Court, and Court of Quarter Sessions, here holden this day, let them come forward and they shall be heard. (A Book of Forms for Practice in the Courts and for Conveyancing, Volume 2, p. 2102.)

Everyone stood as the Justice of the Peace entered and stepped up to the dias and took his seat on the tall bench, and then the people sat down.

A rail divided the general courtroom from the spectator's gallery, and beyond that sat two oval tables where the attorneys sat. Below the judge's bench were benches for the Sheriff and his deputies, and a smaller table where the clerk of court recorded the proceedings.

The gavel cracked three times, and the murmur of the crowd died down to complete silence. The Sheriff called the first case on the docket and people came forward and sat with the attorney at an oval table.

It seemed that case after case was called of one sort or another....

Turning a 2-D scene into 3-D
As I wrote the sketch for the opening of the courtroom scene, I noticed that while I could imagine the disjointed feeling of grief mixed with responsibility and living in the present, I was struggling with getting into the head of a fourteen-year-old boy.

I can see that after we move and get settled in, I'll be spending some time in my new office, surrounded with photos, the apprenticeship documents (which are currently packed away in boxes labeled, "Debra's Gen. Binders/Bedroom #2") and spending some quiet time imagining.

Forming Your Character's Distinctive Personality

Vintage Puzzle by Fel1x

Following the post on composite likeness,
I began giving some thought to the next step....Since I am writing about a person I've never met...a black male in a time not my own...in a world with differing social mores...I must find devices to piece together the complete man from a fourteen-year-old boy through the stages of manhood.

Composite Personality
Just as I had morphed the photos of four generations of Carter males to come up with a visual representation of my protagonist's physical appearance, I have overlaid the layers of our elders' comments with observations of living descendants for three generations of Carter men.

Layer 1: Hezekiah Carter (son; deceased)
In the summer of 2004 our family traveled from our home in New England to the Livingston Grand Reunion in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Prior to the in-gathering of the descendants of Frank Livingston, we stopped over in Whiteville, North Carolina to visit with family from the Prince Livingston branch who were unable to attend the reunion.

Our first stop after visiting the Charles Spencer Livingston home place on Fruit Ridge Road was to interview the matriarch of our family's branch. Now Aunt Albertha holds another special place in our family because she is a double aunt. She was married to my husband's paternal Uncle Jesse Carter...and her youngest sister Lillie Stean had married Uncle Jesse's youngest half-brother, my husband's father...Chester Carter.

As my husband and I interviewed Aunt Albertha and Cousin Ruth about the Carter side of the family, our aunt recounted the day she met Hezekiah and Hannah Jane Carter...my husband's grandparents.

Hezekiah was also our protagonist's third born son of nine surviving children. Born in 1874, Isaac Carter was 35-years-old at his son's birth.

Hezekiah was a very kind, soft spoken man. And you could tell he loved his wife very much. He said he was glad that Jesse had me in his life because his first wife had been so much older...more like a mother figure.

The first wife is a mystery....

 Layer 2: Bert Carter (grandson, oldest son of the first wife; deceased)
Although we attended two George family reunions in North Harlowe, North Carolina, I met our cousin Napoleon online via Ancestry.com. In a correspondence thread back in February 2011 he said:

I used to visit Miss Hannah when I was small and I knew your Uncle Bert pretty well. And like most Carter men in our family...they had a temper...smile...I guess it skipped me...

Layer 3: Chester Carter (grandson, youngest surviving son of the second wife; deceased)
My mother was also so impressed with my father-in-law, stating that he was a fine, distinguished looking man. I will always remember him as a quiet, peaceful man who sacrificed for his family whom he loved dearly. Pushed far enough, however, his anger would flare...but only momentarily. He would take quick, decisive action, and then resume his normal state.

There is a story which he told me years ago when my husband and I were newlyweds, living in their home.... I was suffering from a lung infection caused by a severe allergy to cats. The doctor had told me that even if we got rid of the cat, it would take ten years of vacuuming to rid the carpets of the cat hair and dander unless they were torn up, the floors cleaned, and new carpeting laid down.

Years ago, he said, I was frying a pan of fish and had set it out to cool. I came back into the kitchen later only to find that the cat had eaten the fish! I got angry and Stean yelled, Why don't you just shoot the cat? I think I will, I said, and got my gun. I nearly lost my marriage over that cat, so you'll understand why we don't get rid of it....

Layer 4: Living Carter males (great grandsons)
Though diverse in interests and expression, each of one of the next generation of Carter males has several aspects of personality in common:

• a deep and sincere faith in God
• issues they feel passionately about
• a deep sense of responsibility and love for family
• a good sense of humor
• an even-tempered outward disposition
• enjoyment when interacting with people

Composite temperament for Isaac Carter's character
I see Isaac as a mixture of all these aspects of personality. The challenge will be in finding situations that occurred in his life to visually illustrate these inner facets of personality.

I can see now that I need to devise a check-list to ensure that I reach my scene objectives. For me, this is uncharted territory. . . .

From Character Development to Composite Likeness

When we last looked at character development, we discussed the soul wounds that our protagonist--young Isaac Carter--had experienced up till his fourteenth year of age. The succession of losses in his life most likely left him with fears of abandonment and of financial hardship, taking the form of a mask of self-reliance. All of this sounds so academic and detached.

Now is the time to determine how these theoretical fears and compensation affected the behavior, thoughts and attitudes of Isaac as he matured.

Gaining insights by looking backward
The first step to filling in gaps in descriptive character detail, such as answering the question: What did the fourteen year old Isaac look like? is to examine what you have and work backward.

STEP ONE: While we have no personal artifacts to guide us, we must first look at what we DO have. Below is a list I compiled of all of Isaac Carter's documentation to date:

1. 1850 U.S. Census (9, living with parents & family)
2. 1860 U.S. Census (19, apprenticed to William Temple)
3. 1864 USCT Military Service Record
4. 1867 County Marriage Record
5. 1870 U.S. Census (29, married, farm laborer, 1 child)
6. 1880 U.S. Census (39, married, field hand, 5 children)
7. Civil War Pension File
8. 1900 U.S. Census (59, married, pensioner, 8 children)
9. 1910 U.S. Census (70, married, house painter, 1 child)
10. 1918 Death Certificate

Of all these documents, the only ones which offer a physical description are the military service record (left) and the pension file.

This gives us the description of Isaac at ages 24, and then again at 48.

STEP TWO:
As I began to imagine a fourteen year old boy, I remembered our son at that age. He was very slight for his age due to the effects Chron's Disease. At his annual physical exam, the family physician would plot his height and weight on a growth chart.

With this in mind, I found the form needed at the CDC.

By plotting the height for Isaac at age 24 on this chart, I followed the corresponding growth curve downward to align with the vertical axis at 14 years. I concluded that Isaac would have been approximately 5 feet 5 inches tall, which is about the same height our son was at that age.

STEP THREE:
Next, I scanned photos for our son, my husband, my father-in-law and my father-in-law's uncle to see if I could morph them together to get an idea of what young Issac may have looked like. Below is the composite formed at MorphThing.

Now I have a more vivid image, which actually resembles our son with the lips and jawline of my husband's oldest brother. Heredity is an interesting thing! 

The next step will be to formulate a composite personality based on what I know of the past three generations of Carter males, and what I have heard through oral tradition about the previous two generations of Carters.

Core Question #2: What is YOUR character's greatest fear?

Some life application of the 3 Core Questions
Recently I presented the three core questions for character development to a Teen Sunday School class and asked them to answer these questions about themselves:

Image by STiX2000 on deviantART

1. What is YOUR core need...your motivation in life...and what would you do if you could not attain it?
2. What is YOUR greatest fear?
3. What incidents in YOUR life have wounded you and caused you to believe a lie, or have shaded your perception of life events? 

These questions are a great tool for getting to the heart of our inner truth! I believe most people are caught up in a cycle of  Greek drama, weather comedy or tragedy, hiding their true selves to cover their vulnerability. Sometimes, however, by wearing a mask people begin to believe a lie about themselves or even about the people and world around them. 

Back to young Isaac Carter

I believe that the greatest fear is linked to the core need, and acts as a negative motivator in an individual's life. While Isaac's core need following the death of his parents was to watch over and protect his younger siblings and keep their family unit intact, it was broadened in adult life to protect and free his Negro brethren from a system of enslavement. 

His greatest fear was a negative motivator striving to produce a positive outcome...and that was...

...the fear of losing his family
and being alone in a hostile world...

The next step is to revisit Isaac's life events and apply the core need and greatest fear to them in order to determine the lie he came to believe about himself and the world in which he lived....

Core Question #1: What was young Isaac Carter's core need?

First off, let me give a big shout out to C. S. Lakin, whose series The Heart Of Your Story on her blog, Live Write Thrive, has been a great source of direction in this phase of planning for the writing of my family history memoir! You can find her posts about character development and other topics here.

Next, I want you to know that determining young Isaac Carter's answers to the 3 Core Questions has been much more difficult than I thought it would be. In fact, I'm still figuring it out...and for that reason I am focusing today on just the first question:

1. What was young Isaac's core need, 

and what would he do if he could not attain it?

As I've contemplated the events of young Issac's life in late 1853, I've realized that he must have experienced a life shift which changed him down to the very core.

His parents were both deceased sometime prior to September 1853...
...his grandfather was very ill for at least a year...
...his family was being split in two, and

this middle child then found himself 

in the position of being the oldest of four children 

being bound out to a white landowner 

who had been a good friend of the Carter family.

I am beginning to see that his core need at this phase in his life would be to keep his siblings together, to watch over and protect them. 

If we were to just go back a few years to October 1850, we would find Isaac at home with his parents and all of six siblings. His life would have been much different that that of more recent generations of young adolescent African Americans. He may have shared some of the same dreams and desires as many boys have today...but during planting and harvest time, he would have been found working in the fields right alongside the rest of his family. He would not of had to make the adjustment between elementary school and middle school because he would not have attended school as there were yet no school for free Negroes in North Harlowe, North Carolina. 

But even this life would have weighed lighter on his shoulders than the burden of becoming the father-figure to his younger siblings. 

And what if he could not attain it? 

On October 24, 1861 Isaac became of age and was freed soon after. In July of 1863 his sister Nancy married at the age of twenty. Annanias would have been eighteen years of age, and Zach, fifteen. By June 1871, Nancy reported in her Freedman Bank Record that her only surviving siblings were Isaac and Mary. So, with no record of either brother following the 1860 Census, is it presumed that they most likely died between 1860 and 1871.  Annanias would have been between the ages of 14-25, and Zach between the ages of 12-23. It is difficult to tell when Annanias may have died; however, Zach was the sickly child. For that reason I tend to believe that he may have died first. 

It's hard to tell if young Isaac was able to attain his core need or not. Part of me would love to believe that he did; but, when seeing that by 1871 Nancy had lost both her husband and all three of her children to death, my heart sinks and I am persuaded that they probably died before they received their freedom.

In 1864 at the age of 25, Isaac joined the US Colored Troops in New Bern. If his brothers were alive they would have been ages 19 and 16 respectively. Something inside me believes that they were already deceased at that time, and that part of Isaac's desire to join the Union Army was to ensure the freedom of his people, and to make a better life for the next generation to come. And here his core need broadens not only to keep, watch over and protect his immediate family, but also for the generations to follow.

One Step BEFORE the 3 Core Questions...Birth Order

Yesterday I mentioned that I needed to answer the three core questions about each of my main characters before moving on. Well, when I sat down to work on it I realized there was something else I needed to consider.

Birth Order
My training in psychology always has me thinking in terms of family dynamic. What was the role each person played in the family? Back in the early 1980s when I studied Alfred Adler's theory of Birth Order and Personality, I began applying this information (along with the meaning and origin of names when selecting fictional characters' names) to my family groups to try to reconstruct a possible family dynamic.

In a brief examination of the birth order and ages of the children in Isaac Carter's household in 1853, I noticed an immediate pattern:

1. Comfort (21)     }2 years between Comfort and William
2. William (19)     }
3. Mary Ann (15)  }4 years between William and Mary Ann
4. ISAAC (14)      }1 year between Mary Ann and ISAAC
5. Nancy (10)        }4 years between ISAAC and Nancy
6. Annanias (8)     }2 years between Nancy and Annanias
7. Zach (5)            }3 years between Annanias and Zach

Parents' Ages at Birth of Children

By maintaining the same numbering sequence as above for the children, we can construct a simple chart for the ages of the parents at each child's birth in order to gain some insight on how their ages might have contributed to the family dynamic:

M/A	F/A
16	27
18	29
22	33
25	36
28	39
30	41
33	44

By the time young Isaac was born, his mother was 25 years old with four children, ranging in ages newborn to seven years. 

Two Families in One

There are also two periods in the family's life: first, when the parents were both alive; and secondly, following their death and the children's separation from each other. Young Isaac's parents, Isaac and Rhoda Carter, died somewhere between October 8, 1850 and September 1853. Because of what we've learned about apprenticeship laws, we can safely assume that if his parents did not die together, his mother most likely would have died first...perhaps in childbirth, illness, or accident...followed by the father. It is estimated that it could take up to six months for an estate to be settled; however, no estate records for Isaac Carter have yet been discovered. 

Since William and Mary Ann were not yet of age when their parents died, I believe that they might have been living with another family member other than Kelsor & Sarah Braddock at the time of Kelsor's petition to the Craven County Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions to place the younger children in the care of their family friend, William Temple. Even though they may have been living in the same residence as their sister, Comfort, who did not marry until July 1864, I do not believe that she received custody of them since she was a female, not gainfully employed to care for minor siblings; and also, no petition could be found bearing her name in regards to placement of the minor children.

So, while young Isaac was the middle child in his first family group, he became the functional oldest child in the second family group. At fourteen years of age, he then took on the responsibility of looking after his younger siblings...the youngest of whom was "taken to fits" (most likely some seizure disorder). 

How would a shift in functional birth order affect personality?

From the Adlerian Overview of Birth Order Characteristics chart (link above) you can see that middle children often feel sandwiched and may become even-tempered, a fighter for injustice, and may even find themselves operating as a mediator between two factions. Oldest children, on the other hand, often find themselves as the one to lead by example. The adult expectations upon them are usually high, and they often find themselves in roles of authority. When a child is a natural born first child, he often feels displaced by the birth of the second child and seeks the father's approval; however, in the case of a functional first child, this longing might not be as strong. Although, in a case like this where the father is deceased, the child might long for the father's presence to guide him, or to return him to his middle child state. In either case, the death of the father would most certainly have a marked affect on young Isaac.

What now?

By applying the natural tendencies of children's birth order, both natural born and functional, we can now assess changes in personality and behavior even into their adult life.

The next step might be to look at the affects of grief upon the children...and also that of separation of the younger siblings from the older. 

In the mean time...back to the 3 core questions...

Who are the Characters in YOUR Family History?

Ancestors as Characters
Have you ever thought of your ancestors in terms of Characters in your family history? I have to admit that when I first started out on this journey to write a family history memoir, I first had to narrow down which story I wanted to tell, and once I decided that, I had to begin thinking of our ancestors in terms of characters within the book. After all, when you pick up a book, what is it that grabs your attention and entices you to continue reading? For me it's getting to meet the protagonist within the first couple pages and witness his/her reactions to whatever it is going on in the midst of the action.

Okay. So, we've established that our protagonist is going to be Isaac Carter.
Actually, our protagonist will change over time as we move from generation to generation. But at the onset, our principle player will be young Isaac (14).

Now, who else is in this story? The next set of people I looked at were his siblings who were also apprenticed. They would be:

• Nancy Matilda Carter (10)
• Annanias Carter (8)
• Zach Carter (5). (He is referred to sometimes as Zacchaeus and at other times as Zachariah, hence the nickname, Zach.)

From there I began to think of who else would appear in the first scene. William Temple, their master, would be there. And depending on where I started the first scene, perhaps the boatman, Stephen Priestly, would be present. 

Once they arrived in New Bern, there would be those at the friend's home or rooming house where they lodged. 

At the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions, there would be the Clerk of Court (J.G. Stanly) and the Judge (Justice of the Peace, William Blackledge). And also would be the other persons appearing in court that day.

There would be mention of the children's family: Kelsor and Rhoda Braddock, their grandparents; and, their older siblings...and what about their deceased parents?

So, just from this initial bit of brainstorming, I've come up with the following cast of ancestral characters:

1. Isaac Carter (14), protagonist
2. Nancy Carter (10), sister
3. Annanias Carter (8), brother
4. Zach Carter (5), brother
5. William Temple, master
6. Stephen Priestly, boatman
7. People at the lodging in Newbern
8. Samuel W. Chadwick, Sheriff
9. Judge William Blackledge, Justice of the Peace
10. J. G. Stanly, Clerk of Court
11. courtroom spectators
12. Kelsor and Rhoda Braddock, grandparents
13. Comfort Carter (21), sister
14. William Carter (19), brother
15. Mary Ann Carter (15), sister
16. Isaac Carter, father (deceased)
17. Rhoda (Braddock) Carter, mother (deceased)
18. people in the Temple household

From here I must answer three question about each character:

What is his/her core need?

What is his/her greatest fear?

and

What is the character's inward and outward personae?

It might take some time before I complete the answers to these questions for the main characters in the book, but join me here next time when I share with you the answers to these questions for our protagonist, young Isaac Carter, and take a look at the next step in Writing the Family History Memoir.