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.

The Old Newbern Courthouse

One of the biggest frustrations for me as a researcher/writer is coming to a screeching halt at the appearance of a giant pothole in the middle of the road. It's not quite the same as coming to a dead end. There's more information to fill in the path...somewhere...but where...and when? 

Just as I was really getting somewhere with character development, I received an email which opened up a whole new avenue of exploration in regards to the old Newbern Courthouse.

New Bern, Newbern or New Berne?
Allow me to begin with just a brief note on historic spellings for our city. Victor T. Jones Jr., the Special Collections Librarian in the Kellenberger Room at New Bern-Craven County Public Library, says in a recent Facebook communication:

Officially they started writing New Bern as two words in the 1890s. Before the Civil War, it was mostly written as one word (Newbern), though there are some examples of it as two. During the Civil War occupation is when the "e" was added to Bern (New Berne). In the late 1890s and early 1900s there was a big debate in town about whether it was one word or two, with the e or without. It was finally settled with the the way it is currently spelled, two words without the e.

Since the time period I am focusing on is the 1850s, I will be using the antebellum spelling, Newbern.

Back to the Courthouse...
In our story, the old Newbern Couthouse is the focal point of our first scene, where the four youngest Carter children appear to be bound out as apprentices to the household of William Temple.

I have studied historical accounts and maps of the city, but not till I received copies of the following photos...all that remains of the memory of the old Newbern Courthouse...did I begin to recreate the scene from the children's point of view (POV). I had actually received the photos back in mid-May; but, a more recent email provided the stimulus to try to identify the style of the court house beyond the ruins below:

Ruins of the Craven County Court House,
destroyed by fire January 15, 1861.
The Court House stood in the intersection
of Broad and Middle streets. This view
was taken from Broad Street looking west.
The old Market House is visible
beyond the ruins.

The photos answered a question I had earlier based on a the map I had previously view which placed the court house in the intersection of Broad and Middle Streets.

In the intersection, as opposed to at the intersection, was the correct phrasing; although, it was highly unimaginable for me. How could a court house be placed in an intersection, especially one lined with trees which would have made the roadway about it quite narrow?

From these photos we can see all that remained was the corner of the building.

Ruins of the Craven County Court House.
View taken on Middle Street looking north.
A New Bern Album, by John B. Green, III
(1985), p. 26.

It appears to have been a three story structure, with perhaps three sets of windows on each floor.

This was the second court house in Newbern. The original one was to be built in 1761 by orders of Richard Spaight, Esq., Joseph Leech and John Fonville, Commissioners. It was ordered "that a Court House for the said county [Craven], not exceeding sixty feet long and forty feet wide in the clear be build on the public lots in the town of Newbern ...on the intersection of Broad street where a Court house is already begun" (Rambles about Town: Pollock Street from Queen to Middle, October 8, 1882).

John D. Whitford also noted that "This old court house gave place to the brick one build on the same site about forty years afterwards, which was destroyed by fire just before the war. We have a photograph (above) of the walls with the houses then around them, taken immediately after the fire."

Of the second court house, Mr. Whitford states:

The clock on the cupola of the court house belonged to the town, was purchased in 1826, and no better was ever made and set up. The bell was the property of the county, and not only gave us the hours through the day and night, but it was also rung for all fire company meetings, political meetings, or any kind of town or county meetings, as well as give the alarm of fires.

While Victor had encouraged me to check the colonial architecture of the existing Chowan and Beaufort County court houses, I am now convinced that while the original courthouse may have had some of these colonial influences, this second courthouse did not. And this is how I came upon this conclusion:

Below you will find a collage I constructed of all the photos available on a Google Image search for the Old Chowan County Courthouse in Edenton, NC:

I was so excited about the detail I had discovered, especially the interior design.

The old Beaufort County Courthouse in Washington, North Carolina can be seen below:

While they both have a copula with a clock and bell, I decided to look for images of three-story southern courthouses built around the turn of the 19th century.

Jones County Courthouse, Trenton, NC

I am now somewhat convinced that the second Newbern Courthouse may have looked more like this courthouse built in nearby Jones County, North Carolina.

Whitford states that the original...

Court house is raised on brick arches so as to render the lower part a convenient market place, but the principal (sic) marketing is done with the people in their canoes and boats at the river side.

If the arches were carried over into the design of the second courthouse, perhaps it might look somewhat like the front of the U. S. Post Office and Courthouse in New Bern, seen below:

by eopederson45

Old Fairfax County Courthouse in Fairfax City, Virginia was built in 1799, close to the time the second Newbern Courthouse was erected. Notice the similarity in the use of brick arches in its design.

Courtroom Design
There are some similarities in courtroom design between Fairfax County Courthouse and those of Chowan County, North Carolina,  and James City (colonial Williamsburg) and Isle of Wight Counties in Virginia, which share the same layout.
Ultimately, what I will have to do is to use my imagination to combine elements of all of these settings to re-create the exterior and interior of the second Old Newbern Courthouse for this scene.



And now you can see how the giant pothole in the middle of the road got filled in with a little help from my friends.