A Note from the Author
Dear Reader,
In September 2013, I attended an indigo exhibit at the Picture This Gallery on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. The exhibit featured many different types of artists who used or were inspired by indigo. There were dyers and textile makers, jewelry makers, painters, and a lady who was a living Eliza Lucas Pinckney, and who stayed in character all evening.
I overheard a conversation the gallery owner was having with one of Eliza’s descendants who was in attendance. I caught snippets of a story that would light a fire in me. It was a story about a sixteen-year-old girl who ran her father’s plantations in her father’s name. “This girl,” the unknown person said next to me, unaware of my eavesdropping, “made a deal with her slaves: she would teach them to read, and in return they would teach her the secrets of making indigo.”
Now, I realize I am not a historian. But I do know that there once lived a remarkable girl whose name, outside of Charleston, has mostly been forgotten. And the need to tell her story became so overwhelming that I couldn’t ignore it. I told myself that if I could tell her story in such a way as to capture her spirit and her fire, and introduce her back into our consciousness, then I must try.
The story that you just read was based on true events and historical documents. However, as with any fictionalized version of history there are elements that had to be created to demonstrate character or give fabricated reasons for actions where the truth behind certain deeds has been lost to time.
Most of the slaves on the Wappoo plantation you read about were real, except for Essie and Sarah. Starrat was real and was indeed a witness on a deed to mortgage their property that I found, though perhaps not as vile. I have no idea if the Mr. L whom Eliza refers to in her letter to her father is in fact a Laurens, but based on her vehement rejection of his marriage suit (her exact words “the riches of Peru and Chile had he put them together could not purchase sufficient esteem for him to make him my husband” crystallized her character and made me laugh out loud), I imagined it must have been someone memorable whose principles were at odds with Eliza’s. When I learned about how young Henry Laurens went on to make his fortune in slave trading, I felt he and his father fit the bill perfectly.
Nicholas Cromwell was real and so was his sabotage of Eliza’s indigo attempts. She never refers to a Negro indigo maker in her letters that are available in The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, however, there were a few things that led me to create Ben. She asks her father to send someone, and upon first read I felt it was someone she knew. In other letters to her father she appears to defend the innocence of her friendship with someone unnamed. I believe many historians have assumed it was Charles, and while their friendship and her flirtations in her later letters to Miss Bartlett (and Charles) could support that argument, her defense of this mysterious friendship was, in my opinion, far too early to be attributed to Charles.
Later, in documents by her descendants (Eliza Pinckney by Harriott Horry Ravenel), there is a mention that her father did indeed send a Negro man to help her, and that it was well known in the family record that he did so. But who was this man? He is never referred to again.
A boat with Lucas rice and “a” Negro man really did go down in the St. Helena Sound. One afternoon when I was in the Addlestone Library in Charleston, I found the written document in the Pinckney Papers of this entry of the boat, and to my surprise saw that the author had written “the a Negro man.” From that moment on, I became convinced that there was more to the story. And so Eliza’s childhood friend Benoit Fortuné was born.
Forgive me, dear reader, for any anachronistic mistakes, either accidental or willful, or for any besmirching of the character of ancestors long dead. My intent was purely to revive the memory of a remarkable young girl, who perhaps due to her youth or her gender, or being eclipsed by the accomplishments of her sons, was largely forgotten by history.
When you visit Charleston today, much of the Pinckney history is anchored in the life of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Eliza’s son. You cannot even visit her Wappoo land anymore. It changed hands several times and is now a suburban housing development in an area known as West Ashley. Though a quick look at the road names in that area that I cross referenced with an old plat map show Indigo Pointe Drive, Eliza Court, and Betsy Road. I suppose someone knew the land’s significance.
Largely, Eliza and what she accomplished has been forgotten. She married well, that’s what people remember. There is no surviving portrait of her, and she has become known in some circles as Charleston’s most elusive face. Far from a sweet, genteel lady in history married to a powerful man (though she may have become those things too), she was ambitious, she was headstrong, she didn’t always conform to society’s expectations, she made friends with whom she chose and not who was expected, and she didn’t have an idle bone in her body.
The letters in this book are largely taken from Eliza’s real words. In most cases, they are direct excerpts from longer letters. In very rare cases, letters are adjusted, combined, or slightly embellished. And one letter in particular, the one to her father asking for the indigo maker to be sent, was filled in almost entirely by me, the original letter being unavailable. The prayers are all her original words. I suggest anyone with further interest in Eliza pick up The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney.
It was not available at the time of writing this book (2015), but since then the “living Eliza,” Peggy Pickett, has compiled a robust biography of Eliza published in early 2016. I highly recommend this for those seeking to understand more about Eliza’s life. It is listed in the bibliography that follows.
Eliza Lucas captured my imagination and didn’t let go until I’d told her story. It may not have been 100 percent accurate, but she was heard loud and clear. Almost three hundred years later, I guess that’s all she can ask for.
—Natasha Boyd