Since I’ve been busy not paying attention to this blog, I have progressed beyond Writing the Bones, my previous segment on the writing of my 1st conceptual verse novel. The skeleton is solidly formed and now it’s time to put meat on the bones, so to speak. The next segment, in my progression, will be based on the pages upon pages of handwritten notes on the book whose title I’ve narrowed down to three choices.

One of the characters in my book is Dr. Lorenzo Johnston Greene, historian. Dr. Greene published a book called The Negro in Colonial New England. Even though I went to elementary, middle and high school in Boston, this book was never part of any curriculum I encountered; not even in my year and a half at Emerson College. I don’t remember exactly how I came across this very informative (read detailed) book. It was either in a semi-recent history class at a local university or it was in Wendy Warren’s book, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America. Either way, it was recent enough to be pissed that I was in my early 50’s when I found out about his scholarship, which is impeccable, btw.

But that anger is for another potential post about the state of education in this country. The purpose of this post is to discuss, somewhat, the role he plays in my novel. He is an angel to use Christian parlance. He is also a time traveler who uses his angelic abilities and his training as a historian to resolve a matter that had needled him in his professional life. In The Negro in Colonial New England, the matter that concerns him enough to affect his afterlife is nothing but a one line footnote. That disturbs him because the matter involves a rape. However, his chosen profession is limited by the tenets of histography and requires a poet to contextualize the pieces missing from the historical record. So he functions as a historian and a buffer against what he calls the poets “Africanist flights of fancy”.

It’s definitely a balancing act, navigating between the poet and the historian; especially since I like the poetic bits more!

That’s all for this week. Next week, I’ll talk about a different character.