Kathleen Grissom, author of The Kitchen House, visited with our Book Club on Zoom. She told us how she became inspired to write the book. She moved to Virginia with her husband. They had bought a brick house from 1830 on 25 acres in a rural area. While renovating, they saw a map with a hand-written notation: “Negro Hill.” Kathleen asked 4 local historians about Negro Hill, and they didn’t give an answer in common. She talked with an elderly black lady, who said a young black girl was hung in the town square during history. Grissom had questions while talking with the woman, so the woman suggested that Kathleen write her own story. Kathleen said she didn’t have a story, but the lady said to “Pray on it.” Grissom doesn’t know why, but she started “seeing” the prologue during her meditations and experiencing the story like a movie when she was doing her daily journaling.
Her Dad in Saskatchewan told her of a man he knew who had traced his family history and told of a ship from Ireland to America in 1790. In one family on that ship, the parents had died, and there were 2 little boys whose history was known; but there was also a little girl who couldn’t be traced. Kathleen felt like that girl was connected to her story. She spent a year researching plantation life in South Central Virginia in the 1790s. Then she went to Charlottesville to a book festival (Virginia Festival of the Book. https://vabook.org/ ) At the festival, she saw the author Robert Morgan, who wrote Gap Creek. He wrote the book about his grandmother, using the voice of his grandmother at age 16 to narrate the story. During Morgan’s presentation, Kathleen Grissom realized that the girl who had been on the ship from Ireland was going to be the narrator for her story. After putting that together, The Kitchen House came to Grissom as a movie; fully formed characters with a story to tell.
Grissom sees
her writing as a spiritual gift. She does the work but doesn’t have ego
invested.
Kathleen has
been working on her next book, which tells Crow Mary’s story, for 7 years. She was visiting
her parents in Saskatchewan, Canada, and they went to Fort Walsh. The mounted police had set up a fort there because there
had been a massacre of the Assiniboine natives. At the time, 2 major industries in the area were whiskey trading and wolf pelts. Wolves
had been poisoned, which also poisoned smaller animals not targeted. Horses
were stolen. Ill will and drinking were at an apex when the massacre occurred. Crow-Indian Mary had recently been married at age 16 to a fur trader in the vicinity.
During the massacre in 1873, she saw attackers take 4 Assiniboine women to the
fort. ‘Crow Mary’ saved the women by threatening the men with guns.
Cindy T. asked
why Belle (in The Kitchen House) didn’t use her status as the daughter
of the white master of the plantation, the Captain, but instead kept it a
secret. Kathleen answered that at first she was going to have the Captain tell
his new wife (Miss Martha) that Belle was his child with a slave. But when Grissom
started writing this, the ‘movie’ that was revealing the story to her stopped,
and the characters left. So, she wrote the story as the characters seemed to
prefer, keeping Belle among the slaves and not revealing the Captain’s
connection to her. Kathleen read part of a book review to us that clearly
stated that slaveowners rarely acknowledged their interracial offspring, even
when the parent and child looked alike.
Cindy T. also
asked whether white indentured servants were often assigned to work with the
slaves in the kitchen houses, as Lavinia was in The Kitchen House.
Kathleen said that she wasn’t sure but that she had read history that showed
that searches for runaway indentured servants were very common, with the
servants often running with runaway slaves.
Joanne asked
whether indentured servants could be sold. Kathleen didn’t know but said there
is more research being done about indentured servants. Kathleen said a lot of
people who have read her book tell her that their family history includes relatives
who paid for their passage to North America as indentured servants.
Shirl asked
whether Kathleen knew about any movie plans for The Kitchen House. Kathleen said a producer had begun a movie but
lost funding. We discussed the possibilities of a movie of The Kitchen House.
Claudia
asked about renovated plantations and kitchen houses to visit. Grissom answered
that there are many in North Carolina, Virginia, and the Great Dismal Swamp,
which runs along the eastern coastline.
Lydia asked
whether information about restorations covers the slaves’ lives and whether
restorations show slaves’ quarters. Kathleen said there is more interest lately
in ‘true history,’ which includes more information about slaves’ lives than does
much history written or reproduced in the past. More research is being
done into slaves’ lives, so more and more information should become available,
and more historical sites should include slave history.
We all
enjoyed this fascinating discussion with Kathleen Grissom! Thanks to Shirl for
arranging it!
