Joy in the Victorian Era: Revisiting Black Characters in History and Historical Fiction

There’s a beautiful verse from Nikki Giovanni’s poem, “Nikki Rosa,” where she writes about how often, when people write about black history, they focus on the struggle and the pain. She writes:

because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they’ll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy.

When I began writing a historical novel about the life of Ida B. Wells, I expected to find tales of Ida’s courage, ambition, fierce sense of loyalty to her community and her deep commitment to the social justice movements that defined the 19th and early 20th century. I did not expect to find a diary entry where she noted, with no small degree of pride, that there were five men in Memphis “who with the least encouragement, would make love to me; I have two correspondents in the same predicament.”

Reading her diaries, written in her 20s, when she was a young teacher and aspiring journalist, introduced me to an Ida I’d never seen in all of my studying of black history. Here was an Ida who loved theater and the opera, who spent too much money on beautiful dresses and gloves. I had grown up on Jane Austen, devoured books like Age of Innocence, but I had never read a book about a black American woman, living and loving in the Victorian era. I was so taken aback by her descriptions of love letters, returning love letters, suitors and balls, that I had to keep checking the dates. It was that Ida, who longed for true love with a very 20th century desire for independence, that captivated me and led me to write my first historical novel, Ida, in Love and in Trouble.

I was thinking about Jane Austen and the wonderful line, “next week shall begin my operations on my hat, on which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend” as I wrote about Ida. As a true Victorian woman, so much was riding on her marrying and marrying well. But Ida held even her most alluring suitors with a degree of skepticism. Louis Brown, one of her most ardent admirers, seemed to both press Ida for kisses (which could impugn her reputation) while at the same time avowing that he held her on the loftiest of pedestals. One of the chapters on Brown ends with this declaration from Ida: “That man. Kisses like pecan pie. Poetry like Coleridge. There was only one word that could describe Louis Brown in all his good‐looking, clever‐lad complexity. Slippery. Louis Brown was nothing if not slippery.”

I loved writing about Ida’s friend and contemporary, Mary Church Terrell, and the true life incident where a Greek scholar declares that he is nothing less than shocked at Mary’s mastery of the language because “‘I was surprised to learn that a person of your race could speak Greek so fluently when I was led to believe that the tongues of Africans are so thick it was hard for them to pronounce the more refined romance languages.’” You can imagine how fun it was to write Mary and Ida’s “you must be kidding me” responses.

Race enters Ida’s story again and again as we approach the lynching era, but as Nikki Giovanni so powerfully reminded us there is love and there is laughter. The happiness of the post Reconstruction era is especially sweet because it is a time when Ida and the young men and women of her generation, many of whom were born into slavery, were discovering just how sweet freedom could be.

I loved bringing to life the scenes that Ida described in quick, fleeting entries in her diary, written between long days of teaching school and long nights crafting her freelance editorials as she builds her journalistic career. It was a joy to write about the snow day party she had one day for her fellow teachers when school was canceled, her first ball and her first transatlantic train ride from Memphis all the way to San Francisco.

I spent hours and hours researching the fabrics she might have worn, the gardens where she picnicked, the beautiful paper on which she wrote her love letters and correspondence with editors. I knew that if I wanted to bring her story to life with some of that Austen and Wharton flair that I loved as a reader, that it was time well spent. Along the way, I had the pleasure of interviewing Martha S. Jones, the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor at John Hopkins University. She said, “Part of survival, part of how we thrive and make politics is that possibility of self-fashioning, of beauty, of pleasure, of nylons or the click of your heels.”

Jones went on to say, “I’ve got portraits of Ida Wells and Mary Church Terrell. These are women who take extraordinary care for many reasons but partly because it pleases them. This is part of how they’re making their world, in a terrible world. I don’t think we should allow folks to discount that.”

The more I learned about Ida’s life, the more I knew I needed to bring this joy into black historical fiction—it’s a critical element of how these real life characters made a way out of no way or to paraphrase Jones, made a better world out of a troubled world. 

Check out Veronica Chambers' Ida, in Love and in Trouble here:

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