 This is how I start every every time I talk about this work It's a privilege to talk about people who have been erased and to tell their story So it's usually when the waterworks begin, but it's it's kind of what's kept this project going over many years when Actually, I abandoned this project for a couple of years when I didn't think I could get a publisher and I'm glad that I kept with it So I just want to do some really broad strokes about Dickinson for people who might not know about when she lived just so that we can get a frame of time and actually I think that's where I'm going to start using slides 1830 to 1886 was her life period Which basically means that her life spanned the Civil War so you could sort of think of her as kind of embracing the Civil War And she was born to a wealthy or well-to-do Massachusetts family and Lived in a sort of an agrarian town and actually let's there she is so let's just I mean here's it's a kind of a Country place actually sort of still looks like that Dickinson graveyard local farms. This is actually a factory Emily can see from her house so Wealthy households are right next to and actually this is the Dickinson Meadow looking at the factory Workers houses. This is the back of the Dickinson household and we're gonna stop right there because I Want you to see the domestic wing because that's sort of an important part of where our story takes place is this wing that's jutting into the room and That door with the porticoes around it is important. We're gonna come to that again that's actually the door that Emily Dickinson's casket came out of and the Window right to the left is a really important part of our story because it's the pantry and Dickinson hung out there a lot So Emily Dickinson Was expected to help in the house and so she became actually quite fluent in the domestic arts And it would be sort of like on a regional level if Malia and Sasha Obama were Helping out with the state dinners and putting the state dinners on but if you sort of scaled that down to a regional level that's sort of the kind of household they were in and Therefore you could imagine the pressure. She was feeling when she wanted to write when having to put on big dinners For the family and it's also why she became such an excellent baker and cook and That's actually where I met her in the kitchen Because I had had actually a rather Traditional is it before title nine before girls had t-ball? So the silver lining is is that I really really understood Dickinson's Experience growing up I was very familiar with that and even though my kitchen had a My stove had a thermostat. I understood what kind of time she was spending in the kitchen and oh Okay, oh proud about these slides So this is what she looked at when she looked outs when she was looking from that pantry window this is what she saw the barn and You know funny thing happened on the way to the kitchen today. So let's see. Where are we going after that? Oh, I didn't mean to go that far, but anyway, that's the library so I want to say that how this whole project came about is that I was a poetry student as Nancy said at San Francisco State and Wondering because I knew Dickinson was a prize-winning baker. In fact, she was more famous in her lifetimes of baker than she was really as a poet and that's why the recipes are in the back so you get some hint of that and And so I was actually sort of scorning myself like All right, I where are your 2000 poems Murray? Where are your thousands of letters? So I was actually experiencing a moment of self-scorn and I was at that moment that I was having those moments of self-score I was standing in this room, which is in the old building It's now not recognizable like that, but that was the reading room in the old main library so so I was I was having this moment of Self-criticism and I pulled Dickinson biography off the shelf and I'm thinking hmm. What if she had help and The dick and so the photo I Pulled this popular digs in biography off the shelf and it actually sort of really opened I know this sort of sounds kind of like magical and actually I think maybe the light I Think maybe the lights were streaming in and then there was this big drum roll or whatever But anyway, and I saw this photograph of these three People And it was labeled Dickinson domestic is about 1870 and they were these three Irish faces and the guy in the middle looked an awful lot like my grandfather and Because my grandmother had been nanny my uncle was a waiter and lots of family members in that kind of doing that kind of work and I said Whoa, my great grandmother could have been scrubbing Emily Dickinson stairs Not that my grandmother could have been Emily Dickinson. I didn't go there but so so that was really the moment of Grace or the aha moment and then I never looked back after that and it and so in in the beginning It became the ethnic identity project because there it was You know a virus descent so it so it started there, but then it got to be much more interesting Then an ethnic identity project so let me just so this is the photograph that I saw and The woman on your left Margaret Maher, I'm going to talk some about her, but they're all related Tom Kelly in the center is the brother-in-law of Margaret Maher on the left. That's his daughter and the three of them were Working in these two side-by-side Dickinson mansions. So Anyway, so it was a way I guess for someone who came from humble circumstances to insert themselves into this story of the poet on the pedestal But then I started looking for the story and interviewed servant descendants and And Then they turned out to be a much more varied lot than I thought There were African-American Servants there were Native American servants. There were English immigrants. There were poor white Yankees people Let's say of English German descent so I and I found this out partly because I did things nobody else had done like look at the census about the servants and so Anyway, I want to just read a segment from the book so you get an idea. I'm playing a little bit with Time here, but it just gives you some names and then I'm going to show you some pictures of who some of these people were Or as many as I could recover a Bundle of wood Dropped by Dennis Scannel next to the stove is followed by Hollow clunks as it's neatly stacked the glub blub of boiling water for peeling tomatoes oven door clanks Splish of new milk being churned by Margaret O'Brien Fire sighing from a muffled fall of wood Plates clinking mixed with laughter as poet and made wash and dry plates in the scullery Kettle whistles furiously Three knocks on the door frame a nephew and friend breathless run in a sandy rubber ball Bounces sloing boing as it gets away the rhythm of wash day as soapy water erupts Mrs. Max Red Arms wins loud whip of hanging bedclothes brush thrush of broom on flagstone Then Horace Church pokes his head in to say Miss Emily if I'm pruning do you want cuttings or a Peddler follows him up with miss Dixam Would you buy a new watering tin or Margaret maher comforts her mistress with Emily? I put a lot of pork to it mother's sort trout will soon be well Tom Kelly and his boys Michael and Thomas cry out as they cut the rye Johnny best in kicking stones in the road shouts over to them Then lop clop of horse over gravel becomes muffled mutting of straw in her stall Henry Jackson's wagon rumbles Main Street Harness bells quake rocks wins rocks as Amos Newport settles a new wall If you don't like the weather in Amherst locals say you need but wait five minutes Wind blows clear through from Ohio Elm and pine branches lowering bump the ease tat tat of rain Slants the window noon whistle blows at furings Chickens rush flap each other the train from Palmer bellows long low So now I'm going to show you some pictures of some of those folks Henry Jackson the last person I just mentioned with the wagon was a hugely important to Emily Dickinson's father and grandfather It was a huge important figure in the town and I can tell you more about him this is Kelly Maher Kelly descendants and some of the three that I showed you in that original photograph are in this picture and I'm just going to actually go and point them out. So that was the young woman on the right That's Margaret Maher who was on the left and that's Tom Kelly and the bar far back So let's see who else we have Eliza Thompson. This is probably one of the most exciting Binds that I made she was and she was her photograph was an unlabeled photograph in The Amherst College files for her husband Who was head of buildings and grounds at Amherst College? and if you worked for Amherst College you basically worked for the Dickinson's it was just kind of like all run seamlessly and I didn't have a photograph of an African-American woman who worked in the Dickinson homestead and then I was going through this File and it was unlabeled and there she was and I went. Oh my god. I anyway, so I truly feel like I Resurrected Eliza from the dustbin of history and there's so many stories about her, but well, okay, so that's Charles abolitionist anyway, I can talk more about them their daughter Eliza Wait a minute. I'm sorry Mary Eliza and Charles's daughter Mary and then Henry Hawkins is the person she married He's Native American and he worked for the Dickinson's and I don't have actually I followed up an African-American family And I don't have group photos of them. So I've actually just Henrietta Emma Esther his Henry Hawkins granddaughter Gertrude his daughter-in-law I Think that's Esther again. Oh my gosh. I forgot the woman on the right. I'm sorry Henry again with his granddaughter Helen Petty John. These are the this is the maher Kelly clan So I sort of was following and interviewing and basically an Irish family Irish immigrant family and this African-Native American family And this is the same event and that's The gentleman at the top is Tom Kelly and and if people really know their Dickinson letters It's it's his blue jacket that Emily Dickinson poured her heart out into one time When I couldn't find Servant pictures. This is Sally Ann Brown Scott was an African-American woman who worked in the Dickinson household and right near Dickinson's in the same cemetery are Graves of people who worked there. So I got as close as I could I took a picture of her grave This is the Dickinson grave nearby Henry Jackson who I mentioned These are other Jackson's Margaret Margaret Maher's grave. I'll be talking a little bit about her Horace Church Long-time Dickinson Gardner. These are his descendants and Unknown local man that I thought was adorable came from the Hawkins family collection, but it gives you some sense of what Maybe a poor or working person's house might look like and I want to stop here because I just want to tell you one sort of a little story and then I'm going to read a poem because Finding that there were This sort of variable United Nations of servants in The Dickinson household really changed how I thought about the poems and I want to read you a poem But I want to tell you a sort of a little story about him I And actually a local Bay Area story. I Mentioned a gardener putting building a rock wall named Amos Newport and that name might seem familiar to those of us from the Bay Area because we had a mayor in Berkeley named Gus Newport and I was rather intrigued by This and Actually talked to Gus Newport to ask him if he because I knew he had it back a back east connection so I Talked to him and He said, oh, let me call my mom. So he called his 90 year old mother and his 90 year old mother Turned me on to the family genealogist Historian genealogist who was following five African-American families from this little rural county in upstate, New York where Gus's family is from and Marjorie Perez helped me find actually a lot of the family stories a lot of So anyway, so she helped me do this and Somebody walked in that I know and I just lost my though. Oh, okay, so so Amos Newport was Very old man when he was gardening in the Dickinson Grounds and oh wait, I forgot the Gus Newport So Gus and Marjorie are not sure that the upstate, New York Newports are related to the Massachusetts Newports So they haven't quite put the link together but I got turned on to Marjorie which was quite wonderful because she helped me so much and So Amos is in his 80s in the early 1850s when he shows up in in Emily Dickinson's letters his son was Wells Newport. He was a stableman for the Dickinson's and Emily Dickinson talks about Wells disappearing and then gets replaced by another African-American stableman Jeremiah Holden But the whole piece of him disappearing is interesting because for those of you who forget about the Fugitive Slave Act That was passed in 1850 which basically meant that anybody of African descent north You know anywhere is basically fair game So people were hit over the head and taken to the south and sold into slavery. So basically it just meant nobody was safe anywhere and So it's interesting that Emily talks about Wells disappearing You want I wonder if he pissed somebody off and goes to a safe house. That is an Underground railroad safe house till things cool off because that's what you had to do in a rural place where African-Americans had few allies so So Emily Dickinson is about ten years old when a little girl who is just her age is working in Household and she's African-American. She's an orphan and orphans were sent to people's houses to do domestic work or whatever The little girl Angeline Palmer hears that The family she's working for is planning to travel to the south and when they travel to the south they're planning on selling her into slavery and Emily Dickinson and so the reason I'm put up Henry Jackson's slide again is he and two other men Angeline's brother whisk the girl through this daring rescue whisk the girl to safety put her in a safe house and Actually in the family anyway, it gets really complicated the gardener Horace church She gets sent there and then gets sent to an underground railroad safe house But so Emily Dickinson's father defends the three men So Emily Dickinson's was about ten years old. She would have heard about this right at the dinner table, right? Little girl her age. So it really changed how I heard a poem like this It's written this poem was written Probably within the same year that the Civil War is declared. So this is probably late 1861 The lamp burns sure within those serfs supply the oil It matters not the busy wick at her phosphoric toil the lamp The slave forgets to fill the lamp burns golden on Unconscious that the oil is out as that the slave is gone And Then I want to come back to this photograph for a minute when I read this poem because this is a poem I Think people know the word dyna gets used for African-American Domestic workers kind of as a you know, sometimes people would change people's names. Oh, just call her dyna and Bridget was the same thing for Irish people, right? So, you know, you got the name that sort of encodes the occupation for dyna and Bridget in this period of time and actually Till probably way into the 20th century. So in about 1875 Margaret Maher who is the woman on the left Who Dickinson actually fights quite hard to get to win to work in her kitchen writes this poem and Artist oops, I didn't start at the beginning The spider as an artist has never been employed though His surpassing merit is freely certified by every broom and Bridget throughout a Christian land Neglected son of Jesus genius. I take thee by the hand so So that's about so she wrote that about five years into Margaret Maher's tenure And I just want to say at the risk of spoiling some of the drama of the book. I just want to tell you that Emily Dickinson wrote more when she had maids. I mean, I did a little chart This is the the data for the scientists who are in the room. Ah, so She gets her first permanent maid, you know, right, she was doing domestic work around the house, right? I mentioned before putting on the quasi-state dinners and then the writing urge nudges and she and her sister lobby And they get a permanent maid Dickinson's writing shoots up. She starts writing about a poem a week. Well She has this maid for about nine ten years Margaret O'Brien and Irish immigrant and Dickinson's right about 200 300 poems a year and then she drops to about ten poems when Margaret O'Brien Marys her way out of service so She there's about three sort of depressing years when Dickinson's not writing very much And then she gets wind of the fact that Margaret Maher is about to take off for a California where her brothers are mining gold and Dickinson fights really hard to get her in so this actual photograph is really a Photograph of Dickinson's happiness because she had one Margaret Maher for her kitchen But the funny thing is is that she gets Margaret Maher in there And then she actually doesn't leave the kitchen and she actually starts writing on scraps of paper And I'm just gonna show you some of those scraps Wings of envelope's a little one So she's writing on all of these little oddball things Doing little sketches and this is actually a Margaret Maher's writing and Emily Dickinson's writing together So that's Dickinson's up in the Left And see I don't know really where I So and let me just say another thing and we can talk more about this in the question and answer portion But Margaret Maher be sort of an important character in the story because Dickinson stored her poems in her maids trunk And then after when she I guess on her deathbed She said I want you to burn these poems after I die and Margaret Maher was Every bit the warm and wild and mighty person that Emily Dickinson described her as and didn't burn the poems. Thank goodness and So the last idea I want to leave you with has to do with language This was actually a big surprise to me. I was reading Dickinson's poems and I started to hear something that sounded familiar and and So I'll just I want to say that we live in a country We're so lucky and Dickinson was so lucky to live here in a country that has has so many varieties of English and She was an auditory sponge and I started to hear the first thing that I felt that I heard was Something that sounded like it came from my elders And then the more I thought about it and then it started to also sound like the way I'll just use the common term black English all of these varieties of English have their own rules and grammatical structures and cadences and rhythms and music and so I I Started to think about Dickinson's poems that way. I mean just to give you I'm just gonna give you two really quick examples When Irish people Come into English, right? Okay, so they're using that sort of Gaelic syntax, right? It gets overlaid on to English There's a lot of Dickinson's poems that use that that classic grammatical structure it was not death for I stood up so that it was not it was it wasn't that's the way Irish people speak I It was not death for I stood up and all the dead lie down It was not night for all the bells put out their tongues for noon. It was not frost for on my flesh I felt Sirocco's crawl not fire for just my marble feet could keep a chancel cool The other thing that really interested me was the way Dickinson uses be and If you are familiar with black English or what ling was called African-American vernacular English Promise me this when you be dying. I mean there's a whole way And I don't know all my schoolmates spoke came from South came from the Carolina. So I really grew up hearing this a lot There's also a really interesting way in black English the way verb tenses Right, you'll have different verb tenses that are have different agreement right than standard English Dickinson uses that all the time so anyway, I so I guess in closing I want to say that she uses a lot of Casual speech in her poems in her letters. She uses a lot. She's quoting people. She loves the way people speak She just really sucked it into her language and got I mean Essentially hit pay dirt in that kitchen because she didn't have to go out to the world I mean right we have that famous idea that she's this recluse. Okay stuck up in her kitchen But she was actually in the kitchen. I mean stuck up in her bedroom, but she's actually in the kitchen listening Imagine the kitchen with the doors open you saw the barn and everything very closely Situated she's stable. It's coming in with eggs in that piece that I read so she didn't have to go out to the world because the world came to her and all of those Beautiful ways that people speak English Allowed her as she would put it to dwell impossibility and the last thing that I want to say is Emily Dickinson may have been trying to get People to see the importance of these invisible people in her life when she planned her funeral She requested that six of the family's laborers Be her pallbearers and it was actually shocking to her family. It was shocking to neighbors people wrote about it people were shocked That she had picked these six gardeners Stablemen To carry her casket out that back door and through the barn but I think it was her way of Honoring and telegraphing to the poor and laboring community of Amherst what they had meant to her life And perhaps in these lines. She's acknowledging it So soft upon the scene the act of evening fell We felt how neighborly a thing was the invisible Actually don't know how to go backwards on this one. Oh, wait, there is back as well. Anyway I'll just leave it at that so Two people have questions. Oh, oh, who are these people? Oh, okay. Um, yeah um In 97 because I've been doing this project since the beginning of time These are the people who were then cleaning the homestead, which is a museum the Dickinson homestead and These were the two gardeners at the time John on the left actually just retired Judy. Actually, I think it's no longer working there Well, there's my apron There I am oh Oh Yeah, I'm cleaning at Dickinson a word is said a word is dead when it is said some say I say it just begins to live that day So yeah, she was really into speech On the street of New York, I just happened to see it. Where? I Don't know. I'm not a New Yorker You'll have to go look for it Yeah, go ahead Okay, the question was what's the connection between the book art of service and this book? 300 pages. No, no, I'm sorry. I'm goofing around the book art of service is I Was doing let me just step back for a minute art of service is a just a short little un numbered book of And I'm sorry. I didn't bring a copy to show you. There's actually a slide of the cover, but I Interviewed those people the two house cleaners the two the gardeners landscape and a carpenter actually, I don't have a photograph of the carpenter, but And I asked them about their work and how long they had done it and then I took those questions I sort of was doing this long distance because I was also having an installation in a big exhibit in Amherst and and I wanted to Make the people who were maintaining the museum Visible in a way that Dickinson servants had been fairly invisible or to us now. They were very visible to Dickinson, obviously so I interviewed them and actually Made these handmade books and they were supposed to mimic Dickinson's handmade books called the fascicles Dickinson made her Would bind maybe 12 or 20 poems into a book And she restored them in her maids trunk And so my idea of making the art of service was to do that and and I then asked all of those folks You know tell me about your work and tell me how it's like art or poetry And so then I made them kind of into a little paragraph And then when people came to this installation in the Dickinson Museum They could read the books and Yeah, so that's basically what it what it was was a collaboration with them Okay, I can try. Okay, so the question was about that poem and I mean I mean that poem wasn't really a comment on the Little girl being kidnapped But thank you for bringing it back up because I guess what I meant by why I brought it up is Sometimes Emily Dickinson this scene is kind of detached from what was going on in her time and You know, she was just up in her bedroom. What did she know about the war? You know and she was from a wealthy background What did she know about anything? But she had to do with Amos Newport and Henry Jackson was in and out of that household because he was Dealing with lots of issues with her father and her grandfather Eliza Thompson was there Eliza Thompson was so so that the whole issue of slavery was so It was not remote. It was so present. I mean her Emily Dickinson's father was actually one of the Architects of the Fugitive Slave Act actually he was a wig politician and so That stuff was talked about around the dick I mean they were power brokers for the region and the nation so all of that stuff is talked about in the house and So the poem She's actually talking about a slave Escaping because the last part of it. Okay, so I'll just read it again The lamp burns sure within those serfs supply the oil It matters not the busy wick at her Phosphoric toil the slave forgets to fill the lamp burns golden on Unconscious that the oil is out as that the slave is gone. So this is actually About a skate, you know slavery, you know The institution of slavery being over with or the slaves escaping or you know, just that whole thing being dismantled And this was written. I mean right after the wars It's believed that it was written in the so the war I think begins in April of 1861 and this is believed to have been written in the latter part of the year. So And she did not come from an abolitionist family by any means she came from a fairly um Entitled family that they were not abolitionists. Let's put it this way. Yeah Okay, so the question was did Digginson have anything to do Did Digginson write to abolitionists did Digginson comment about it in her writings. There is actually A whole body of scholarship about looking at that. I mean her Mentor was an abolitionist Henry Wentworth Higginson Who led the first troops of African-American soldiers? So she was around that world I don't know if she wrote to Mary Ellen Pleasant She certainly wrote to Wentworth Higginson a lot of the letters haven't been recovered um But there is a huge body of Scholarship now looking at the fact that Digginson was not as divorced from The times and that there was I mean actually mom She was prolific during the Civil War and I Know that during the Gulf War I remember being incredibly prolific as an artist You know, what are you gonna do? It's awful and you want to channel that into something beautiful, right? So you make art and So I don't know that fully the answers, but there definitely are people who are looking at this and looking at her There's several books out about Digginson's response to the war and slavery Okay, so if people didn't hear the question it was regarding How many poems have this language? influenced and I'm actually hoping that somebody's gonna pick up and do that I feel like okay. I opened the door and now I'm gonna let the linguist go in there and have at it hopefully Because I'm not a linguist I actually spent some time I think Nancy and her introduction talked about me being down at Stanford for a couple of years And I actually work with John Rickford who is a Linguist who whose expertise is actually where And now I'm gonna use a technical term high-burner English, right? That's the English that Irish people speak. It has a technical term African-American vernacular English. That's the technical term for black English So he's an expert at those were those two come together. And so I was very fortunate to be tutored by him and So now I'm hoping that somebody else is gonna take that and really break it down Who is an expert in that arena? So maybe some of his students well Oh, yeah Is Do people want to see those should I just try to go back that was actually me see I I can't do anything sort of straight So I Was this is actually me silk screening actually some of Dickinson's writing on to some actual paper made in Thailand tied up with rope that I found in my garage But I was trying to riff on the idea of Dickinson making her own packets of poems and tying them up, you know, sort of using the domestic arts to make books and And then I put them in a trunk because I was playing with that whole idea of Dickinson putting So this was actually so among some of these slides. You see some of my oddball things And and actually someone was asking that. Oh, actually, okay, so Early on before I knew that there were other important servants besides the Irish immigrant service right when it was still the ethnic identity project I Was trying to determine whether not things and was also hearing Irish and so I actually silk screened Some Irish writing and then I put Margaret Mars writing on top and then I put Emily Dickinson's on top So that's what that is. That's a kitchen table and then I was trying to get to the Art of Service and then this is that book that you asked about the Art of Service book, which is this Just small hand press and it was made at M Press in Mill Valley Dale Goings. I saw Dale here. Oh, yeah Dale Goings press in Mill Valley And so this is where I actually sort of wrote those and then their hands-own books that I then put in the trunk in that exhibit She wanted to have burned That's what I think. Yes Question was just about what Dickinson's motivation was to have her Packets of poems burned and that Kafka had done the same thing and he was a perfectionist. So what was what was going on for Dickinson? I Think a couple of things, but I think primarily that She knew that Margaret Marr wouldn't do it and So I think it was a Smart move on her part because she actually gave her letters to her sister and her sister was very obedient and her sister Did burn the letters which is unfortunate and so these were letters that Emily Dickinson had received from her friends and And so what I think is that she made Margaret Marr promise She's on her deathbed and said okay You're gonna burn those poems, but then Margaret Marr goes next door to Dickinson's brother and sister-in-law and says in tears so and But I think that Dickinson knew that she was gonna do that um So I thought it was a smart move on her part And the other thing is that Margaret Marr actually came from a literary family so If she had burned them she would really in a sense be erasing herself, right? I mean she'd been a midwife to this project for 17 years and also she knew when she came from a country with poets are like Like the most important people in the culture whoa, why are we here? Okay, but anyway, so So Yeah, so I think I think it was actually kind of a a sly smart move And then they are in there. Oh, I forgot to ask are there any people in this audience who know that there's descendants of Okay You're a descendant of a Dickinson servant a Dickinson Oh, no, no, I meant of the Dickinson actually um I A couple weeks ago. I was at the Dickinson homestead and there were two dozen people there I actually mean correspondence with people all over the country who are descendants of The Hawkins Thompson family, I mean a lot actually and they sort of keep coming out of the woodworks So each time I forgot to ask that but each time I I Actually ask that because it's kind of sends a shiver through the room when the hands go up It's pretty thrilling actually. Oh Absolutely. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah actually, I Facebook friends with a Lot of Hawkins Thompson descendants and but yeah, I mean I Roberta Roberta was just at something I did at the Connecticut Historical Society and when I asked for servant hands going up Everybody was pretty excited. It's kind of thrilling. It kind of makes it all very present. So There was a question here, and then I think there was one over here. So you want to Why was she storing the poems in Margaret's trunk in the first place? Oh, okay So the question was why would she store her poems in in Margaret's trunk? Which by the way still in the family, which I'll tell you about in a second Not the Dickinson but in the Margelli family. Um, I think that Dickinson It's believed that Dickinson wrote like 10,000 letters. Okay. She had 100 maybe a hundred over a hundred people that she corresponded with regularly So you can imagine them replying There was a storage issue And Margaret Maher would have come with her trunk the trunk she used to carry her stuff from Ireland Right comes to the Dickinson household and it's a wealthy household. They probably gave her a cast-off Bureau to put her own clothing in and So here was a storage issue that she could solve with her now empty trunk is what I think Probably it was the trunk was in Dickinson's room and then she could put the finished poems right things that you think you're done with I mean it's kind of like having file drawers or something and And I was corresponding having an email exchange with a Kelly maher Kelly descended in North Carolina And she's so yeah, that trunk is in the Twin Cities It has these flowers. So I'm going to the Twin Cities as soon as I can Oh I don't think I don't think so. I don't think so. I think it probably was all near to hand But I mean it could have on poems could have been anywhere But when Dickinson died her sister expressed some surprise that there were all of these poems so it does tend to suggest Something interesting going on there, but they made obviously I mean Margaret Maher and all I mean, you know Anybody who was cleaning her stuff knew that she was a writer So and there was a question over here Okay, so the question was how socially unusual was it that Emily Dickinson would have been spending so much time with Her maids and servants Well live-in service is pretty intimate and I Think it's pretty Sometimes people hire a servant or a Cleaning lady whatever you want to say for one reason and then the relationship changes to companionship. That's so typical and because That's the person who's I mean Someone who's working in your household. I mean, well, let's just talk about Dickinson's household for a minute They saw and heard everything everything and yet they were supposed to be, you know, looking down looking around Whatever, I mean someone I work with who used to be a nanny was saying Fight do all these embarrassing things hit each other right in front of me and I'm not supposed to notice that it's going on and not supposed to remember and I'm supposed to talk about it and So I think having somebody under your roof is a pretty intimate experience and So then the question is how unusual is it for Dickinson? I think it's There's two things going on. I think one of it. It's unusual for us Because we think of Dickinson as being an isolated person, you know, she was up in her room She was wearing her white dress. Nobody ever saw her She never saw anybody. It was actually a town sport to get a sighting of her and But but that would be for her peers Obviously the poor working working-class poor of Amherst Could walk in the kitchen door very easily it actually if you came in through the front door of the Dickinson homestead It was actually like three hallways actually put it in the book But it's like three hallways and four doors to get to Emily Dickinson in the kitchen if you were Coming to sell her a watering can the door of the kitchen is propped open and you could walk right in so So it's a different Yeah, I mean, okay, so so the question is Working alongside of okay, so let me just say this that she came from a really traditional household where the women were supposed to do everything And it was sort of a she and her sister really had to fight to get a Permanent maid they had seasonal people who would help them, but it took a little bit Extra effort, you know, it took some lobbying on Emily and her sister's part, but they were like every other 20 year old they really wanted to socialize and so they wanted help in the kitchen and So I think they had the The custom of being in the kitchen the two Sisters and Emily Dickinson's father actually only liked her bread So he actually insisted that she stay in the kitchen and keep making the bread he didn't want it from the maid so Yeah, I think so and Yeah anyway, so I know there was another question someone It's okay, so the question was if she put them in packs, it wasn't she meant to wasn't she saving them to give and Or and did she give them and I think Helen hunt Jackson might have teased up a Packet out of her. I think maybe one or two people did but you know Her stuff wasn't published during her lifetime and when it was you know A friend would sneak something away and send it to a newspaper to be published Can you believe it newspapers published poems? Okay? So Maybe newspapers would not be in quite the straights they're in now if they would put poems in them. So Anyway, so she she didn't like the way they changed the punctuation and Really monkey with her poems. So she actually I think ten poems got published during her lifetime so I mean, it's a great question. I mean, maybe she was there's people written books about the groupings, you know, why those poems together You know really I don't know But I don't think they went too far and wide. I think maybe one or two got got Snuck out or whatever. Yeah Okay, so the question was do we know how many African American slaves we know how many Irish people work there, etc Okay, so first I want to say there were no slaves These were all free. In fact Amos Newport who was the gardener for short period of time in the early 1850s his grandfather was Caught as a boy Along the coast of Africa brought to Springfield, Massachusetts in chains and sued In a Hatfield courthouse for his freedom So these are all people who were free, but who might have had grandparents or In terms of the African Americans so numbers I've come up with Maybe 65 or 70 names of servants sometimes just first names and So I can't actually I don't actually have the numbers for you But but but that's the numbers of people I could recover and we're not talking about all at one time There's probably maybe a half a dozen people working at any time towards the end of her life There was I think a stableman Steven Sullivan and Margaret Maher who were working there and then maybe Dennis Scandal, maybe Henry Hawkins were doing the working on the grounds. I'm not sure It's hard to find, you know, it's really like looking for needles and haystacks to figure out I Mean I mean and I guess what underlies your question is there's reams of data on the Dickinson's reams and so looking for People who work for them is pretty tough because they there aren't a lot of records left and a lot of times There are records people would list people who would work for them Carpenter right not even a name carpenter, you know, 50 cents or something for some task done You know apples to Tom I Who oh, I'm not looking at the Tom Kelly slide But I mean I knew that they were talking about Tom Kelly and this was in a you know peers household So it was pretty tough to kind of really knit this story together I had to like look at similar families like the family that Dickinson robbed Margaret Maher from they had The guy was a genealogist and an historian and so they left reams of data And so because they were of the same class I was able to sort of extrapolate a lot to figure out But it was it was it was quite a task sometimes I had to go into the cemetery and look around to piece the story Sorry did Henry Henry Hawkins His house is still sanding and Amherst his relatives He actually died in New Haven, Connecticut was brought back to Amherst, but I couldn't find a stone on his grave a lot of the family Lives in Connecticut, they eventually moved into Connecticut and Yeah, so the part actually So the question was it might be hard for African Americans to find their history during that period of time. I think You know the Hawkins Hawkins Thompson family is actually I mean Baskervilles, I mean their names are all it's like Connecticut history. These are old names that go back many generations So I felt like when I started to interview Roberta I mean she had a genealogist had gone all the way back to Henry Hawkins Fair for bearers Henry Hawkins escaped there was some kind of tribal Stuff going on and he had to escape from Pennsylvania Finds his first wife Meets his first first wife as an escaped slave, but she might have been Native American also maybe biracial I don't know in Amherst, Virginia. They end up in Amherst, Massachusetts Maybe it's like a sister city sister city program. Let's go from Amherst, Virginia to Amherst mass but I mean there's a huge She I mean I look through binders to help put that part of the story together Thank goodness. She had that but I Actually hope that somebody will pick up because the there's a really really rich story about the African American community of Amherst That I feel like I just really kind of Started to delve into it's a wonderful story Yeah, it's a Yeah, yeah, it would help put the story together a little bit more. Yeah Oh Okay, so the question was it wasn't unusual well one comment wasn't isn't it too bad that her sister did it? And then the other question was was an unusual it actually was fairly common to burn correspondence So it was that was not considered An unusual thing which is why I think maybe she Holdings into two different Irish issues yeah, oh Okay, so so the question was what was Emily's consciousness about Irish issues and thank you for asking it because There's two things I want to say actually about the Irish and about African her attitudes about both So when Emily Dickinson was about 20 her brother was teaching Irish schoolboys in Boston and Irish people were just this is early 1850s, right? They're just escaping from famine coming over communities and families and major disarray and Emily Dickinson and he was having a hard time controlling his Students and His contempt for the Irish was probably very little concealed Because there was a fairly prevalent thing that Irish people were Very very other Right, and so she actually talked about oh well, you know, I something about I Think they ought to be scientifically destroyed Which was kind of interesting Because three and a half decades later the six people that she asked to be her pallbearers Were six five of them were Irish immigrants and the chief pallbearer was Tom Kelly So he's kind of a key figure and and and the reason that I I don't I want to point out about the fact that she picked Six Irish immigrants because in that period of time I Dickinson died in the mid-1880s at that period of time abolitionism was now thought of as very old-fashioned and quaint and There started to be a real backlash well started to be there was an upsurge backlash towards immigrants and African-Americans in that period of time I French can ate the French are pouring down from Canada into New England African-Americans are pouring up from the south looking to get a foothold somewhere and Dickinson Had come made huge strides in terms of how she thought about the Irish obviously She no one thought they should be she wanted to honor them right as her pallbearers. She actually made some very Hateful comments about African-Americans, which was really different than when she was younger And I think because nobody had picked up that there were African-American Servants working there. Nobody had looked at the census. I'm sorry, but I just you want to talk about a surprise in this project It was like how come nobody looked at the census Jeremiah Holbin Well Henry Hawkins, I know from descendant that he worked there, but but she talks about Jeremiah Holbin going around to Jerry's house. She talks about Amos Newport Wells Betty Ann Brown Scott, okay So that was a big shock to me that like okay, like how come I'm the first person who's like bothered to look at the census and So but when she's younger she doesn't bother to call out that they're African-American because How can I put this if you were African-American you knew you were there on sufferance I mean that you just had to be careful and you had to keep a low profile And you had to be attached to a rich white person so you could be safe because it wasn't like being in the city So there were a lot of asymmetrical relationships. If you see what I mean like power, right? I mean Henry Jackson Emily Dickinson's father and grandfather could not have operated without Henry Jackson and Yet right so they considered him a friend when he died. They were all giving eulogies Died the early part of the 20th century. They were all got up and gave testaments But the relationships are sort of out of balance, right because the white guys are you know, but that's how you survived Right to be attached to someone And The Thompson Hawkins families were attached to the president of Amherst College and somewhat to the Dickinson so So, you know in those early letters, you don't know that Emily Dickinson but She doesn't make any Pejorative comments until the 1880s and then she puts it in the mouth I thought this was really low puts it in the mouth of her nephew and cloud was a Pajard if it's like using the m-word now and she used it and but puts it in the mouth of her so this was a letter that comes out in the 80s, which was kind of interesting because You see over the course of 30 years that she's made a huge huge strides in how she thinks about the working class She could have made a really low blow about Dennis scandal drinking and she doesn't she avoids it and her nephew was a notorious bigot and I'm just gonna say that because it's true and And she was writing to him and she could have really she could have taken a pot shot about the stereotype of Irish and drinking She avoided it, which I thought was amazing This was like in the late 1870s, but she did say that about the African American that was so disappointing to me because I thought she had made otherwise such great strides about the working class, but That's how people there was a big backlash in the 1880s and she was part of it And but yet the Irish servants felt as though she had made Great strides in terms of I mean they described her as being democratic when I interviewed them and they said she had She really valued the service that she got from the servants and she was democratic She was not conscious of class distinction. So so otherwise she had made good strides But the news is not good because she really parroted the Language of the day the sort of backlash backlash language of the day about African Americans. So So the question was do we have interactions with her brought with Emily? Letters. Well, there's a collection of Emily Dickinson's letters. So Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah Yeah, I mean, that's actually where I found most of my research was Right Absolutely So the question was about my process in doing this. So do you mean like how I did it sort of yeah Oh, well actually Wendy and Michael would you put your hands up? So I Want to save it Well, I Was working on this project actually I became injured. Oh in Dale. Well, actually. Oh my god There's so many people in this room. We should be raising their hands Liz Carpelli who got me work I mean there's so many people in this room who who but I'm just gonna call out because Michael was doing the cooking and once a month Wendy was coming and helping clean my house and That was huge And I have to say that and I talk about in the book. I mean, I'm kind of spoiling it I think it's chapter seven where I talk about Wendy and Michael and Dale and a lot of people in here who who helped me in various ways and And So I did get to have an experience of the oddity of having other people do things for me so that I could write And it was a quite an unusual experience Still feels awkward But it did give me a window into understanding Dickinson and Then there was and I actually write about this in the book. There was a period of time and I don't think Helen's here anymore, but Well, there are some people from my job here, but there was a period of time where I just It was a bad patch Because I was back at work I had taken the summer off I patched together your tax dollars Your tax dollars at work my vacation time I would use to work on on this project and I Actually had knitted it all together and taken the summer off when I had the contract Then I was back at work In a very unusual schedule. I was working a hundred percent one week and then at my job and then a hundred percent on the book And I just could not get this chapter five together or something like that and so I ended up going to a cabin up on the coast and because I There was a time when I just couldn't be civil with I didn't want to yell it, but I was so tense And it was so helpful and I felt like I really understood Dickinson. I got a window into What it was like for her like both that sort of intensity of concentration so that you You needed or you would have liked to have Margaret Mawher or Eliza Thompson or somebody at the door And And and I didn't have to worry about day or night and I didn't have to worry about Michael saying could you come to bed now? You're gonna like you're burning a candle up over and whatever and I you know I'm just like So I could wake and sleep whenever I wanted and I had a week of it and I got through that chapter That was a really harrowing moment There were a lot of harrowing moments when I couldn't get a publisher and I abandoned the project In 2005 I gave up and I said okay. This isn't meant to be a book and how wrong I was and My friend Susan said Then when I said to her oh my god somebody somebody went to this place and and and this publisher is interested in these usually yeah Yeah, when you give it up, you know, that's what's gonna happen and So Yeah, there were lots of Serendipitous moments. I mean Nancy talked about one walking in the door and her finding this map for me But it's in Hartford, Connecticut. I'm going there tomorrow or you know when I Walked into the Amherst History Museum, and they said oh well wait I Showed you that picture of Henry Hawkins and his wife Mary. Oh Wait, there's this person and she says her ancestors work for the Dickens. You know They were just like moments of serendipity and grace All along the way which really helped for the harrowing moments So does that sort of answer? Yeah, okay, you're probably Move around now You