Transcript: There is a Ghost at the End of this Story
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Welcome to voicemails from Meg. This is not a podcast. It's just a message I'm leaving after the beep. Beep!
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I feel like I've been underground for the past two weeks.
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That's how it feels when I'm researching something that feels very big to me. Even though those things are often very small. Like the past two weeks, I've been striving to understand the Venus flytrap.
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Riley made an offhand remark about Venus flytraps about two and a half weeks ago, and I thought, how do those work? And that question turned into an upcoming essay on the colonial and post-colonial North American context that informs our understanding of the Venus flytrap, alongside a pretty shocking history of the flytrap's place in the establishment of slave plantations in North Carolina and how the Venus flytrap is still being used to enforce modern day slavery in America.
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Yeah.
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All because Riley, like, said Venus flytrap. Anyways, when I am researching a piece that is this big, I feel like I go underground and that there are these kind of dendritic passageways that I'm pushing through, trying to find - I don't know - maybe I'm following sources of light. Sometimes I try to describe what it's like to Riley and I tell him it feels like being in a tomb, but that's not quite right because there's a lot of movement. But I do kind of feel like I have to be dead to the world in order to find the thing that's already there.
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I don't know. Yeah, so passageways works better than tomb. So when I'm researching like this, there are a lot of branching places that I can go because that's what research is, right? Like, you have to choose which doors to walk through and which doors to walk past. And I have to walk past a lot of doors or else I'll never produce an essay.
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And producing essays is how I pay for childcare. So many of my readers support me financially, and they should have a product in return for that support. And that's what the newsletter is. That's what the essay is. But when it's a big piece like this, I have to not only not walk through all those doorways that I find, but I don't click on emails, I don't answer phone calls.
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I can't sit down to write, you know, a little short newsletter that will fill the inbox space until this one's ready. Because - because I won't know how to get back on the path I was on before. It's a brain dysfunction. I'm sure. It makes me sound like - listen, it's not like single minded determination.
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It's just a knowledge that if I glance away from the light I'm following for too long, it'll go on without me. And I won't know how to get to where we were going together.
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But once in a while, once in a while, I let myself glance away just for a minute when I find when I'm about to walk past another passageway that just I don't know, seems illuminated on its own.
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So I gave two days of research this week to one of those, I don't know, distractions.
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But I want to tell you about it because I won't make it into the essay because it was a distraction, but I do think it'll inform how I finish writing the essay.
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I've been working from a lot of primary source documents from the the 16 hundreds to understand the people who were establishing plantations. They were mostly Irish, Scottish, British, and I wanted to know what brought them to North Carolina in the first place. The answers are different for all of them. But in trying to understand context for one of the people I'll be writing about, I quickly jumped over to my family tree because my family comes over from Scotland and Ireland at around the same time they come over.
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Some of them were in the Irish rebellion in 1641 and were not, you know, by the end of the 1660s were no longer welcome in Ireland. Some of them came seeking fortune. I don't know. My guys were not the richies. Unfortunately, that doesn't make them better.
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It just means that they're not going to show up in the essay that much. But I did think that they would give me some context. And so as I'm scrolling through my family tree, trying to figure out which branching area I'm supposed to go down first, trying to follow that light, I saw a name - Isabella Rose. And I have a niece named Isabella Rose. She's not named after this Scottish ancestor from the 1400s.
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Her parents just liked her name, but I wanted to show her that she had, like, a Scottish ancestor named Isabella Rose. So I walked into that branching tunnel.
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And here I'm realizing that I am the aunt who sends their tween nieces genealogy about their names. So I'm not the cool aunt. I'm having that realization right now as I'm talking to you. Okay, I'm going to come back to that.
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Okay, well, it is what it is. Anyways, when I click on Isabella Rose, when I allow myself this distraction, I learn an interesting story. She came from the Rose clan in Scotland, a powerful clan with a lot of money and a lot of land. She's married to John Calder, who comes from the Calder clan. He was the Thane of Calder, which eventually Calder is anglicized into Cawdor.
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So the Thane of Cawdor, if you've heard of that, it's from Macbeth. You know it from Macbeth. I guess it's not from Macbeth, but the three weird sisters tell Macbeth that they prophesy that he will become the Thane of Cawdor, and then he will become king. And when Duncan makes Macbeth the Thane of Cawdor, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth see that as the first part of the prophecy fulfilled. And then decide to bloody their hands in fulfilling the rest of the prophecy. So Macbeth, the figure that the play is based upon, he lived hundreds of years before the Thane of Cawdor was established. It's basically an earl.
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So before that title exists, Macbeth is dead. Shakespeare was taking some liberties with his writing. But just about a century-ish before Macbeth is performed for the first time, well really less than a century, there is an interesting story with the Thane of Cawdor.
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Isabella Rose marries John Calder. But John Calder dies shortly before Isabella Rose has their only child, or shortly after, and the only child is a girl.
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This is a problem because the house, the clan of Calder only had John marry Isabella because they were trying to prop up their own power. John was supposed to live a long time, and Isabella was supposed to have a lot of young sons. And the Thaneship, the thanedom, however you want to say that, however the Scottish say that, was supposed to pass through those sons and remain in the clan of Calder. But John dies, Isabella Rose lives, and her baby daughter lives, Muriel Calder. And that means that the thaneship goes to Isabella Rose - she is basically a placeholder.
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But then through the matrilineal line, it's going to go through Muriel and the Calders do not want this, so they betrothed her as a baby to a grandson, to her first cousin, so that the Thane-ship can remain in the Calder family.
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But clans maybe exist to fight. And there's another clan that has recently lost power because of issues with the English king. Are we calling him English or is he Norman? At that point, I guess it doesn't matter. The king. The British dude.
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And one way that clan can maintain their power is to bring someone - like an heiress, like Muriel - into their family and have her marry one of their sons.
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There's a story around Muriel. Once her father dies, her mother knows that this baby, this toddler, is not safe. And she may be taken by anybody that wants to, any clan that wants to marry a man to her, so that they can claim everything that Muriel is entitled to. And so the story goes that she burns a mark into Muriel's thigh when she's a baby so that she'll be recognized later. So that she can't be taken and then traded out for another girl from another family, claiming that it's her. Because she just knows that she will lose sight of this baby when the baby is still young enough to be unrecognizable to her mother once she's grown.
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And that does happen. Whether the burning mark story is true or not, muriel is taken when she is a baby. She's kidnapped by a rival clan, the Campbells. And when she's twelve, she is married to John Campbell, and he becomes the Campbell of Cawdor.
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Eventually, Muriel and her husband, they move to Cawdor Castle, which originally was always hers, but has become the Campbells because they've taken her. And the Campbells still live there to this day, which, I don't know, some people really figure out how to hold on to their land, I guess. And there's a story, there's a ghost story.
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So the Campbells get the lands and the titles and the power.
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You know, Shakespeare makes Macbeth a Thane of Cawdor.
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And then Muriel who, who really had the rights to all of it, she just becomes a ghost story.
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People say that they see a woman in a blue velvet dress, wandering the castle of Cawdor, and they think it's her.
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And I don't know, I took so much time to find all of this, and so much of it, again, is like legend at this point. But still, I just felt this, like, ache, like this presentness in the story.
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Her mom didn't get to recognize her again. Her mom, by all accounts, died very young, like 26, maybe.
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Like, she placed that mark on her daughter, um, and then never got to - like in the hopes that even once she was taken, she'll be found and recognized. And like, that never happens for her mom.
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And I just wanted to be her proxy, I guess. I do believe in things. I don't know, I don't believe in ghosts, but I don't not believe in ghosts, you know what I mean?
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But like, if there was a ghost, like if Muriel was a ghost and she was wandering the castle, like, maybe it's because she's waiting for a mother to recognize her.
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And it's so weird because I feel this way so often when I let myself wander underground like this.
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I'm her, whatever-granddaughter, you know, whatever 100 million greats, but I feel moved to mother her, or at least do the work her mother wasn't allowed to do.
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This has nothing to do with Venus flytraps. And it took two and a half days of research. I mean, gosh, but it's been - as I go back to finishing the piece, it's been helpful because I'm writing about things that happened a long time ago. But their marks are still burned into this country, its soil, its history.
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And most of the marks were made out of hate, not love. But those still need to be recognized, too, especially because, and this will be in the newsletter, but the things in the past really don't stay in the past.
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They're still marking us and marking the most vulnerable around us.
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So that's what I've been doing for two weeks.
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I'm trying to figure out what it means that to write the big things I want to write for you. I sometimes have to go underground. I'm not sure how that works in, like, a business model, but for those of you who are supporting my work, I couldn't go underground for two weeks to find out the things I found out over the past two weeks without your help. And I really, really appreciate it. And hopefully, when the newsletter publishes, that will feel it will feel like it's something of value.
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Until then, I guess I don't know, maybe if we could approach everyone like their mother is looking for them and hasn't found them yet, we'll all feel a little bit less haunted. Or we'll be haunted in, like, good way, which I'm down with also. All right, talk soon.