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Hi everybody! I’m taking this week off to work on some things behind the scenes, so I wanted to talk this chance to replay an episode from early in the podcast that I love. I know many of you are devoted listeners who have listened to every episode of the show, but in case you’re newer to the podcast, here’s a chance to revisit an earlier interview.
Back in August 2022, I first released my interview with Dr. Isabela Morales. She had recently published her first book, Happy Dreams of Liberty, and she was working multiple jobs in public history. I particularly love this episode because Isabela speaks so poignantly about her commitment to narrative history and holding on to that writerly spirit in graduate school.
I’m very pleased to report that after we spoke, Happy Dreams of Liberty went on to win multiple well-deserved book awards, including the prestigious Frederick Douglass Book Prize in 2023. I reached out to Isabela for an update on what she’s working on these days. At the end of 2025, she wrapped up her time at the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum, and is now working full-time on her second book. She hinted at that book at the end of this interview, and it’s now under contract with Liveright for W. W. Norton and tentatively titled The Black Widow of Hazel Green. Here’s what Isabela told me about that book: It is a biography of Elizabeth Dale, a wealthy white plantation mistress and enslaver in antebellum Alabama, who was married six times and to this day is rumored to have murdered some or all of her husbands. While I think six dead husbands is enough to pique most people's interest, I also find Elizabeth Dale interesting historically as an embodiment of white women's deep but often-overlooked complicity in the institution of slavery.
Having read Happy Dream of Liberty, I am eagerly awaiting Isabela’s new book. In the meantime, though, it’s inspiring to revisit this conversation with her. Even if you’re heard this one before, I think you’ll be rejuvenated by another listen. And if it’s your first time, you’re in for a treat.
I’ll be back next week with another fantastic new episode. Until then, please enjoy this marvelous interview from the archive, with Dr. Isabela Morales.
Original show notes:
For this episode of Drafting the Past, I interviewed Dr. Isabela Morales, writer and public historian. She is the editor and project manager of The Princeton & Slavery Project and the digital projects manager at the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum, central New Jersey’s first Black history museum.
Dr. Morales received her Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 2019, specializing in the 19th-century United States, slavery, and emancipation. Her first book, Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom, was published earlier this year by Oxford University Press. We talked about how work as a public historian influences her writing, why guinea pigs are essential to her process, and the fiction she reads to learn how to evoke a place and time.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:
- Find Isabela Morales on Twitter, @IsabelaWrites
- Evernote, the software Isabela uses for organizing her research
- Tiya Miles, Ties that Bind
- Martha Sandweiss, Passing Strange
- Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City
- Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall and A Place of Greater Safety
- Martha Hodes, The Sea Captain’s Wife
- Daniel Sharfstein, The Invisible Line
- Suzanne Lebsock, A Murder in Virginia
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:00
Hey everybody. This is Kate. I'm taking this week off to work on some things behind the scenes. So I wanted to take this chance to replay an episode from early in the podcast that I love. I know many of you are devoted listeners who have heard every episode of the show, but in case you're newer to the podcast, here's a chance to revisit an earlier interview. Back in August 2022 I first released this interview with Dr. Isabela Morales. She had recently published her first book, Happy Dreams of Liberty, and she was working multiple jobs in public history. I particularly love this episode because Isabela speaks so poignantly about her commitment to narrative history and holding on to that writerly spirit in graduate school, something I can definitely relate to. I'm very pleased to report that after we spoke Happy Dreams of Liberty went on to win multiple well deserved book awards, including the prestigious Frederick Douglass Book Prize in 2023. I reached out to Isabela for an update on what she's working on these days. At the end of 2025 she wrapped up her time at the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum and is now working full time on her second book. She hinted at that book at the end of this interview, and it's now under contract with Liveright for W. W. Norton, tentatively titled The Black Widow of Hazel Green. Here's what Isabela told me about that book. It's a biography of Elizabeth Dale, a wealthy white plantation mistress and enslaver in antebellum Alabama who was married six times, and to this day, is rumored to have murdered some or all of her husbands. Isabela says, "While I think six dead husbands is enough to pique most people's interest, I also find Elizabeth Dale interesting as an embodiment of white women's deep but often overlooked complicity in the institution of slavery." Having read Happy Dreams of Liberty, I am eagerly awaiting Isabela's new book. In the meantime, though, it's inspiring to revisit this conversation with her. Even if you've heard this one before, I think you'll be rejuvenated by another listen. And if it's your first time, you're in for a treat. I'll be back next week with another fantastic new episode. Until then, please enjoy this marvelous interview from the archive with Dr. Isabela Morales.
Isabela Morales 2:13
Even then I was interested in narrative history. You know my writing sample, that undergraduate paper about the Townsends, was narrative history, and this professor said, You're a writer. Don't let grad school crush your writer's spirit.
Kate Carpenter 2:29
Welcome back to Drafting the Past. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter, and this is a podcast devoted to the craft of writing history. In this episode, I am delighted to talk with Dr. Isabela Morales.
Isabela Morales 2:40
It's absolutely wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me.
Kate Carpenter 2:44
Isabela Morales is a writer and public historian. She is the editor and project manager of the Princeton and Slavery Project, as well as the digital projects manager at the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum. Her first book, Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom, was published earlier this year by Oxford University Press. We dig into her process for writing that book, as well as the relationship between writing and public history, the benefits of reading fiction and much more. I hope you enjoy.
Isabela Morales 3:17
I have wanted to be a writer from a very young age. You know, the family story goes that when my older sister went to kindergarten, I was exceedingly jealous and frustrated, specifically because she was learning to read and write and I wasn't. So I figured, you know, as soon as I got to school, it was just making up for lost time. I was always reading. I wrote my little stories, and because professional historian isn't really a career path that a lot of young children know is available to them, I assumed if I was going to write books someday, I was going to be a novelist. It would be fiction, and it really wasn't until college that I first encountered historical writing outside of a textbook. I remember my very first reading assignment as an undergraduate at the University of Alabama was Eric Larson's Devil in the White City for an American studies course. And as soon as I read that, it was like a light went on. Oh, I want to do that. And you know, later, in later classes, I would read much more. Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind, Martha Hodes, Sea Captain's Wife, are all beautiful narrative family stories that really ended up helping me shape this book and visualize this book, Happy Dreams of Liberty, which came out of another undergraduate course I took at UA my junior year. I took a seminar in the history department on slavery in the Americas. And it was both, you know, there were lectures, there were discussions, but it was also about getting hands on research experience. The idea was that every student by the end of the semester would produce a 20 to 30 page research paper based on archival collections held in the University Special Collections Library. And, you know, I thought I was hot stuff because I knew how to use a microfilm reader, but I had never been in a special collections library before. I had never dealt with archival materials. I'd never used a finding aid. So these were all really good basic skills that you need for historical research. And I was able to get them through that class, and I ended up writing my paper on this family that I came across just skimming finding aids, the Townsend family, who were the children of a wealthy white cotton planter in Alabama and several enslaved women that he owned on his plantations. And when he died, he freed them in his will and left them his $200,000 fortune, which would be millions of dollars in today's currency. And so following this family and their lives and travels from slavery to freedom and across the country, from Alabama to the American West, and I, at the time, I figured, oh, I can write, I can write 20 pages on this. There's enough for me to do a research paper, having no idea that I would spend the next 10 years of my life working on it and it would become my dissertation in this book. But yeah, it all started in that undergraduate course.
Kate Carpenter 6:09
Well, I want to get more into the book and your writing, but I first want to start with just the basics. So could you tell me when and where you do your writing?
Isabela Morales 6:16
I'm speaking to you from my writing spot, which is the second bedroom in my apartment, which my husband and I called the pig room, because it's also where our two guinea pigs live. And this is, you know, this is my home office, and I do all my work here. I've been working remotely for the last two years, so I am, I'm in here all day, and it's nice to have company from my guinea pigs while I'm writing. In terms of when I write, when I was a college student and grad student, I would write pretty much at all hours, stay up very late if the spirit moved me or I had a looming deadline. But then I got my first job after grad school, which was in the exhibitions department at the National September 11 Museum in New York, which was a great job. I sat down at my desk at 9 am, I left at 5 pm and absolutely no one sent work emails outside of business hours, which seemed like a much more reasonable way to organize my schedule. And of course, then COVID happened, and I started working from home, where it's much harder to enforce that boundary between work and non work, but I've I've enjoyed having that routine. I've tried to keep to my nine to five schedule, and I find I'm just as productive keeping a boring, normal business hour sort of schedule to my day than I ever was going on writing binges all night, and it is easier on my sleep cycle. So that is when I am working, after 5 pm or, you know, in the winter, when the sun sets, whenever it sets, I, you know, I'm not I'm not thinking about work. I'm watching TV with my husband.
Kate Carpenter 7:52
What is your research process like? How do you like to organize your your notes and your sources?
Isabela Morales 7:57
I'm similar to a lot of historians and writers in that getting organized is very much a work in progress. Writing this book, which, you know, had a previous life as my dissertation, and before that, this undergraduate paper, I had a very unwieldy system. I basically had a Dropbox just full of Word documents and a very convoluted labyrinth of folders that no one but I could ever navigate, plus post its on the wall and pieces of paper taped on the closet. Just chaos, and I have tried to get better since then. My older sister once saw my Dropbox and was just like, this is not efficient. You need to, you know, act like an adult and work properly. And now I I'm an Evernote person. I use it for my public history and museum work, as well as my research and writing, and I really like it because, you know, I can tag notes by topics or project. Everything is keyword searchable in one place, so I'm not constantly clicking between folders. And I've definitely cut down on the post it note system. Though I can't say I've completely let go of it, but I have found that to be a really helpful system for me.
Kate Carpenter 9:07
I'd like to ask you about revision in general, but I'm especially curious about the process of taking your project from dissertation to book. Did that require a lot of reworking?
Isabela Morales 9:16
Well, it's interesting, because I tend to revise as I write. So even for this book, which started as my dissertation, I can't really point to a first draft versus a second draft, because it was a constant process of incremental changes over time as I went. And I think a lot of that comes from a habit I have developed of writing out loud. Like most writers, I care a lot about the flow of a sentence or a paragraph the way it sounds in your head while you're reading it, and I tend to work on that by speaking my sentences out loud as I'm writing them, or, you know, just after I've put them down in the Word doc. And I think it's helped me develop a voice as a writer. Sure, and not just, you know, with how specific phrases flow, but how a larger chapter or argument might progress as well. You know, when I'm stuck on a transition or not sure how I want to get to the next part of my story, I'll experiment with different options out loud, and nine times out of 10, if it's awkward or cumbersome to say it, it's probably going to be cumbersome to interpret it as a reader. And I did this all through grad school, all through the revision process, going from dissertation to book. And I have my guinea pig companions in the room while I'm doing this, so I joke that they must be the best educated pets in in New Jersey when it comes to American history, because they've heard me read my entire dissertation out loud. They've heard me read my entire book out loud. And so has my husband, incidentally, who works from home in the other room, but I hear all of his conference calls with other physicists, so I figure we're even on that score.
Kate Carpenter 10:56
At what point in your writing do you share with other people to get feedback? Aside from the guinea pigs.
Isabela Morales 11:00
I am a little bit shy of sharing my works in progress, and I think that might be lingering grad school seminar trauma. So maybe I will get better over time. I find that, you know, most of the collaborative work I do is in my public history positions, because public history is collaborative by nature. And working in museums, you have to be working with lots of people, getting diverse perspectives, brilliant people, working on wonderful projects, who I've met, and continuing to collaborate with them and bounce ideas back and forth is something I really look forward to. And you know, if, in the course of the conversation, not in a formal way, I do talk about my research, I found that to be helpful, but I don't have a writer's group, and at this point, I'm not a grad student. I could probably email chapters or drafts to my former dissertation advisor, but she just retired this month, so probably not a great idea, but I think that's something I need to work on, getting better at sharing my work as it progresses with historians whose opinions I trust and respect.
Kate Carpenter 12:06
I'm curious how you make sense of or if you try to of the relationship between your work as a public historian and as a writer. Do you see them as related?
Isabela Morales 12:14
Yeah, definitely. And I think that my public history work has helped me develop as a writer, and a lot of that comes down to helping me think more deeply about audience. I've been the editor of the Princeton and Slavery Project since 2017 so I guess five years now, and in that capacity, I have developmentally edited, proof read, copy edited, more than 100 interpretive essays to our project website, which I will plug, slavery.princeton.edu, and editing someone else's historical research is a very different job from writing your own, because the author is mostly focused on telling the story to the best of their ability. And as the editor, I'm thinking about how our audience is going to receive the story. Is it clear? Is the argument easy to follow and the author, the writer, always has more information than the reader does, and so the challenge is keeping in mind how much your audience probably knows, and therefore how much background you need to explain, how much context you need to give, whether you need to define a field specific term, and sometimes that's hard to see when you're the writer from that perspective, but as an editor, I'm looking for those places to ensure that all the writer's hard work gets across to the reader as best as it can. And having done that for so many different contributors to the website at all different levels, from undergraduate students to grad students to faculty at other institutions. I think it's helped me become a little better at keeping that in mind for my own work. And when it comes to my museum positions, you know, at the 9-11 Museum, I was writing exhibition scripts, and in that capacity, I was aiming for an eighth to 11th grade reading level, and that's not an assignment you get in grad school, right? So I needed to be able to mentally recalibrate myself to write for a very different audience than my dissertation committee. For example, in my new position at SAAM, the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum, I manage the museum's digital presence, and that means the website and all of our social media channels, aiming for the highest possible level of engagement from our community. And again, that's thinking about a different audience. You know, how do you tell a story from history in a tweet? How do you tell a story in a way that's going to draw in people from diverse backgrounds, and I think that can only help me in the future in my independent research and writing, because thinking about audience is so critical when you want to be a storyteller, when you want to make sure that your research is received by people of different backgrounds and received well.
Kate Carpenter 14:56
So we have both been fortunate enough to take classes with with Marni Sandweiss, who was also, I think, your dissertation advisor, but you mentioned that you specifically took a class from her at Princeton on writing history and that that had really influenced your work. Could you talk a little bit more about the kinds of things you learned in that class?
Isabela Morales 15:13
I loved that class. That might be my favorite class in grad school, and it, I took it my second year. At the end of my second year, I believe it was the spring. So I was thinking about my dissertation prospectus. I was starting to think about how I was going to write the story of the Townsend family. And, you know, in that class, we read a lot, as you do in a grad seminar, lots of examples of history written in different forms, lots of narrative history. Erik Larson, Tiya Miles, Martha Hodes, Marni Sandweiss, her own fantastic book, Passing Strange, and that's just to name a few. But it wasn't just reading. We also did kind of experimentation with writing of our own. And there's one assignment that I remember really vividly. Marni had us choose, each choose a passage from the journals of Lewis and Clark, which, you know, are all digitized, keyword searchable online now, so we could find, you know, whatever we wanted in there. And then we were supposed to write about this passage in whatever form we chose. It could be a footnoted paper. It could be a more popular narrative history format. And I decided it would be a good idea to just go full Lewis and Clark fan fiction and write it as if I were a novelist, and that was so fun and liberating, because I just let my creativity run. And I'm not saying that scholars are not creative. You know, Raymond Fogelson talks about historical writing as an act of creative synthesis, but it's different from the creativity of an artist, because you're still very much tethered to the sources that are available to you. And I like that structure, but the opportunity to break out of those, you know, restrictions just this once, to invent dialog or inner monologues, that was so much fun. And I do think, you know, after that experience that it's helpful to stretch those mental muscles every once in a while, because it forces you to look at your story from a different perspective, which never hurts if you know maybe if you're stumped with where to go next, or maybe if you just need to get a different idea, a different way of looking at what you're researching and writing.
Kate Carpenter 17:24
To learn more about her writing process, I asked Isabela to walk me through the writing of a passage from her new book. Here's Isabela Morales reading from the first chapter of Happy Dreams of Liberty.
Isabela Morales 17:36
Lizzie arrived in Alabama the year the stars fell. She was 10 or 11, she couldn't say for sure, but for the rest of her life, she would remember that night in 1833 when the world seemed to be ending. Around midnight on November 13, shooting stars began to fill the skies east of the Rocky Mountains, with Alabamians receiving the most spectacular view. Flashes of light and booming sounds woke people and drew them outside as meteors passed through the Earth's atmosphere, dozens per second and hundreds per minute, according to some estimates. It was as if the planets and constellations were falling from their places, one newspaper reported the next day. As the shower continued unabated for hours, witnesses started to wonder whether this was the long awaited second coming of Christ. "And the stars of the heaven fell unto the earth," the Book of Revelation reads, "For the great day of his wrath is come and who shall be able to stand." Terrified onlookers cried or prayed or simply stared in wonder. Up north in Illinois, a young man named Lincoln heard his innkeeper shouting, "Arise, Abraham. The day of judgment has come!" For a century after, Alabama residents would mark time by the year the stars fell. The dividing line for local and personal histories. It was the dividing line for Lizzie, too. A night the sky seemed to reflect what must certainly have felt like the end of her world: the year she was forced to leave her home in Virginia, sent west on a 700 mile trek to Alabama, and sold to a man named Edmund Townsend.
Kate Carpenter 19:13
What goes in to preparing to write a passage like this?
Isabela Morales 19:16
I guess just a little bit of background. The Lizzie I'm discussing here was a woman named Lizzie Perryman. She was very likely the daughter of a white woman, Frances Perryman, and a black man in Richmond, Virginia. And as you know, because slavery in the United States followed the condition of the mother, that meant that Lizzie was born free, but her existence as the mixed race daughter of a white woman was an embarrassment to her mother's family, and so ultimately, her uncle sold her into slavery when she was a young girl, illegally, you know, but who's going to believe her word over his? And that took place right around the time of this massive meteor shower over Alabama in 1833 and you know, I'm not just speculating that she remembered this event and connected it with her kidnapping. I found a source. It was notes taken by a lawyer on a conversation with a local man who had known the Perryman family. And in those notes, the lawyer says that this man says the girl, Lizzie, estimates she was 10 or 11 in the year the stars fell. So he'd heard it from Lizzie herself. And clearly she connected this cataclysmic celestial event with the most catastrophic event of her own life, which was her enslavement, forced migration to Alabama. And as a writer, that was just too perfect a connection, I think, because when we talk about the domestic slave trade, the second Middle Passage, it was a world shattering event for enslaved people to be ripped from your family, your home, sent hundreds of miles to a place where nobody knows you and you know no one. It is the end of the world. And here we have it happening for this young girl, in tandem with this crazy meteor shower that a lot of people, Black and white, feared was the literal end of the world. And I remember writing that paragraph and getting to the part, you know, in the newspaper articles where people are praying and talking about Judgment Day, and suddenly it hit me what I could do there. And I raced over the bookshelf, pulled out my Bible and was flipping through the book of Revelation. Because how many times do you get to quote Revelation in your writing? You know, the great day of his wrath has come, and for me, that presages another world shattering event that's on its way, the Civil War. You know, mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, so to find a source that brings Abraham Lincoln into the story too. You know, witnessing the falling of the stars from the sky was just an added bonus.
Kate Carpenter 21:51
Yeah, I love that this paragraph accomplishes really so much. Did you think about all of those goals for this paragraph when you first wrote it, or did you just start writing and then in revision, really make, make sure that it was accomplishing all of that?
Isabela Morales 22:04
I, when I was writing this, Lizzie is an important person in the history of the Townsend family. She ended up becoming the enslaved concubine of a white planter, Edmund Townsend. She was the mother of two of his children, his daughters, who would be freed after his death, but Edmund did what her uncle did. He sold her, and she was separated from her family. And you know, her story is a tragic one, but it's an important one in the narrative and in understanding this complicated family tree and the family dynamics. And I just needed a way to introduce her earlier in the chapter, so that when we came back to her readers would remember Lizzie, remember her name, and know something about her history. Because it's very hard to give the histories of enslaved people, especially enslaved women. There's not a lot of sources out there. There are lots of gaps and silences, as with, you know, any work of history. And I was like, I need to find a way to bring her into the story earlier, and I happened to come across this source that references the year the stars fell. I didn't know much about that, so I looked up, you know, it's very poetic, and started reading about the meteor shower and people's reactions to it at the time. And it just seemed like a way to kind of bring these themes together. It was, it was kind of accidental. I really just, you know, I'm thinking about how to introduce a character for the first time who's going to be important, and this seemed like a memorable way to do it.
Kate Carpenter 23:32
It must have taken so much work for you to tease out all these stories, especially for people who are often not well documented in archives, and not only to tease out the stories in terms of facts, but to be able to bind and use the kinds of details you need to tell this sort of narrative story where you really are telling stories, is even more work. I think writers like you do such a good job of making it feel easy that it's tempting for readers to forget the kind of work that goes into that. How did you approach that research?
Isabela Morales 24:01
It was a challenge, but I think I got very lucky in terms of my source base, as you'll see if you skim the 100 pages of footnotes in the book. The archival collection that I cite the most is the S.D. Cabaniss papers at the University of Alabama, and this is the collection that I first encountered when I was an undergraduate back in 2011 and the S.D. Cabaniss papers are the legal documents of a Huntsville attorney, Septimus Cabaniss, who served as the executor of the cotton planter Samuel Townsend's estate after he died. So he was the man in charge of making sure the Townsend children were emancipated and receive their inheritance, and over the course of their lives, he exercised, as the executor a great deal of control over when they received disbursements from the estate. Who received money from the estate. He was a very powerful figure, and that led to a lot of correspondence and among the 1000s of documents in this collection of his legal papers, which, fortunately for me and other historians, he saved. He was a meticulous record keeper. There are two boxes of letters written by members of the formerly enslaved Townsend family themselves. So in writing this narrative, I had access to around 170 letters, first person narratives written by these historical actors in their own words. And that's been a really incredible resource, and it has given me the chance to share the voices of an enslaved family, to get more detailed into the kind of intimate family dynamics that you might not have for telling the story of many other enslaved families, because this was a complicated case. It generated a lot of litigation. It generated a lot of documentation. And so, kind of, by this accident of the archive, the Townsend's voices are preserved, and I I was very fortunate to have access to that as a resource. Now, of course, interpreting the letters is not a straightforward task. They're very complicated. The vast majority of the letters are written to Cabaniss the lawyer. So there is the power differential to take into consideration. You know, these are formerly enslaved people who know this white lawyer who was once himself a slave owner who was a Confederate officer during the Civil War, has control over their inheritance, and they are careful in shaping their letters for the eyes of a powerful white man with a slave owner's mentality who has a lot of control over their future, and so they're not talking about everything that they might be thinking. I'm not getting this unfiltered view into their minds. You never do with any source, but it's still more, vastly more than you're going to get for most other freed people, most other enslaved people. And so it's been a wonderful source. There are a few letters, maybe about a dozen, written between members of the Townsend family that are extant in this collection. And those letters really give a hint at what's missing from the ones directed to the lawyer. They're between, mostly between two brothers, Charles Osborne, living in Colorado, and his brother Thomas, living in Alabama in the second half of the 19th century. And Osborne, Charles Osborne, he writes much more directly and openly about his political beliefs. He's a greenbacker. He's all for William Jennings Bryan. He's a miner, and he even reminisces about their lives as enslaved children in Alabama. He, you know, he asked his brother, Thomas, do you remember that time that we did this? You know, Wade and I, we sit around on the porch every Sunday, and we talk about life back in Alabama. And so it's just, you know, these tiny glimpses of conversations that would otherwise be completely lost to time are so precious and so valuable. And it makes me wish that I had all the letters that you know members of the family wrote to each other. But I am grateful for what I do have, because I am fully aware that it is an incredibly rich cache of archival material that without it, I wouldn't have been able to tell this story in such detail or really get into the family dynamics among the Townsends.
Kate Carpenter 28:23
I'm also struck by how well and smoothly you use research about people in similar circumstances to try to flesh out some of those gaps. Was that difficult to work in?
Isabela Morales 28:35
I think it was a necessity, because even with all of the amazing sources that I have for the story, there are still gaps, the silences embedded in the letters written to the lawyer, the lack of letters between members of the family, not knowing what different Townsends are doing at given periods of time. And so filling in those gaps is a challenge, and one way that I hit on this, and I didn't hit on it alone. It was a suggestion from my advisor and from other early readers of my dissertation was, well, why don't you look at other first person narratives from formerly enslaved people, from free African Americans during this time period. And you know, one example I can think of is Wesley Townsend. He was Samuel's eldest son, he was freed before the rest of the family in 1858 sent to Ohio, and he expects the rest of his family, including his pregnant wife and his toddler daughter, to follow him in a matter of weeks. You know, because the will has been probated, they should be free, the whole family. But then another lawsuit pops up. The lawyer can't send the rest of Samuel Townsend's heirs, and Wesley is alone in Ohio for two years, probably expecting that he's never going to see his wife again. He's never going to meet his infant child. And I don't have anything with Wesley writing about this, but you know, Henry Bibb did write about this, about the pain of separation from his wife, when he fled slavery to freedom, and she couldn't, she couldn't escape like he did. And he talks about it as like losing a limb, like a limb being pulled from your body. And that's so poignant and so evocative and painful. And just thinking, you know, he's not the only enslaved person to have felt that. Countless people felt that, and so finding a way to potentially apply that to Wesley's situation seemed like a natural fit.
Kate Carpenter 30:32
We've talked about the class that you took, but I'm curious to know if there are other pieces of writing advice that have been influential for you.
Isabela Morales 30:39
This isn't a writing a piece of writing advice, per se, but it is writing adjacent. When I was applying to graduate schools, you know, as you do, I reached out to various professors at programs I was considering. You know, I shared a precis of my research with them, and asked if they'd be interested in working with me should I end up at that university? And one professor from a university I didn't ultimately choose wrote me the kindest email. And there was one part that I've never forgotten. Even then, I was interested in narrative history. You know, my writing sample, that undergraduate paper about the Townsends was narrative history, and this professor said, "You're a writer, don't let grad school crush your writer's spirit." And you know, at the time, I didn't know what grad school was going to be like. I thought, okay, you know, he's being dramatic, but he was absolutely right. I did find in my graduate career that narrative history was not always respected, and that may be changing. This was, you know, 8, 10 years ago, and your podcast is proving that things have changed, which is only to the good. But you know, I was told to my face by a member of my cohort that I wasn't a real historian because I wanted to write for audiences outside of the academy, that I could that I could never get my PhD, that my advisor was letting me get away with writing a narrative history, which is crazy to me, because the historical profession has room for all types of scholars and all types of writing, and this is something I've come to realize, even though it was devastating at the time. So I can only reiterate that very kind professor's advice not to let grad school or any, you know, individual or institution that may have norms you feel you need to squeeze yourself into crush your writer's spirit, because there's absolutely room for your work. I very strongly believe that.
Kate Carpenter 32:33
Are there other writers who you do look to for inspiration?
Isabela Morales 32:37
You know, I've mentioned Martha Hodes and Tiya Miles a couple times already for their beautiful work on family stories, and significantly, for my research, you know, stories of mixed race families and individuals whose experiences illustrate the more flexible racial lines of the 19th century. Daniel Sharfstein's The Invisible Line is really fantastic in that regard as well. And I actually just started reading a book yesterday that I already am enjoying a lot, Suzanne Lebsock's A Murder in Virginia. You know, my dissertation adviser just returned, uh, retired, Marni, as I said, and I had the chance to raid the bookshelves in her office. And among many books I took, this was one of them. And I, you know, grabbed it off the shelf, not knowing anything about it, but I'm finding it to be a really compelling example of popular history and narrative history with a true crime bent that is a little ahead of its time. Everything seems to be true crimey these days, so I'm enjoying that, and I think it's going to be one of my favorites when I finish it, but I also read a lot of fiction. And so I'm going to take your question about historical writing broadly and take historical fiction into account. And the one thing, I can't really read 19th century us historical fiction, just because, as a as a 19th century Americanist, I I can't relax, but I love Hilary Mantel. Everyone I think loves Hilary Mantel at this point. You know, with Wolf Hall and the books that followed, she is so masterful at evoking a time and place, and that is something that I think I need to learn. I would love to learn. And you know, she has another book, an earlier book from the 90s, A Place of Greater Safety, which is my absolute favorite novel of all time, and I have reread it so many times, and it's about the French Revolution. And at the time, reviewers among historians said, Oh, this is, this is too novelistic, and reviewers among literary critics said, oh, there's too much historical research. And so, you know it was, but I find it such a great experimentation with form and style. There are parts that read like, like a screenplay, or like, like the script of a play, and there are parts that are just beautiful and descriptive and lyric, like Wolf Hall. And so that that is a top choice. And I think that reading fiction is a way to, at least for me, help me think about my historical actors as real people with deep inner lives. Because reading a novel, we take that for granted. Of course, these are people we're going to relate to and empathize with, because we're viewing the world from inside their heads. But how do you do that with history when you can't write an internal monologue for someone? How do you make sure your historical actors come across as more than just vehicles for historical argumentation, as people, because as a writer, I want to portray these individuals as people with lives that are rendered compassionately and with nuance. And I think that those skills are something that we can learn from novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, other artists.
Kate Carpenter 35:54
Now that this book is out, that that originated as your dissertation, and you're working as the public historian, how do you see yourself as a writer now, without, you know the, for all its complications, the nice thing about a tenure track job, right? Is that you have sort of space and time and encouragement to research and write. So how are you looking at that going forward?
Isabela Morales 36:13
Yeah, I mean, that is a challenge. When I was at the 9-11 museum that was a full time position, nine to five, like I said, which it was a wonderful job, but it didn't give me a lot of time to write, and that was when I needed to be revising my dissertation into a book manuscript. So, you know, finding the time to do that was challenging, and I am fortunate to be in a position now where I have a number of different part time jobs in public history that I am doing while leaving time for myself to work on my second book project and do research and writing. And I know that that is not a possibility for everyone. I am lucky to have a partner who is so supportive financially and otherwise, so that I can carve out this time for myself to continue to research and write, because that's something that's important to me. And not all public historians need to be writing books or articles. There's very valuable work that is outside of that realm. But I consider myself a writer, and I love to write, and I don't want to be working in a position where I don't have the opportunity to do that. So I, you know, I know that I'm lucky and and COVID really changed the calculus in terms of thinking about what kind of job I want to do, working from home. What are the benefits and drawbacks of that? What other positions are available to me? And so, you know, the last two years have been a time of great change in many ways, but they've put me onto a path that I am very happy with right now, working for a local museum, SAAM, Stoutsburg Sourland, African American Museum, which is central New Jersey's only first and only, for now, Black History Museum, working on the Princeton and Slavery Project, doing some freelance public history work, but still giving myself time to do more research and writing on a new project.
Kate Carpenter 38:04
Before I let you go, can I ask you what you're working on?
Isabela Morales 38:06
So I not going to share too much, because it's very, very early stages. I'm still doing some basic research, but it is related to a family that lived next door to the Townsends. So I am staying in Madison, Kelly County, Alabama, I will say that there are a number of murders and murder trials involved. So, you know, I'm jumping on the true crime bandwagon a little bit there, but it's just exciting to be working on something new. After writing about the Townsends for the last 10 years, and it's a wonderful project. I'm so glad that I was able to do it that it turned into a book that's, you know, beyond my wildest imaginings. But to dig into something new, a completely new project, although there are some repeating characters, since it's a small community in 19th century, Madison County, to have the chance to explore new avenues of research, again, is, is really fun.
Kate Carpenter 39:02
A big thank you again to Dr. Isabela Morales for joining me on Drafting the Past and talking about her writing process. You can find a link to her new book, as well as other books we discussed in this episode at draftingthepast.com. And if you've been enjoying the show, please share it with a friend. After all, friends don't let friends write boring history. Until next time, happy writing.
