(Holly) A book at our reach is like a handshake to the connection we all need, because through them we gain friends, family and those characters we never even knew we needed in our lives until we start turning the pages.

Hi, I'm Holly Jackson, I'm your host for Books by the River.

I want to say thanks to you for joining us on this journey, where we sit beside the writers who tell these stories that sometimes feel like our own, or they give us a glimpse of the experiences of someone we need to know.

(♪) (Announcer) Major funding for Books by the River is brought to you by the ETV Endowment of South Carolina, the proud partner of South Carolina ETV and Public Radio.

With the generosity of individuals, corporations and foundations.

The ETV Endowment is committed to sharing southern storytelling and compelling conversations with viewers across the nation.

This program is supported by Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina.

This program is made possible by the support of Peters Zamuka and Lynn Baker.

Additional funding for Books by the River is provided by Visit Beaufort, Port Royal and Sea Islands and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at USC, Beaufort.

(Holly) Here to talk to us today is Doctor Mollie Barnes, author of Paper Heroines.

Doctor Barnes, thank you so much for coming.

(Mollie) Thank you so much for having me.

I'm happy to be here.

(Holly) Well, tell us a little bit about yourself and about this first book.

(Mollie) Well, I have my dream job at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort.

So this is home.

And I have been thinking about writing this book for a long time, and it's my first book.

So Paper Heroines is about relationships among women during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

(Holly) All right.

So tell me about the challenges of writing this book.

And the research process, process overall.

(Mollie) The challenges have really been joys.

Part of the work that I get to do is to read materials that people have looked at before, but haven't taken seriously in their own right.

So I get to spend time being really nosy and reading people's diaries, (Holly) That sounds fun.

(Mollie) autobiographies and looking at things that, people have not taken seriously as historical or literary documents.

and, and then putting those women's private, sometimes private documents in conversation together.

(Holly) So I've heard you say before about, you know, women were often in the footnotes.

And so it's bringing those footnotes kind of more to the forefront.

(Mollie) Yes.

(Holly) What was it like for you just kind of inside, just knowing that you have that responsibility and, to be able to do that.

(Mollie) Yeah.

I'm a teacher first and foremost.

And so when I think about the fact that I get to teach students from this region, from Beaufort County, from the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands, and that a lot of times they don't know the stories about their home towns.

And I didn't know them either when I moved here.

And so writing the book for me has, in a lot of ways, been what we would call, in literary studies, recovering the stories that are right there, but that sometimes people skim over because the women become footnotes, that people mined for men's history.

And women were doing a lot of the work, in Beaufort and then the South Carolina Sea Islands.

(Holly) Alright, well, let's give them some of the credit they deserve right now.

So tell me some of the major work that they were doing that people might not realize.

(Mollie) Ok.

First, I think probably the most exciting the headliner is Harriet Tubman, who was living and serving in Beaufort during the Civil War and led the Combee River Raid or helped to lead the Combee River Raid, which, listeners or watchers, viewers have probably seen Edda Fields Black come talk about Combee which is a beautiful, gorgeous book.

And she was living in this town and, often carried titles like Laundress or Gingerbread Maker, but she was also plotting the most important, event to liberate 756 people in a single day.

And while she might be more famous, there are plenty of other women who were doing remarkable things right by her side.

So, I studied diaries by a woman named Charlotte Fortin, who was the first black teacher at Penn School.

And Penn School was the school, was a school that was founded on Saint Helena Island during the Civil War, so that black, black families and communities could learn to read, in the first days after their, self emancipation, before they were actually considered free.

And I study the diaries of her colleague, Laura Matilda Towne, who was the founder of the school.

So those are some of the stars in my book.

I also studied the work of a woman named Sarah Hopkins Bradford, who helped co-write Harriet Tubman's first, biography.

It's called a biography.

We might think of it as an autobiography, though, because Harriet Tubman wasn't literate.

But she sat and did interviews just like us, a conversation.

So with Sarah Hopkins Bradford, who was a neighbor, so that she could write her story and use that, to that, project to fundraise for her parents and so that she could pay her mortgage.

(Holly) Oh wow.

(Mollie) In the years after the Civil War.

(Holly) I found myself a lot of times I was talking to a friend about this recently, how I will read obituaries, and I get sad that I didn't get to, like, talk to that person about something that I learned through there.

Like wow, (Mollie) Yes, yes.

(Holly) I never knew that that.

And I wonder if you went through some of that yourself and these discovery moments.

(Mollie) Yes.

(Holly) Did you, did you get to feel like you were connected to these people and, tell me about just the emotional involvement in this whole process.

(Mollie) I love how you're thinking about that.

Yeah, when, when I spend time reading any book, I feel like that's the greatest way to experience empathy, right?

To stand in the shoes of someone else.

And that's kind of part of what the book is about, is trying to stand in the shoes of these women and understand how they stood in one another's shoes.

But reading diaries, you definitely, learn things about people that maybe they want everyone to know, and maybe they don't want everyone to know.

And I feel like over the course of working on these different women, there were some days when I felt incredibly irritated and frustrated with them, and angry with them for the things, their shortcomings.

(Holly) Right.

(Mollie) And other days when I thought, there's nothing more I'd like to do than have a cup of coffee with them and find out what do they think about the Beaufort that we get to live in now.

(Holly) Right.

How personal were some of those diary entries?

(Mollie) It depends on the figure.

And so probably I don't know if you kept a diary when you were little.

I was a, (Holly) They would come and go.

(Mollie) I am a failed diary keeper.

I have I have never been good at consistently keeping a diary.

Some of the diaries are very personal.

I think some of the diaries plan to keep them as private documents.

Laura Town I don't think I ever intended to have anybody read her diary, which is one of the reasons I think it's the juiciest.

(Holly) Yeah.

(Mollie) Others at the time, and this is a little different in the 19th century than it is in our own lifetime.

Diaries were almost part of their jobs.

So when these women came to Beaufort from Philadelphia or from Boston, they kept diaries almost as one of their professional tasks to document the work that they, the relief work that they were doing, they were missionaries.

And to think account for the fact that they were doing something meaningful for the communities they served.

And their days were so full that if they didn't stop at the end of every day and write it down, they might easily forget it.

So some of the diaries are full of the things that would fill their everyday lives.

Going to take care of sick families on the island, even if their real job was to teach.

And some of the diaries have everyday things that we would experience in our own lives.

Arguments with one another about you should or should not marry this man.

Or I like the way that this person cooks, or this person has a terrible singing voice in church.

You know, just the ordinary things that form the texture of life for anybody.

(Holly) Which is so beautiful.

And I wonder what historians, years from now are going to have for us, I guess are going to have our Facebook entries?

(Mollie) My best friend has been deputized to delete everything on my phone if anything were ever to happen to me.

(Holly) Okay, whenever you were to ask me about, you know, whether I kept a diary and your explaining some of those entries, I started thinking about whenever I did have diary entries.

Even as a small child, I don't know, maybe you're like 9 or 10 years old.

(Mollie) Yeah (Holly) I would write things, but also in the back of my head I was thinking, what if, (Mollie) Yes, yes.

(Holly) my parents do get a hold this, I'm going to kind of write some code.

(Mollie) Yes.

(Holly) You know, where only I will understand who I'm talking about.

(Mollie) They do that.

They absolutely do that.

(Holly) So you're kind of breaking some code at the same time?

(Mollie) Absolutely.

And I feel wildly inappropriate a lot of the time when I'm reading these materials.

Two of the women, at least, Fanny Campbell and, and, Charlotte Horton actually address their diaries, almost like letters.

And Fanny Campbell addresses a real friend, and she almost writes as if she's writing to her best friend back home.

Charlotte just addresses her diaries, 'Dear A,' and I think it's kind of an imaginary friend that she's writing to.

And when she feels incredibly lonely.

Letters took a long time to arrive during the Civil War.

(Holly) Yeah.

(Mollie) When she's feeling lonely, I think she looks to her diary as the friend that she wishes that she had, that she didn't have.

Oh, wow.

(Holly) Oh, wow.

(Mollie) Which is really moving to read.

(Holly) Definitely.

(Mollie) And you want to reach out and hug her.

(Holly) Yes, alright, so your research process was, intense, but if you had to, like, put a start and finish date, what kind of time frame are we talking about?

This is years?

(Mollie) I would say the act, the actual writing of the book probably started with a class that I got to teach in 2015, and I tested out reading some of the things that I always wanted to read, and I knew I had a captive audience.

And then I finished it, about ten years later.

(Holly) Okay.

Wow.

That's, that's a long time.

(Mollie) Yeah.

(Holly) Now, are we actively doing stuff that whole ten years or?

(Mollie) No, fits, fits and starts.

(Holly) Okay.

Like, kind of like the diaries.

(Mollie) Kind of like the diaries.

Yeah.

(Holly) But you did eventually pick it back up and start over, (Molllie) And, and I needed to travel to see some of these papers.

(Holly) Alright, talk about that some.

The research of going places.

(Mollie) The Penn school papers, which are at the University of North Carolina house all of the papers from the Penn School, from its start until most recently.

And that's actually where I got to touch and hold and spend a week with, Laura Town's diaries a couple of summers ago.

And I was really excited about that because that diary was out of print.

And when I started wanting to know about her friendship with Charlotte Horton, who she was living in the same house with, they were, they were colleagues and they were roommates, essentially, which that sounds difficult to me.

(Holly) Yeah.

(Mollie) I don't know that I love my colleagues, but I don't think I could live with them.

(Holly) Right.

There's got to be a little separation.

(Mollie) And Charlotte writes all the time about Laura.

But in the addition of the diaries that I had of Laura, which were published in 1912 and edited by a family friend, Charlotte never appeared.

And that seemed really strange to me.

So the thing that I wanted to do, and probably the most exciting thing that I got to find while I was researching this, was I went to North Carolina to see what the manuscripts look like and what I could see in the manuscripts, and what was kind of my, probably the most motivating thing for me was that the family friend who had edited her diaries after, 11 years after she died, had taken a pencil and crossed out, in her actual diary.

All the good pages.

(Holly) Interesting, okay.

(Mollie) And most of the good pages were entries.

(Holly) Were you able to kind of see through the crossings?

(Mollie) Yes, yes most of the entries were about the women.

And I think he had just decided perhaps to protect her reputation, or perhaps because women's work is sometimes considered insignificant.

Not to include the details about the other women.

And Charlotte was there all along.

(Holly) Oh wow.

(Mollie) And so were so many unnamed or first named black women who were living in the house and serving in the Port Royal experiment, and we might not know about them if Laura hadn't written so passionately about them.

(Holly) Right.

Tell me about how you are different because of this.

How are you a different citizen?

How are you a different teacher?

How has it impacted you and your daily life?

(Mollie) That is such a good question.

And a daunting one.

I would like to think that the process of reading about these women would help me want to work for justice.

You know, one of the beautiful things about our region is that it is there are a lot of difficult and painful and violent stories, but there's a lot of beauty, too.

And one of the things that I appreciate about, especially Laura Town, who I, I, I really kind of hated when I first read about her, was that the more I read, the more I loved her.

And I think part of what I loved about her was that she changed.

And the more she spent time with women of color and worked with them and got to know them, I think the more open minded she became, and I would like to hope that that can help me and women in our own moment, too.

(Holly) Sure.

What do you see as things that have changed?

In a good way.

And where do we still need to grow?

(Mollie) Yeah.

(Holly) In terms of, you know,, the women and the footnotes.

(Mollie) Yeah.

I think one of the thing that's true of most of the women that I study in paper heroines is that they're committed to education, and they see education as great hope and as the promise of justice.

One of the things that I think held them back in and is something that we're all still talking about today, is the way that people's access to education really limits the kind of justice that we're able to make in the world.

And so I think there are still lessons to be learned from the women that I study, as flawed as they are.

And I like to think of the work of our generation as taking up the mantle, but doing better, trying to do better.

(Holly) Very good, all right tell me about, the writing process in terms of what were the, were there ever times along the way where you're like, I just don't know if I can do this anymore.

(Mollie) Yes.

(Holly) It is too much.

(Mollie) Yes.

(Holly) And what was it that drove you to keep going?

(Mollie) Every day I think.

(Holly) You had those conversations in your head every day.

(Mollie) Every day.

I think writing is the hardest thing in the world.

(Holly) Do it, don't do it.

(Mollie) And it's also I feel llike it's regular imposter syndrome that keeps me going.

(Holly) Uh huh.

(Mollie) But I also other people, you know, this book is a book about community of women and communities of women kept me going.

My mom, I talked to my mom multiple times every day, and she, would celebrate the treasures I'd find in the archives.

And she knows these people like family members.

(Holly) Awe, that's nice.

(Mollie) And writing groups.

I think everybody needs a writing group.

And I've been very fortunate to, surround myself with exquisite writers.

(Holly) So I heard a lot of, authors talk about writing groups, especially in the Covid times.

(Mollie) Yeah.

(Holly) I think that was kind of like their saving grace through it all.

Tell me about yours and how that's helped you.

(Mollie) Okay.

I love my writing group.

(Holly) Is this an in-person thing?

(Mollie) I do a couple of different writing groups, so I have one writing group that would meet on Zoom every Friday morning, and it was accountability.

We would just talk about what we had accomplished or not.

(Holly) Okay.

(Mollie) And then encourage each other to keep going.

And I have another writing group.

We don't talk in person.

We but we exchange drafts.

And so everybody gets a turn about once a semester.

And that's a life writing group.

So all of us are working on biographical, historical kind of work and reading those people's work has also inspired me to keep going.

(Holly) Wonderful.

Was taking the criticism easy, hard, okay, for you?

(Mollie) I think you have to be in a group with people you love and respect and trusting that, that people whose work I admire so much that they were reading my work and would tell me how to make it better, makes it feel safer to usher a book into the world, and to know that I'm doing justice as best as I can to these people.

(Holly) Yeah.

Tell me about the friends you met along the way.

I imagine through all of this research, there have to have been friends made.

(Mollie) Yeah, I mean, one of my mentors, Barbara McCaskill, who is a member of my writing group, has, is always talking about how important it is when we do, research about our communities that we seek our communities as experts, because I might have a degree after my name and I might have some tools.

But when you write about a community, the community members are the experts.

And, getting to spend time with people in Beaufort and on Saint Helena Island and listening to those stories has been a really important, training for me to listen, to do the kind of listening that I, that I hope that I needed, that I know I needed to do in order to write the book.

(Holly) Yeah.

At the end of the day, what do you hope that the readers will take away from this book?

(Mollie) I hope that readers look at these women with all of their beautiful contributions and all of the flaws that they have, and see what they did and remember what they did, and use that to think about what do we owe each other now in our own moment when education is still so important and education is, can be such a transformative force for students?

(Holly) Yes.

All right, so you said that from start to finish, we're talking about a ten year span.

(Mollie) Yes.

(Holly) So I have to ask, would you do it again?

(Mollie) Yes, I'm doing it again.

(Holly) Oh a quick yes.

Okay.

You're doing it again.

Tell us, what's next?

(Mollie) So, because I developed such a complicated relationship with Laura Town.

(Holly) Yeah.

(Mollie) And because I was so angry about her diaries being mangled by her previous editor, the book that I am finishing right now is a new edition of her diaries.

And in the cover, you can see that the silhouettes of the women there's a manuscript behind.

And that's actually the last page of Laura Town's diaries.

So I like to think of that as a little sneak peek.

(Holly) I'm glad you referenced the cover because I love this cover.

(Mollie) I love it too.

(Holly) And I want to hear about the process of that and your involvement, if any.

(Mollie) So I, this is my first book.

I had no idea what kind of involvement I would get to have.

And, I so, I got to talk with my editor about what we wanted, and what we decided was that we wanted to have multiple women featured on the cover, because this is not a book that's just about one person.

But we wanted to make sure that we weren't heroising, any one particular woman.

So we wanted the women to, be able to embody any number of people.

And so that's why their silhouettes, one of them is loosely based.

This one is loosely based on a favorite image that I have of Harriet Tubman.

(Holly) Okay.

(Mollie) But it doesn't have to be Harriet.

(Holly) Right, it can be, if you want it to be.

(Mollie) Yeah, right.

(Holly) I love the cover.

(Mollie) Thank you.

I love it too.

My designers did a beautiful job.

(Holly) Yes, alright, so you mentioned your mom, and she's somebody who reads some of your work before it comes out.

If I were to ask her, what do you think she would say to this question?

Is this a surprise that you did this whole project?

(Mollie) I don't know what she would say, actually.

(Holly) Were you made for this?

Were you made for writing?

Were you made for bringing up women, bringing out women who maybe weren't known?

(Mollie) I love you writing, I come, I am in a family of creative people.

My mom is a quilter and so I love the quilts on the set, and I feel like there's a lot of connection between quilting and making a book, because you have to bring together a lot of pieces and it often seems messier, or it seems like it maybe won't come together.

But then it does.

And so I do look to my mom's creativity in the way that she can see the beauty in things before it all comes together.

(Holly) Yes.

(Mollie) That's always been a model for me.

(Holly) That's awesome.

And last thing I want to know how you incorporate the study to your classroom.

You know, a lot of the students who you teach, I imagine, are from this area.

(Mollie) Yeah.

(Holly) And you get the privilege of teaching them a little bit more about where they're from.

(Mollie) Yeah.

(Holly) So how do you make sure that they kind of get some of these nuggets that they might not have known?

(Mollie) Yeah, I feel very fortunate to live where we live.

And it would be criminal for me not to teach these women and so I've gotten to bring students to sites that are really important in the book.

I've gotten to take students to visit Penn's school.

I teach in downtown Beaufort, and I'm teaching a first year class this semester about archives, and they're learning in a class about teaching argument.

They are reading 19th century arguments for why education is important and why Beaufort is such sacred soil for the history of freedom, and not just our town and our county, but our whole country.

(Holly) That's beautiful.

Well, thank you so much for coming.

This has been a great conversation.

And such rewarding work, (Mollie) Thanks for having me.

(Holly) that you're doing out there.

(Mollie) Thank you for having me.

(Holly) Absolutely.

Thank you.

And I want to say thanks to you out there for joining us here on the show Books by the River.

It's always good having you around.

My name is Holly Jackson.

I'm the host for Books by the River.

And until the next book.

(Mollie) So I'll read just a paragraph from the opening of Paper Heroines.

Paper Heroine suspends us in wondering we ought to do about what brought these women together, what they did know about one another's lives, what they didn't, what we know and what we may never be able to know about women's life writing that hasn't survived.

Paper Heroines is about recovering and reconstructing networks of women.

Constellations of abolitionists, reformers, and relief workers whose most important work was often tethered in a no man's land between official, unofficial, and even secretive positions, and whose archives resist easy classification.

They're not quite private, not quite public, not quite personal, not quite professional, not quite civic, and not quite domestic.

In addition to analyzing the life writing these women kept and left behind, Paper Heroines also demonstrates the power of reimagining their diaries and autobiographies as archives that were always in deep conversation with one another.

(♪) (Announcer) Major funding for Books by the River is brought to you by the ETV Endowment of South Carolina, the proud partner of South Carolina ETV and public Radio.

With the generosity of individuals, corporations and foundations, the ETV Endowment is committed to sharing southern storytelling and compelling conversations with viewers across the nation.

This program is supported by Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina.

This program is made possible by the support of Peter Zamuka and Lynn Baker.

Additional funding for Books by the River is provided by Visit Beaufort, Port Royal and Sea Islands and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at USC, Beaufort.

(♪)