Traveler’s Tales: House Touring

Have you ever been house touring?

We’ve always enjoyed the scene in A&E’s Pride and Prejudice where Elizabeth Bennett tours Mr. Darcy‘s mansion and shocks both of them by meeting him down by the lake.
Apparently even 200 years ago, visiting the large unique homes of the wealthy was a tourist past time.

Touring homes, however,  is something I don’t do out here in California.

But I have done it on the east coast and in the south where, apparently, more mansions are open to the public. Houses like Mt. Vernon, The White House, Arlington House, and Paul Revere’s house, to name a few.

Tennessee

And while I was in Tennessee and Kentucky recently, I visited more.

The first stop was the most thrilling: the home where my general and his wife honeymooned.

I walked into the center hall and thought, “they were here. They knew this staircase and the view toward the river.”

And of course we saw the actual room!

My heroine had spent time at the house as a child. She had stepped off her horses onto the same “upping stone” where I sat.

The house had the same footprint and bricks from 1814. Only the kitchen wing and carport were relatively new.

To run my hand along a banister she knew, to feel the breeze pick up my hair across the fields just as it would have for her, were sobering moments in which she came alive again in a hoop skirt and a bonnet.

I could position her, geographically in my mind, by seeing a place where she lived.

You would have recognized the goosebumps.

Kentucky

Ten days later I visited the home where the general lived as a young man. Ran my hand down the bannister, looked out the window at the gardens–neatly trimmed just as they were kept 160 years ago.

I visited the family church, saw the famous neighbor’s law office and admired a painting of the man over the fireplace.

This was home to him, and I needed to hold it in my mind and breathe the air.

What difference did it make? The people have been dead and gone over 125 years, yet the house lives in.

When you spend hours and days reading books and letters on microfilm, you begin to get a sense of your characters as real people.

As a novelist, of course, I’ll flesh them out with words, actions and emotions to tell their story.

But in my case, I’m writing a book based on real people–I need to fix them in time and space to better see them and understand just who they were.

Elizabeth Bennett tells her sister Jane she first began to love Mr. Darcy upon seeing his house at Pemberly–when she, perhaps, more fully grasped who he really was.

Places will do that for you.

Are you a slave?

Of course, they also can turn up unexpected perspectives as well. We visited Andrew Jackson’s famous home, The Hermitage, in Nashville, Tennessee when my daughter was just shy of five.

I’d read a biography and wanted to see this house, but I also wanted to view the slave quarters–I thought it would be insightful to the man and his time.

“What is this place?” my kindergartner asked.

“This is where the slaves lived.”

“What’s a slave?”

I looked at her shining, innocent face and answered slowly. “A slave is a person who takes care of the chores at the big house.”

I gestured toward the glorious brick structure not far away. “They do the cooking, cleaning, sewing, gardening and they tend the children.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s like you. You’re a slave.”

Perspective. That’s what you get when you visit a new locale.

Where was her father, anyway?

“No,” I explained. “I chose to marry your father and take care of you. A slave doesn’t have a choice, they’re bought, owned, by a master. I’m not a slave.”

Right?

🙂

Standing in the old log cabin, looking up at the Hermitage, however, I could begin to grasp the distance from a life of service to the manor house.

Perspective, turning the prism, learning who your characters might have been because of the place they lived.

Sometimes it can be a bit of a shock.