I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Miscellany

Shreddies—RAF-issue underwear. So called, apparently, because the woven pattern of the cloth from which they were made strongly resembled the appearance of a Shredded Wheat biscuit.

Part Three’s Heading is derived from a quote by the novelist Florence King:

“In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.”

—FLORENCE KING

Black Freemasons—At one point, Claire wonders whether there are black Freemasons. In fact, there were. Prince Hall, a well-known abolitionist and black leader, established Prince Hall Freemasonry (Boston).

Haitian Navy

You see frequent references in historical accounts to the “Haitian Navy” Chasseurs-Volontaires, who fought with the Americans during the Siege of Savannah. In fact, Haiti didn’t exist as a polity at this point in history, and these black volunteers were actually from Saint-Domingue (later the Dominican Republic) and other places, and their background is fascinating, but not something I was able to go into during my discussion of the Battle of Savannah. The following details, however, are from the blackpast.org website and give a fuller picture:

D’Estaing’s troops were mainly composed of colonial regiments coming from various locations such as Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue. The 800 men from the French Caribbean colonies were organized into a regiment called Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue. These soldiers were des gens de couleurs libres (free men of color) who voluntarily joined the French colonial forces. The gens de couleur were mixed-race men of African and European origin from Saint-Domingue. They were born free and thus were distinct from free slaves, or affranchise, who were born enslaved or became enslaved during their lives and then freed themselves or were freed. This distinction allowed the gens de couleur a higher social and political role in the French colonial West Indies. According to the 1685 French Black Code, they had the same rights and privileges as the white colonial population. In practice, however, strong discrimination by white French colonial residents impeded the gens de couleurs from fully exercising them.

Cultures and Language

This is not the time or place to discuss the portrayal of cultures in fiction, save to say that