WHAT YOU ANSWER TO Tiphanie Yanique talks to Vanessa Riley about Island Queen
men in England. Riley, a woman of color herself, was curious about this detail. When Riley was growing up, in the ´70s, Black beauty was something Black people had to be taught was real. But was Blackness always considered inferior, Riley wondered? Were Black women always thought to be less coveted by the male gaze? Thanks to her reading of Austen, Riley had a hunch that Black beauty wasn’t a new concept even in the West. But even as a fiction writer she wanted the evidence to back up her hypothesis. This is how Riley found the real Dorothy “Doll” Thomas. Here was a beautiful, successful woman who had been enslaved, but who was she? The more Riley learned about Dorothy Thomas (who went by many names, Doll, Dolly, Dorothy Kirwan), the more she wanted to know how this woman became one of the richest persons, male or female, Black or white, in the Western world at her time. “I wanted to know how this woman did it.” The “how” turned out to be rather incredible, and based in part on the “who” and the “when.” Dorothy Thomas managed to become economically successful despite being a mother to at least ten children. She was an attentive parent, making sure her children were educated, married well, had their own business. She also used her own businesses to support other women of color. But this wasn’t easily done. It wasn’t all pretty, as Island Queen makes clear. Rape was common during slavery. It was the tool by which the master could satisfy his own sexual desire while also creating more free labor when children were produced from such unions. The children were also his slaves and could be made to work for free.
Vanessa Riley is a skilled and serious researcher, and this aspect of her books has been somewhat under-lauded. The covers and the titles of her books set up the reader for a juicy, gossipy, soapy ride, and to be sure, her books are full of drama and intrigue. But there is always something serious behind Riley’s work: something she is trying to excavate from the historical archives about the human condition. In her newest novel, Island Queen (William Morrow, 2021), this desire to make history bare for her reader is abundantly clear. “I have a PhD in Engineering,” Riley reveals. “This taught me to ask questions, and to save material. In my first year I saved data that seemingly had nothing to do with anything, but later that same material was central to finishing my PhD work. This taught me details are worth holding on to.” Island Queen is replete with details about the time period—the late 1700s to early 1800s—when Dorothy “Doll” Kirwan Thomas lived and traveled throughout the Caribbean region and Great Britain. Despite Riley’s science engineering training, she always loved the humanities – and reading. In particular Jane Austen, who herself was sometimes dismissed for writing just for women but was often able to get away with otherwise radical details—because the learned men weren’t always paying much attention. For example, Austen wrote about the reality of beautiful Black women being coveted by white
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FEATURES | Issue 97, August 2021
In writing Island Queen, however, Vanessa Riley uncovered some vital information about enslaved women in the Caribbean. She discovered, for example, that the rate of women being freed was higher in the West Indies than in any other place where there was slavery, and that birth rates were lower. It turns out that enslaved women in the Caribbean often bargained with their “love” (as the archives call it) to gain their freedom, but also kept their children out of slavery by choosing when to have children and choosing whom to have children for—even though they could not always choose whom they had sex with—by utilizing the herbs that might prevent or end a pregnancy. Caribbean feminism may have its roots, then, in the economic power women had over their bodies during slavery and during freedom. Riley acknowledges that this is not always the way we want to think of the honorable enslaved person. But she says, “there is something in survival. We do a disservice when we try to ignore this important part of our history. Even if the picture of survival doesn’t look exactly how we want it to look, we need to honor it.” When it came to facing these difficult parts of the work, Riley says that her engineering background helped her remove emotion from the narrative and find and relay the facts. There were times when she wished the history of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas was more gentle but, ultimately, she felt it was important to be factual. “We carry this history on our backs,” she told me. It was vital to Riley that she show the ways in which individuals sought dignity, even in this difficult reality. In Island Queen, we see that
