What You Answer To

Tiphanie Yanique talks to Vanessa Riley about Island Queen

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 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.

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

AUSTEN wrote about the reality of beautiful Black women being coveted by white men in England. Riley, a woman of color herself, was curious about this detail.

Dorothy as a character often code-switches her language—using the English of the enslaved and the English of the elite. But Riley also chose never to use the n-word in the novel, though she does reference its use.

“When I wrote the first version of this book, I had the n-word in there. But I wrestled with it. It has so much psychological baggage, and it’s been given so much power because it was used to humble us. I realized that using it directly in the book took away Dorothy’s power. I believed that Dorothy would have had to be very selective in what she allowed into her psychology in order to push past racism and sexism. How could she really listen to the n word and still achieve what she did? She would have had to ignore this painful language in order to get through.”

This incongruity seems to be essential to fully understanding how some Black people and women of the time, and even now, succeeded in spite of racism and sexism. Moreover, we rarely learn about the Black people and women who had to compromise—and how integral, though sad, that might have been.

Some Black people during slavery were burning down the tables, but, as Riley says, “some were taking a seat at the table. There are different ways to claim your own humanity.” Riley shows how Dorothy Kirwan literally built the tables that she and other powerful women sat at and then welcomed the white planters to join them. Dorothy played the economic game, and this kept her and her family, and many other families, alive and intact.

The idea of family is an important one in Island Queen. It often seems like Dorothy herself is trying to stave off generational trauma. Riley says that “there are things we pass down whether we like it or not. The importance of extended family is in the blood of people of African descent. Also, Doll was a mother, and mothers often blame themselves. Doll worked so hard to get her children and anyone in her lineage educated and freed. Then she would bring them into the fold. She believed in the value of the extended family.”

This, of course, goes counter to the prevalent narrative about the weakness of the Black family. Still, Vanessa Riley says that she “wanted to defeat the myth of the super-human Black woman; this mythical concept that we feel no pain, that we feel no grief or fear. As a Black woman, I know we are also tender.” Riley uses evidence from the archive to prove Doll’s humanity—as a good mother, caretaker, provider, friend, and wife.

Much of Island Queen is about the power and fears of motherhood, though as a protector and provider to her children, Dorothy also embodies the traditional father’s role. Riley makes clear that this was a tremendous labor for Dorothy. At many points, Doll could have sold her property and moved to England. Instead, she chose to fight to provide for and protect her children and their children. She could have had a life of luxury, but she was always using her financial wherewithal to help her family and friends.

There are many points in Island Queen where Dorothy herself highlights the importance of women working together, independent of men, to secure strength. However, when Doll meets her friends and future colleagues, the women of the Entertainment Society, they meet in a brothel. Riley doesn’t shy away from this contradiction. She makes the point that “for women who have been forced to give away sex under the rules of slavery, one aspect of power might be choosing what you want to do with your sex.” In the book, Dorothy never looks down on women for selling their bodies. As Riley writes her, Dorothy understands that part of being free might be that “you are your own property.”

The book makes a strong claim for the ways in which we claim ourselves for ourselves. Naming and the power of names itself is a recuring theme in Island Queen, and as noted above, both the historical Dorothy and the one of this novel went by many names. Riley states that “the enslaved mother might only have the power to name her child. That may be her only power, her only act of parental authority. Back to the n-word, am I going to answer to this?” What matters, then, is how you say who you are to others and to yourself. From its title to its last words, Island Queen makes its author’s case that, “What you answer to is extremely important."

WRITTEN BY TIPHANIE YANIQUE

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of Land of Love and Drowning, a novel set in the Virgin Islands during the transfer from Danish to US rule. Her forthcoming book, Monster in the Middle, will be published in October 2021.