Authors: Emma Donoghue
Getting back to the facts: You may wonder what really did become of Blanche and her nameless son after she told Coroner Swan that Arthur and Ernest “stole away my child, a little boy one year old, and at the present time I do not know where he is.” While writing the novel, I had no idea whether she ever saw her son again. I knew of one article published three years after the murder (the aforementioned “Jeanne Bonnett,”
Morning Call,
October 19, 1879) that claimed that Blanche died of throat cancer within the year, but the piece had the ring of French naturalist fiction, and the illness in particular sounded like a heavy-handed symbol for Blanche’s unspoken secrets—so I didn’t believe a word of it. It was only during the final copyediting of
Frog Music
, when I was trawling through online archives one last time for any sources I might have missed, that I came across a much more credible report—a laconic paragraph in the
Sacramento Daily Union
of April 26, 1877, noting that Blanche Beunon had died of throat cancer in San Francisco’s French Hospital on April 24, leaving her son (said to be two years old) in the care of a family in Oakland. The reporter got Blanche’s age wrong—thirty-five instead of twenty-five—so I suppose it’s within the realm of possibility that he got her identity wrong too, but I doubt it. This is the only time I have ever found myself actually grieving for someone dead a century and a half. The one crumb of comfort I can find is that the lost boy was found and was reunited with his mother, if only for a matter of months.
As for the other characters: On immigrating to America with Blanche in 1875, Arthur Deneve described himself to a ship’s clerk as an acrobat, and on another voyage in November 1876, he called himself an artiste. When he was briefly detained in New York after the murder, he spun reporters a yarn about being an analytical chemist trained in his father’s Paris firm (a fictional one, as far as I can tell) who’d given it all up to take the lowborn, pregnant Blanche to America; he also claimed that Blanche gave birth to four children (in two and a half years!), only one of which he believed to be his. What we know for sure is that Deneve married Emilie Baugnon in New York and the couple declared to a ship’s clerk their intention of returning to France for good.
Probably in the same spirit of self-aggrandizement, according to an 1874 passenger list, Ernest Girard claimed that he had been an official back in France. He and Madeleine George married in 1880, and the census of 1900 shows them still in San Francisco, without children.
As for Jenny’s surviving family, two years after the murder, Jenny’s sister, Blanche Bonnet, was released from Stockton State Hospital into the care of a friend at whose house she stayed on as a servant. In 1884, Sosthenes Bonnet, “paralyzed,” was still living on the charity of his friend Leo Samson at a saloon in Oakland.
I did not have to invent or even exaggerate the twin plagues—the heat wave and the smallpox—that hit San Francisco in 1876. By the time the epidemic petered out in July of 1877, leaving four hundred and eighty-two dead, it was clear that Chinatown could not have been the epicenter of infection, since only sixty of the some sixteen hundred reported cases lived there. But of course the new city health officer, John Meares, explained that away by claiming that the Chinese must have hidden several hundred more cases.
My novel’s Sinophobic riot, set in September 1876, is a fictional foretaste of a far worse real one that took place in July 1877, when the economic crisis now known as the Long Depression finally reached San Francisco. On that occasion, over the course of two days, a crowd of roughly five hundred white rioters burned down twenty laundries and killed four Chinese people before the police, aided by about a thousand volunteers (dubbed the Pick-Handle Brigade), managed to stop the violence.
Blanche’s building, 815 Sacramento, is said to have become a “rookery” for thieves and then (possibly by the mid-1890s, and definitely by 1905) the headquarters of the Chinese Salvation Army, whose mission was to help indentured Chinese women get out of prostitution. A few minutes’ walk north, at 1314 Stockton Street, Jenny’s destitute ex-lover (or ex-husband, according to one source) Adrien Portal gassed himself in his rented room in 1904. Chinatown was devastated in the 1906 earthquake and fire, so the streetscape in which my characters lived exists only in photographs today.
The shabby settlement of San Miguel Station was often called simply San Miguel, but I have used its full name to avoid confusion with either California’s inland town of San Miguel or the offshore San Miguel Island. The McNamaras outstayed all their neighbors, and John Jr. died there in 1881, at sixteen and ten months—no cause given. His elder sister, Mary Jane, is likely to be the woman of that name who got a job at the Golden Gate Woolen Manufacturing Company in San Francisco. Jeremiah probably grew up to be the Jeremiah McNamara recorded on a 1900 California voter-registration list as living just a couple of blocks away from what had been San Miguel Station—by then rebranded Ocean View—and seven years later he (if he is the fireman Jeremiah McNamara) was the first of the family to vote. Ellen was still alive in 1910, living with her younger daughter, Kate, Kate’s husband, and their four children. The suburb was finally swallowed up by the OMI District (Ocean View, Merced Heights, and Ingleside), and my best guess as to where the McNamaras’ saloon stood is the intersection of San Jose Avenue and Alamany Boulevard under the shadow of Highway 280 today.
According to Herbert Asbury’s
The Barbary Coast
, Madame Johanna Werner’s brothel on Sacramento Street—which I have dubbed the House of Mirrors—was known for virgin auctions, and it began to decline in the late 1870s when her supplier Johnny Lawless was jailed for selling a fourteen-year-old girl to a crib (bottom-level brothel) in Oregon.
Baby farms were a paradoxical institution. You could describe their function as infanticide by neglect or as child care, without which many parents (working, single and unsupported, poor) could not have managed to keep custody of their children at all. (And the death rates in municipal institutions such as foundling hospitals were so astonishingly high, you could call them de facto infanticidal too.) In Britain in 1868, the public was alerted to the dark side of baby farming by a series of articles in the
British Medical Journal
, but in the United States—despite the occasional case, such as the trial of Madame Parselle that year—suspicion was slow to spread. It took the founding of a network of child-protection organizations to shine a spotlight on this issue. The year of Bonnet’s murder, 1876, saw the launch of the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and among its first targets was Doctress Amelia Hoffman. (Learning that Blanche and Arthur had their baby nursed out from shortly after birth, I chose Hoffman’s notorious premises, which seems to have moved between different buildings on Folsom Street but according to several of her advertisements was on Folsom between Tenth and Eleventh Streets.) Convicted several times, she used various stratagems to avoid jail, and in 1887 she had the gall to offer the City of San Francisco both her baby farm and her ten-acre suburban home (right beside the Industrial School, at San Jose Avenue and Ocean Avenue) for the founding of an orphanage on the condition that she and then her son Frank would be its superintendents for life. Hoffman’s offer does not seem to have been accepted, and she died leaving a fortune in 1889.
Despite the child-abuse scandals that plagued the San Francisco Industrial School (where Jenny Bonnet was incarcerated in her teens), it survived its grand jury investigation and stayed open till 1891, when the building was converted into the city jail for women. The site is now covered by the campus of City College of San Francisco, a piece of Highway 280, and Balboa Park.
When San Francisco’s Odd Fellows Cemetery was closed, in the 1920s, all the remains—which would have included Jenny’s—were moved to mass graves in the Greenlawn Memorial Park in Colma, California.
The California red-legged frog was eaten to the brink of extinction in the late nineteenth century, and it remains a threatened species, mostly due to ongoing habitat loss. The frog-leg trade (which includes both wild-catching and farming) wreaks great damage on ecosystems today, particularly in developing countries.
Everything Jenny quotes with the words “as the fellow said” comes from Mark Twain, famous resident of San Francisco during part of her adolescence (from 1864 to 1869), who I’m sure would have been her favorite author. She may not have read Walt Whitman, but some of her thoughts coincide with his. Blanche paraphrases Whitman’s “I cock my hat as I please,” and Arthur borrows several bon mots from Charles Baudelaire.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank:
Autumn Stephens, whose
Wild Women: Crusaders, Curmudgeons, and Completely Corsetless Ladies in the Otherwise Virtuous Victorian Era
(1992) first drew my attention to Bonnet, as well as to Annie Hindle (the protagonist of my second play,
Ladies and Gentlemen
) and Annie Taylor and Madame Restell (the subjects of two of my short stories), which makes Stephens’s witty, illustrated guide the single most inspiring book on my shelves;
The late great Kevin Mullen, former police chief and popular historian, for his account of Bonnet, drawn from the department’s files, “The Little Frog Catcher,” in his
The Toughest Gang in Town: Police Stories from Old San Francisco
(2005);
William B. Secrest for
Dark and Tangled Threads of Crime: San Francisco’s Famous Police Detective, Isaiah B. Lees
(2004), the sole source I know on the indomitable, scar-faced Maria Lafourge;
Nayan Shah, whose
Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown
(2001) I found most helpful, particularly on the smallpox outbreak of 1876;
Daniel Macallair for his invaluable “The San Francisco Industrial School and the Origins of Juvenile Justice in California: A Glance at the Great Reformation,”
Journal of Juvenile Law & Policy 2
(Winter 2003);
Jürgen Kloss for his insights into the history of “Rye Whiskey” (http://justanothertune.com/html/tarwathie.html) and all the song hunters at www.mudcat.org for their zealous tracing of the muddy, ever-proliferating roots of folk music, especially Professor Jonathan Lighter, whose recent book about “Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye,” entitled, ironically,
“The Best Antiwar Song Ever Written,”
saved me from parroting the old myths about this famous song;
Librarians who went out of their way to help me over the past decade or so on my flying visits to the San Francisco Public Library, the California Historical Society, the Bancroft Library (University of California, Berkeley), the New York Public Library, and the Weldon Library (University of Western Ontario), especially Ms. Hamashin of the California State Archives for graciously looking up the medical records of Blanche Bonnet (Jenny’s sister) at the Stockton State Hospital and discovering that it was not she, but a baby born to her, who died there;
Naomi Edel for taking me to San Bruno and Coyote Point to get a sense of Jenny’s landscape, and fellow novelist Ellis Avery for thoughts on writing Frenchness in English;
And Professor Clare Sears, whose fascinating work on public space in nineteenth-century San Francisco includes the only scholarly investigation of Bonnet I know of, a probing chapter entitled “‘A Tremendous Sensation’: Cross-Dressing in the 19th-Century San Francisco Press,” in
News and Sexuality: Media Portraits of Diversity
(eds. Laura Castañeda and Shannon B. Campbell, 2006). Professor Sears, author of the forthcoming
Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco
, went to the considerable trouble of making me up a parcel of otherwise unobtainable newspaper reports about Bonnet. It’s a kind of intellectual generosity I’ve found to be very common among academics, but still, shown to an extreme by Clare Sears.
Gratitude as always to everyone at my loyal and zealous agencies (Caroline Davidson Literary Agency in London and Anderson Literary Management in New York) and to the energetic and brilliant teams at my publishers (Little, Brown; HarperCollins Canada; and Picador).
I want to thank some great friends: Alison Lee for convincing me that I could write a crime novel, Wendy Pearson for critiquing a late draft, and both Daniel Vaillancourt and my beloved mother-in-law (luckily for me, a translator), Claude Gillard, for improving the book’s 1870s French.
Finally,
bisous
to my three bilingual loved ones for bearing with me as I stammered in the
boulangerie
during our extended stays in the South of France.
For anyone curious to learn more about the murder that was generally known as the San Miguel Mystery, I will be posting an annotated list of sources on my website: http://www.emmadonoghue.com/images/pdf/the-san-miguel-mystery-the-documents.pdf.
And if you’d care to hear twentieth- and twenty-first-century recordings of the songs quoted in
Frog Music
, please go to http://8tracks.com/emmadonoghue/frog-music/.
CHAPTER I: DARLIN’
“L’Canchon Dormoire” (“Song for Sleep”), aka “P’tit Quinquin” (“Little Child”)
Written by Alexandre Desrousseaux (1820–1892) in 1853 and published in the second volume of his
Chansons et Pasquilles Lilloises
(
Songs and Satires of Lille
) in 1869, “L’Canchon Dormoire” is the most famous of his over four hundred songs. The lyrics are in Picard—also known as Chtimi, Rouchi, or Patois, a language closely related to French, spoken in several northern French regions and parts of Belgium—and this lullaby has become the unofficial anthem of the city of Lille.
“Darlin’,” aka “Darling,” “Honey Babe,” “You Can’t Love (But) One,” “Darlin’, You Can’t Have One,” and “New River Train”
This is the only piece for which I have invented my own variation on a traditional song. “Darlin’” seems to have been widespread from the end of the nineteenth century; Alan Lomax in
The Penguin Book of American Folk Songs
(1964) describes it as “the national chant of a rebellious American libido.” Its counting-song form (technically a progressive chain) is strict, but the lyrics vary, and from the 1920s on they have often included a chorus about riding a train. Some versions are not suggestive at all, and others only mildly so. I have pushed mine in the direction it seemed likely a burlesque performer would take them.