P’tit lets out a wail and kicks as if to shake off his stiff boots. He’ll be sturdy on his feet in another few weeks. Running away from Blanche, no doubt. She’ll have to race to keep up.
Water is striping the glass now, turning its glaze of dust to rich mud. “A proper rainstorm,” she marvels to P’tit.
The transparency of his small ear makes her feel like a she-wolf. But it strikes her now that it’s P’tit who’s been protecting Blanche, all this time, sketching a magic circle around her, not the other way around. It was because she was this boy’s mother that Ernest didn’t let himself instruct Louis to kill her too. What a joke! She’s alive today only because hers is the body from which this odd, unwanted, fought-over child sprang.
Rain’s whipping down hard now, hard enough to cut the autumn’s long fever and wash this foul old world clean.
Things ricochet. You can turn the weather with a song. The knack of riding backward: now, there’d be a trick to learn. Jenny wouldn’t be dead if she’d never crashed into Blanche on Kearny Street. P’tit wouldn’t exist if Blanche had never met Arthur. Facts as hard as rocks, and Blanche has to pick her way among them, find her balance, with an acrobat’s cocky smile.
She rubs at her cheek, and the tiny scab falls away.
Up ahead of them the engine sends out its long moan. The rain slams sideways against the window. It’s cheering us on, she tells herself, like that stone-deaf frog in the story. P’tit’s leaning back, on the verge of sleep. His moist eyelids flicker, fighting it. Nobody wants to give in, be snuffed out, surrender. Nobody wants the day to be over. Blanche holds her son like a sack of gold dust. It’s all going to be hunky-dory. Sings in time with the juddering train: “‘Dors, min p’tit quinquin, dors.’”
AFTERWORD
Almost all the characters in Frog Music come from the historical record, and I worked with and around the known facts of their lives:
Jenny (or Jennie/Jeanne/Jeannie) Bonnet (or Bonnett) (ca. 1849–1876); her father, Sosthenes (or Sosthène) Bonnet (1825–?); mother probably named Désirée Leau Bonnet (1818–ca. 1873); and sister, Blanche Bonnet (1856–?);
Adèle Louise “Blanche” Beunon (or Buneau) (1852–1877) and her son, name unknown (1875–?);
Arthur Pierre Louis Deneve (or DeNeve/De Neve) (ca. 1844–?) and his wife from December 1876, Emilie (or Emily) Baugnon (or Baugnan) Deneve (ca.1858–?);
Ernest (or Earnest) Girard (or Gerard) (1856–?) and his wife from 1880, Madeleine (or Madeline/Madelein/Madaline) George Girard (1845–1908);
Adrien (or Jean Pierre-Adrien) Portal (1824 or 1839 or 1843–1904), Charles St. Clair, Coroner Benjamin Swan, Dr. Crook, Julius Funkenstein (1845–?), Doctress Amelia Hoffman (1829–1889), Detective Benjamin F. Bohen (?–1903), and Maria Lafourge (floruit 1856);
At San Miguel Station, John McNamara Sr. (1830 or 1835–?), Ellen McNamara (1830 or 1835 or 1839–?), and their children Mary Jane McNamara (1860–?), John McNamara Jr. (1863 or 1864–1881?), Kate McNamara (1867 or 1869 or 1870–?), and Jeremiah McNamara (1870–?); their neighbors Philip Jordan, Mrs. Holt, Pierre Louis (or Pierre Logis, or Louis Deframmant/de Frammant/Dufrannon/Dufrannant/Dufranaut/DeFramond) and his wife, Caroline.
Two characters inhabit a gray area. Madame Johanna Werner and her brothel on Sacramento Street are described only in Herbert Asbury’s footnote-free The Barbary Coast (1933), and the businessman known to police as L’amant de Blanche, whom I have called Lamantia, is mentioned only in two newspaper articles, years after the murder.
The only characters I have invented are Cartwright the journalist, Durand the restaurateur, Low Long the shoemaker, Mei the grocer, and Gudrun the help.
Although many records were destroyed in San Francisco’s earthquake and fire in 1906, much remains. Frog Music draws on roughly sixty newspaper articles (from 1872 to 1902) about Jenny Bonnet, as well as on the annually published San Francisco Municipal Records, the U.S. Federal Census (1870, 1880, 1900, and 1910—the 1890 records were badly damaged in a 1921 fire, and almost all of what remained was later destroyed by government order), ships’ passenger lists, and French, Irish, U.S., and Canadian birth/baptism/marriage/death records.
Not that using such invaluable sources is ever simple. Nineteenth-century reporters often made up details to fill in the blanks in their research. Like newspaper articles, legal documents are full of variant spellings and dates. In addition, century-and-a-half-old type or (even worse) handwriting scanned into databases can end up as gibberish. So I had to make many educated guesses, especially when it came to the clashing and at times ludicrous testimonies given at Jenny’s inquest. I have also changed a few facts for the sake of the story, simplifying the sequence of events leading up to the murder and presenting Blanche as just as fluent in English as Arthur when in fact she spoke through an interpreter at the inquest.
There is one myth I would like to put to rest. Jenny Bonnet shows up all over the Internet these days as a proto-trans outlaw: presenting as male, persuading women to give up the sex trade and forming them into a thieves’ gang. Attractive though this image is, it seems to derive from one highly colorful article that was not published until three years after the murder (“Jeanne Bonnett,” Morning Call, October 19, 1879) and an equally unsubstantiated popular history from 1933 (Asbury’s The Barbary Coast), and I have found no evidence to substantiate it.
Despite the renown of the San Francisco detective force, the investigation of Jenny’s murder was dogged by confusion and delay. Several years on, Detective Bohen and his colleagues would come to the conclusion that Arthur Deneve paid Pierre Louis two thousand dollars to kill Blanche (rather than Jenny) and that Louis bought a farm back in Canada with the money. Louis was arrested there in July 1880, after his battered wife, Caroline, accused him of having shot Jenny (by mistake, instead of Blanche), but he killed himself before the San Francisco detectives could gather enough evidence to extradite him. This police theory—conveniently pinning the blame on a dead foreigner who was said to have earned an extraordinary figure (even by California hired-killer standards) for having shot the wrong woman—seems riddled with holes to me.
Then again, the explanation Frog Music offers of this still unsolved murder is only an educated hunch, which is to say, a fiction.
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 chem
ist 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://justanothertu
ne.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).