Just like I like a nonfiction book with a nice, thick notes or works cited section, I love a historical fiction that shows its receipts. The transparency of what’s based on research and what was invented for narrative’s sake makes a story only more magical, and impactful. That’s the case with Rachel Beanland’s The House Is On Fire, an imagined account of a deadly 1811 theater fire that devastated a city and revealed the racial and gender biases running beneath its pleasant surface.
Just after Christmas 1811, Richmond, Virginia, is in the height of its winter social season. The hottest ticket in town is to the theater, which draws everyone from slaves and sex workers to the governor. More than six hundred people are packed into the three-story theater. When a piece of scenery catches on fire, that means there’s six hundred people across three floors to get out as the whole structure goes up in flames.
Cecily, a slave, is able to escape safely from the first floor, but sees an opportunity to let herself be presumed dead and run for freedom. A stage hand, Jack, was also able to get out unscathed, though that fact seems almost insulting given the part he played in the start of the fire. Sally, wealthy enough and recently widowed, has a much more harrowing escape out a second-story window, and immediately gets drafted to help triage the burned and broken when she seeks help for her injured sister-in-law. Meanwhile, Gilbert hears the commotion and rushes to help others who are jumping from windows in hopes of surviving the inferno, but his heroics cause problems when his master hears that he slipped away—even to save many lives. When the theater troupe spreads rumors that a slave uprising, not faulty theater equipment and rash decision-making, was at fault for the fire, things get more complicated for all of these vastly different characters.
The stories are as unique as the people in them, and while a tragedy of this magnitude could unite any group of people, the sheer number of people affected in the theater and the city surrounding it means the opportunities for connection are made largely by chance—and circumstance. Some of the characters have fleeting appearances in the background of another’s story but, with one exception, there’s simply too much breadth to this story for the characters to interact. The focus on each person and their facet of the fire, though, is precisely what keeps the narrative threads in The House Is On Fire from becoming knotted together—or from becoming a caricature through which to view an aspect of the fire.
Because they do all give us a different view of the disaster. With Jack, we get an imagined fly-on-the-wall account of how the false rumor plot came to be (the rumor to deflect blame from the theater company, and an ensuing hunt for the supposed rebelling slaves, is unfortunately one of the pieces rooted firmly in history). Through Sally and Gilbert, we see the efforts to save and heal those who were trapped. Gilbert gives us a grim view of life as a slave, while Sally’s injustice is of the good ol’ sexist variety, as “gentlemen” trampled over their wives and then proceeded to erase women’s accounts from the historical record. Cecily’s story is in some ways the most harrowing, and the most hopeful. As a “favorite” of her master’s violent son, the glimmer of hope this tragedy brings a sense of desperation even to the reader.
It’s a testament to Beanland’s writing and research that the characters all feel so human, and the world around them so real. The unfolding events of The House Is On Fire are also a still-relevant warning about how quickly disaster can strike—and how the most vulnerable in a population are most likely to take the brunt of that tragedy.
Ring Reads 