Short Fiction: Shades of the Tenth Muses

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Notes

1. ¹Frost Woodhull, 1887–1939, was born in Bexar County, Texas, in a family of civic-minded ranchers and served as Bexar County Judge from 1933–1936.

2. ²A reference to the English colonist, Thomas Morton, who in 1625 established a settlement at Pasonagessit (present day Quincy, Massachusetts), an Indian name that was translated as “ma-re mount,” but became known as “Merrymount” when Morton and his group erected a maypole and held a May Day revel, to the horror of neighboring Puritan settlers.

3. ³Technically, not during in her lifetime; her husband Simon Bradstreet was not governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony until 1679; Anne died in 1672. Gonzalez might have meant Bradstreet’s father, Thomas Dudley, who was governor of the colony in 1634–35, 1640–41, 1645–46, 1650–51.

4. ⁴As evidence of her modernity, González has Sor Juana quote the trademark line spoken by Mae West, an actress, writer, and producer known for her frank sexuality, from her 1933 film She Done Him Wrong: “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?”