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Blame it on that heirloom gold locket that my dad gave to
me, after my house burned to the ground. The midwinter fire devoured all the
jewelry my mother gave me over the years, all her knitting projects, a
half-made crocheted bedspread for my youngest brother that I claimed after her
sudden death a few years earlier, saying, “I’ll finish it for you.” Raging on a
twenty-three-degrees-below December night, the fire took our clothes, my work,
the children’s new Christmas toys. None of that compared to the importance of
the three of us escaping, with burns on our faces and frostbite on our toes,
from sock-footed hike a third of a mile to the nearest neighbor.
Dad drove north to check on us, a day later. He brought some family photos, thoughtfulness
that impressed me; he brought my youngest brother the contractor, who’d never
receive that bedspread after all, but who brought me boxes of his spare tools;
and he brought the locket. Gold, shaped like a tiny box on a short chain, it
opened to emptiness. No photo of anyone inside, but I saw an intricate gold
grating that flipped outward. “It’s a hair locket,” he explained. “You put a
lock of hair of your beloved into it.”
During the night of the fire, a mile from where my
ex-husband lived, the only “boyfriend” in my life was playing music in New
Orleans. He got a busy signal when he tried to phone me, and bitterly assumed
I’d taken the phone “off the hook” to silence it during a date with someone
else. Days later, he’d finally phone a neighbor and learn that a fire burns
through phone and electric lines. I didn’t put a lock of his hair into the
locket; he left not much later, for a dancer he’d formed a crush on.
When I turned fifty, in accordance with the answer a
prayerful friend of mine had received, I met and fell joyously in love with my
soulmate. By then, the kids were grown and gone, but on their rare visits home,
they agreed I’d finally found the right partner. Next time my darling got his
hair trimmed, I collected a curl and popped it into the locket.
Historical fiction already meant a lot to me; a lifelong
history writer, and a fumbling novelist, I found the combined threads
satisfying. And I wanted very much to give readers a vicarious experience of Vermont’s
approach to the Abolition movement and to diverse settlers (setting aside for
the moment the state’s sometimes cruel treatment of Native Americans; I’d
addressed that in my first work of historical fiction, and the book is a
classic, The Darkness Under the Water, but also controversial). I
figured, if readers followed along with the teens in my new story, they’d
discover for themselves that Black people in Vermont in the 1850s were “free
and safe,” as one of the state’s great historians puts it.
If you haven’t yet written a novel, this might surprise you:
Often the characters stubbornly diverge from where you thought they were going.
So did the girls in The Secret Room: One morning, halfway through
writing, I realized at least one of them would head into a dark collapsing
tunnel, in a desperate rescue effort. As dirt fell into her eyes and mouth and
she moved resolutely forward, one hand landed on an object that she reflexively
tucked into a pocket. Later, in daylight, she discovered it was an antique
locket.
Yes, there you have it: Dad’s little locket had crept right
into my story. So it felt obvious, later, that I’d write another novel, this
time set in 1850, when that locket first hung at the throat of a Vermont teen.
That turned into The Long Shadow, a book I’d never imagined would be the
first of a series.
Yet when I turned it in for publication, the cheerful editor
said, “I hope we’ll be hearing more from these characters!” Shaken, I asked,
“You mean a series? How long?” She replied, “How about until everyone is free?”
It doesn’t take a lot of American history to recognize that
“when everyone is free” probably means the end of our Civil War: 1865. If I
wrote a book for each year from 1850 until then, there’d be 15 books in the
series. A nifty idea! However: My teenaged characters from the first book would
be in their thirties. That wasn’t an age I wanted to write about – I love the
voice of a teen observing her world. How could I solve this?
It took another week for the idea to arrive: If the teens
had a reason for vanishing from the village at the end of each book, or maybe
each second book, and the next book’s protagonist became a girl who’d been
younger at the start, and I kept passing it along that way — well, you see how
it would work, right? Sort of a relay race, passing along the Vermont fight for
human liberty to each new girl, or set of girls. Yes! On the spot, I decided
(since I’m far from young) that there would be two-year jumps between the books
in the series. That meant seven or eight titles, which seemed workable, as long
as I took my vitamins and avoided any repeat of the disastrous housefire.
Now we are in book 3 in what the editor and I decided to
call the Winds of Freedom series. Almyra Alexander, who showed up in book 2 as
a fashionable girl from Boston, longs to be a minister, a difficult if not
impossible path for a woman in 1854. The Vermont village, with its changing
ideas about people and their roles, may give her a way forward toward her
dream.
But first she’ll have to puzzle out several newly arrived
women at the local tavern, what they are carrying around the county, how to
handle an aging criminal who arrives while her uncle the minister is out of
town, and whether she can effectively assist the cause of Abolition.
If you’re ready to find out whether Almyra is up to those
challenges, and what the risks are, and what allies she’s recruiting — get
ready to read The Bitter and the Sweet.
