The Letter Writer (16 page)

That's all I had, but more than I usually have to start out with.

Then I must figure out the where and the when of it.

You have to be living under a rock these days not to know that young adult novels are getting sharper and
more on the edge and, yes, riskier. Today's kids want more, so I decided to take the risk and put my girl (already named Harriet) against a backdrop so terrible for her time that Frankenstein would look like the Three Little Pigs.

The Nat Turner rebellion.

I found her a place in the Whitehead home. And then, while doing research, I came across an incident in which a fourteen-year-old girl is seen by Turner running through the woods in bare feet, hysterical and crying, running northward for help.

That was my Harriet, I told myself. I was on the right track.

And so it began.

I do not pretend, offering a book like this, to be as knowledgeable as the adult prizewinning authors who wrote about the Turner rebellion. I do not pretend to have any answers about it, any special information. Someday, perhaps, someone will.

I do not offer academic viewpoints or racial bias. I do not intend to foster arguments. My Harriet wrote her letters, as she was told, and when the time came, saved her world.

I simply offer that. A good read.

The books I found most helpful for the time period of my novel are listed below, with many thanks to the authors who so painstakingly did the original work.

Berlin, Ira.
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America.
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

Betts, Edwin Morris, ed.
Thomas Jefferson's Farm Book.
Monticello, VA: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1999.

Franklin, John Hope, and Loren Schweninger.
Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Greenberg, Kenneth, ed.
Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Mellon, James, ed.
Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember.
New York: Avon Books, 1988.

Styron, William.
The Confessions of Nat Turner.
New York: Vintage Books, 1967.