Thanks to Ebele Mogo, president of the Engage Africa Foundation, who answered my call for help with the Igbo. Much like my work with Joanne, I sent her my clumsy attempts, along with my thoughts and intentions, and she translated the concepts for language and cultural appropriateness. I am deeply grateful to her for sharing her creativity with me.
Thanks to Irene Gallo, Tor’s art director, and Larry Rostant, my cover artist, for letting me have a little bit of a hand in the cover. I have been making Regency dresses for “research” since I started the series and asked if I could make this one. They were game and said yes.
So, that dress on the cover?
I made that.
And I also need to thank the unknown embroiderer who did the beadwork on the sari I built the dress from. Everything that is special about the dress is the work of someone who I have no way of identifying. While I know that it’s period correct to make a dress from a sari and not know the craftsperson, this is one place where I truly wish I could be anachronistic. It’s beautiful and I wish I could thank them by name.
Of course, thanks to Jane Austen. I borrowed a number of lines of text from her to describe the women of color on Antigua. As an example, Louisa shares a description with Emma Watson of The Watson: “Her skin was very brown but clear, smooth, and glowing with beauty, which, with a lively eye, a sweet smile, and an open countenance, gave beauty to attract, and expression to make that beauty improve on acquaintance.” I’ll let you find the others, but just remark that one of them is a description of Jane Austen herself.
And, finally, thank you. Thank you for following Jane and Vincent through the early years of their marriage. May your own Muses treat you with kindness.
A Note on History
I’ll be honest: when I sent Lord Verbury to Antigua at the end of Without a Summer, I did it before much research about Antigua. I’d picked it because in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas goes to Antigua to check on his estates. I had the idea of showing part of the offstage action that happens in that novel.
The first place this came back to bite me was that it completely destroyed the plot that I had pitched to Tor. The original synopsis ends with a slave revolt modeled on the 1791 Haitian Revolution. The problem is that when I started researching, there were forty British forts on Antigua. Forty. It was also Britain’s major naval base in the Caribbean. There was no way, even if I could make the revolt succeed, that the people of color would be able to hold the island. It had too much military significance for Britain to allow it, which meant that the novel, and the series, would have ended with blood and more blood. I did significant revisions to wind up with the plot you see here.
The other thing that I did not understand prior to researching the novel was the enormous differences between the slave system in the United States and in the Caribbean. Both were horrific, but in different ways. In the United States, there was the prospect of escape to the North. In the Caribbean, the enslaved Africans were on islands. There was no escape. Because of that, they had comparatively more freedom of movement than those in the United States. But “comparatively” is the operative word. The enslaved Africans had to grow their own food, in addition to laboring in the cane fields. The surplus from these “sustenance plots” formed the basis of a second economy on the island, complete with market days. Since these market days formed the basis for much of the food served at the great house, the white slaveholders would turn a blind eye to movement around the island by the women who did most of the marketing.
This was countered by the fact that sugarcane was a year-round crop. In the American South, there was an off-season, but in Antigua, the enslaved people literally worked from sunup to sundown, every day.
In addition, the ratio between blacks and whites in the United States and Antigua were vastly different. In the United States, white people outnumbered the enslaved Africans. The population was denied access to education as a way to solidify the white slaveholders’ claim of superiority. In Antigua, there were approximately ten enslaved Africans to every white person. As a result, there weren’t enough white people for the skilled labor required on the island. Slaveholders regarded the ability to read and write as a valuable asset and would make certain that the people they had enslaved were educated. Lord Verbury’s decision to educate Frank would not have been the generous gesture that it might have appeared in the United States. He would have seen it as an effective use of resources.