If you could travel months and years into the past or the future, would you do it? I’ve often thought about particular moments in history. And while I haven’t yet discovered a time machine to carry me back, I can enter into the lives and times of others by writing novels that take place in the past. Sometimes I get so involved in the characters’ predicaments, I’m startled to see members of my own family returning home, wearing modern clothing and carrying pizza boxes. For this novel I asked myself a question: If I had lived in the time of slavery, would I have accepted it or fought against it? I spent weeks and weeks reading about the 1850s—about politics, Ohio, how much things cost, and how people traveled and lived and ate and worked. To help me write Lucinda’s letters and those of the young men who admire her, I read real letters of young courting couples. Then I studied slavery—Northern and Southern viewpoints, original slave narratives, abolitionists’ writings. I found a book with yellowing pages, written in 1856, about fugitive slaves who escaped to Canada.
