As painful as it was, reading about sexual violence toward Black women and girls helped me with necessary creative depictions. My book could not have been written without Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye as well as Beloved, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple—this last book is so special to me because Ms. Walker is a native of Eatonton, Georgia, the home of my maternal ancestors. （My mother was one of Ms. Walker’s teachers.）
My mother—Trellie James Jeffers—published an early germinal essay about colorism in the Black community, “The Black Black Woman and the Black Middle Class,” which allowed me to witness （vicariously） intra-racist sexism in African American communities. Another essay by her, “From the Old Slave Shack: Memoirs of a Teacher,” offers historical background about Mama’s experiences attending segregated schools in Eatonton, Georgia, in the 1930s and 1940s, before attending Spelman College in 1951.
The history of slavery provides the spine of this novel. Some texts that offered “deep background” were Boubacar Barry’s Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, which excavates eighteenth-century slave trading history in Wolof-speaking areas of West Africa, and Walter Rucker’s Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture, and Power, about Asante peoples of West Africa, those who would come to be called “Coromantee.” Sylviane Diouf’s Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas is a must-read for anyone interested in Muslim history on the American side of the Atlantic. And Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History gives background information about the brutal transatlantic slave trade. In addition, the digitized Georgia Archives provided information about eighteenth-century slave and Native American codes, as well as Land Lottery records. Henry Louis Gates’s edited The Classic Slave Narratives, which include Jacobs’s as well as Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies, continue to be so important to me.
Ailey’s family lives on land that was stolen from Native Americans; this is why this book begins with the original inhabitants of central Georgia. Four wonderful books on early Creek and Cherokee histories are Michael Green’s The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis; Claudio Saunt’s A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816; Theda Purdue’s Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866; and Angela Pulley Hudson’s Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South.
And I must give a final shout-out to Tiya Miles, who does work in what is called Afro-Indigenous studies—or more colloquially Red-Black studies. When I read her two books, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story and Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, I experienced something like a “happy” shout in church. Before I read these books, the Afro-Euro-Creek characters of Wood Place were still rolling around in my head. I was sure my novel was possible, but I didn’t yet have the nerve to write it. Reading Tiya Miles’s two books gave me that nerve. I remain so grateful for her important scholarship.
About the Author
HONORéE FANONNE JEFFERS is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of five poetry volumes, the latest of which, The Age of Phillis, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, and has published writing in The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, and more. For her research on the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley Peters—which inspired The Age of Phillis—Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, a learned organization for the study of early American history, to which fourteen U.S. presidents have been elected. Jeffers is critic at large for Kenyon Review and teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Oklahoma.
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