The Mapmaker's Children (33 page)

M
APPING
S
ARAH WITH
S
ARAH

According to the moleskine journal I tote just about everywhere, the first scratch of an idea for this novel came on June 5, 2011. I couldn't get a woman's voice out of my head. She kept saying,
A dog is not a child
. At the market where I was buying peppers, at night while listening to my husband snore, while brewing my tea and baking biscuits, while walking my dog through our neighborhood…she called to me from the steps of the Apple Hill house.

When I finally wrote down the phrase on June 5, I swung open the front door and out came a dozen hastily penned pages of contemporary New Charlestown. As with my other novels, I knew the names immediately: Eden and Jack Anderson.

It's funny how characters come full-formed to an author. Our duty is to dig, gently but fervently, to unearth the narrative around them. And so I excavated the fictional landscape. I knew the Andersons lived near the true Harpers Ferry and Charles Town cities in West Virginia. I Googled home addresses: Liberty Street, Duncan Field Lane, Washington Street. All were lined with Queen Anne homes featuring elaborate porches and gabled roofs. Beautiful architecture. The real estate listings said they were facades to older foundations dating back to the 1800s. My story wheels had begun to turn. I had a place, a vision of the setting.

I immediately began outlining Eden's chapters, but it wasn't until September 2011 that John Brown's name appeared in my journal. A genealogy tree transcribed from the Internet wormed its way down the page alongside another scene I couldn't get out of my head. Scribbled illegibly as if I might blink and forget:
Jail cell. Warden. John, hung before noon. Wife. Daughters
. Then there she was, Sarah Brown.

Her character details spilled out like a cup running over. Freddy, Ms. Silverdash, Cleo, and the Miltons, too. All seemed to crowd my imagination, hollering to have their names added to the playbill, to be remembered.

S
ARAH
B
ROWN
Courtesy of the West Virginia State Archives

By October, I'd begun historical research on the Brown family, Sarah in particular. I was fascinated by her nearly forgotten life. A gifted artist, early feminist, abolitionist, friend of the famed Alcott family (Louisa May and the rest), familiar with all the leading men of the Underground Railroad and John Brown's Secret Six Committee, highly educated, a minter, an orchardist, a teacher of orphans, devoted to children not her own, called the most beautiful of John Brown's offspring, and yet never wed, never engaged, even as all of her siblings married off. It grated on me—not knowing her story.

So I began what would end up totaling over three years of mapping Sarah across the country. In Concord, Massachusetts, I visited Orchard House, where she stayed with the Alcotts while at Franklin Sanborn's private school; Boston, where she visited “Friends” of her father, John Brown. In Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, I walked the town from beginning to end, the railroad tracks to the riverbank. With my own dad by my side, I went into the firehouse where the infamous Harpers Ferry Raid met its bloody finale. There, Sarah's brothers and other raiding men died together, slave and free, black and white, all dust now.

In the swelter of that 2012 summer's day, we were silenced by the ominous substance of history underfoot and rising up in the Virginia heat. Then my dad said, “All those sons—those boys…dead. A tragedy.” His words gave me goose bumps.

A hundred and fifty years later, a father stood mourning lost futures. I have two brothers, Jason and Andrew. As a sister, I can't imagine the pain
of losing them. Call me selfish, but if I were in Sarah Brown's shoes, I'd just want my family back—even though the cause was righteous, her loss was considered the catalyst for the Civil War and a nation's emancipation from slavery.

I visited Charles Town next. The old courthouse where John Brown was imprisoned, put to trial, and hung still stands stately and white across the street from the clock tower bank, town hall, and steeple church. So quaintly Americana and yet its history is steeped in violence and heartache. It was there that I clearly saw Sarah and Eden, side by side, as an iconological mirror.

I continued to follow Sarah's trail from West Virginia across the continent to Red Bluff, California. The gracious director of Archives and Collections at the Saratoga Historical Foundation Museum opened the doors to me off hours for a private research visit. She patiently answered my litany of questions, provided me all the documents the museum had on hand, allowed me to take photos, walk the rose-brambled grounds, and stand before Sarah's paintings.

A
UTHOR
S
ARAH
M
C
C
OY AT THE
S
ARATOGA
H
ISTORICAL
F
OUNDATION
M
USEUM
.

The five on display are the only publicly remaining artworks by Sarah Brown: pencil and crayon portraits of John and Mary Brown; oil paintings titled
Peaches
,
View of Mt. Diablo
, and
Carmel Mission
. Between her art education and commissioned pieces, there must've been more. But like her life, they seemed to have come and gone without detailed chronicling and, so, they're buried beside the people she aided as an abolitionist, the orphans she nurtured, the family, friends, and local community to whom she remained devoted.

J
OHN
B
ROWN AND
M
ARY
D
AY
B
ROWN: PORTRAITS BY
S
ARAH
B
ROWN
Courtesy of the Saratoga Historical Foundation

I walked the town of Red Bluff, too. Though 3,000 miles apart, its Main Street was nearly identical to Concord, Harpers Ferry, and Charles Town, with residents going about their daily errands, children following along, and businessmen waving hello to one another just as they did in the nineteenth century. I went to Sarah's gravesite, sat beside her on a bed of pinecones, and listened to the autumn leaves whisper. I say confidently that I felt Sarah there in Madronia Cemetery and believe she was a guardian angel to the writing of this novel. With me in my darkest hours was a woman who made an unconventional life into an extraordinary legacy. I gained strength in the faith she displayed. I was inspired by her as a creative, independent woman.

But please understand, I didn't set out to write a biographical account of Sarah Brown or a romanticized version of the facts. My role as the storyteller was simply to use the tools of my craft and imagine what Sarah's life might've looked like, how she felt, her struggles and joys, what she
might've dreamed, even as I dreamed her into existence. I did my homework for years: researched newspaper articles, letters, distant Brown relations alive today, Sarah's real-life art, Underground Railroad artifacts, symbols, and codes, bootleggers, baby dolls, and a colossal amount of John Brown information available in library archives.

The pictorial symbols I described are factual to the documented Underground Railroad and Slave Quilt codes. I united those cryptograms with the speculated use of children's dolls to smuggle contraband, spy messages, and medicines to slaves in antebellum America and during the Civil War. Most informative to my story development was the debate surrounding the “Nina” doll on display at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia. The family who donated “Nina” claimed her to be an example of the doll-smuggling theory. Passed down through the generations as legend, she gained celebrity today due to her ambiguous past. “Nina” fueled my imagined trajectory for Sarah and Eden.

Admittedly, I took liberties with some of the historical events and facts. I was more concerned with capturing Sarah's heart and future impact on Eden in the present day than on writing an official profile. This book is wholly my own invention.