Blogging Mary Bowser

Ever wonder what authors talk about when readers aren't around?

Wayyyyy back in October, I found out that The Secrets of Mary Bowser would be published on May 15. But it was only a couple of weeks ago that I began to wonder what I would actually do on May 15. And, for that matter, on May 14, and on May 16. I had no idea. So I asked some of my friends who are published authors.

For their answers, and my zany, zany May 15th travels, check out "Sex Tips for Authors (Well, What Authors Trade Instead of Sex Tips)" today's guest post on the Powell's blog.

Recycling is very important to keep the planet healthy. So I've gone green (and red!) by recycling a February entry from this blog for today's guest post "Fear of a Red Tractor" at Powells.com. But the pictures I did for the Powells version are supercute.

Speaking of supercute, check out this supercute photo I just tweeted with the message "Blue v Gray meet White v Red. Vote 4 The Secrets of Mary Bowser 4 for the Sutter Home Wine June book club.



Voting ends Monday, May 21! My sister says you can vote multiple times, although I of course would not openly advocate such blatant election rigging.

From today's guest post at Powells.com/blog:

"We're giving you a French flap," my publisher said.

"That's fantastic!" I said.

Then I immediately Googled "French flap."

Which it turns out is not, as I feared, some new variant on a Brazilian wax.

A French flap is a . . .

Want to know how that sentence ends (hint, it may point the way to saving the American book publishing industry)? Check out the full post over at the Powells website.

To an author, librarians are superheroes. First, they are incredible sources when we are researching and writing. Then, they are vital connectors for helping readers find our finished books. And if librarians in general are superheroes, Nancy Pearl is the superduperhero, the librarian so cool she has her own action figure. So when Nancy Pearl defines the four elements that make a person fall in love with a book, who wouldn't listen?

I did, and I blogged about it today for Powell's. Check it out on their site.

I didn't know I was going to be a novelist.

Or a Civil War Enthusiast.

So how did this happen?



Find out in today's guest post at powells.com -- the first of five I'll be doing this week.

I knew the Oregonian would be reviewing my novel on Sunday. I also knew the Sunday Oregonian actually comes out on Saturday. So Saturday afternoon, I strolled down to the store, and pawed through the paper. I chose a store that also sells things like PeptoBismol. Because it is incredibly nerve- and stomach-wracking to know you are about to read a stranger's words judging your work.

But it turns out I didn't need to swig down any pink bismuth after all. It's a great review (if you don't believe me, have a look for yourself).

And if you're interested in The Secrets of Lois Leveen as well as The Secrets of Mary Bowser , check out this interview.

The UK version of my book arrived today--thanks to Suzie Doore, Francine Toon, and all the wonderful folks at Hodder & Stoughton, for bringing my book to readers across the pond.

Click on the MORE button to see how a free woman of color became a free woman of colour!

Not-so-undercover exposé: Partying with librarians! Had drinks with a couple of librarians last night. Loose-lipped, I admitted I'd checked WorldCat earlier in the day to see what libraries already had my book.

"I'm in the Library of Congress!" I kvelled. Even though I, and the librarians, knew this was really not saying much. The LOC pretty much adds every book to its holdings. But still, it sounds so OFFICIAL. Like maybe what has John Boehner weeping this week is some touching scene I wrote.

The partying librarians, however, were all business. "What're your LOC subject headings?" one asked.

"I dunno," I said.

The librarians looked at me in shock, and then shouted in unison, "TEXT A LIBRARIAN!" Which it turns out is a nifty service in which you text message a question and somewhere a librarian toiling in darkest night researches the answer and texts you back. It's just like google but with that touch of civic pride that any library engagement involves.

So here, fresh off the text message, are the Subject Headings for *The Secrets of Mary Bowser*:

Bowser, Mary Elizabeth, ca. 1840- --Fiction.
Freedmen --Fiction.
Women spies --Fiction.
United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865 --Secret service--Fiction.

I'm thrilled that The Secrets of Mary Bowser has been chosen as a finalist for the June selection in the Sutter Home Wine book club. Please vote! Tell your friends to vote! http://on.fb.me/IDbrbG
And remember to always drink, and read, responsibly.

It's World Book Night. Or at least English-speaking World Book Night. All over the UK, Ireland, and the US, people are giving away free books. Bestsellers. Classics. Books donated by authors and publishers, to spread the joy of reading.

I paired up with some of the staff at Multnomah County Library to give away Bel Canto by Ann Patchett.

We went to some of the parks downtown, like the rest of the pushers.

The first book is free. After that, you need a library card.


I was particularly pleased to turn my leopard-print bicycle into a minibook mobile. You can ride 3 miles with 20 copies of a bestselling novel onboard.

The highlight of the day was meeting these kids

They're from a small town in Washington. They were visiting Portland together because one of them is about to leave for military training.

We gave them 3 books. They're giving a lot more.

They did love the cat ears.

Dangerfield Newby. That's the sort of name you can't make up as a novelist. I'll be reading a passage about Newby tomorrow, and I'm afraid I'll choke.

Not over his fantastic name. Over the letters his wife, who was a slave, wrote him, once he was free and trying to save the money to buy her.

Here's one--real people, real letter.

Is this a brilliant, touching way to show the horror of war, or a Martha Stewart project gone awry?
http://bit.ly/HUB4yK
On the one hand, it makes visible the thousands who died. On the other hand, it looks like a garden party, albeit a somber one.

The good news: you're free. The (potentially) bad news: as in free to leave the country.

Today's Civil War fact: The law that emancipated DC slaves compensated owners $300 per slave. It also offered those former slaves $100 each to emigrate.

It's one of the sharpest examples of the racism of many (though certainly not all) white abolitionists, who might have objected to slavery as an institution but were not quite up for accepting blacks as equal citizens of the United States. The colonization movement mostly focused on sending former slaves to Liberia, although the DC law didn't specify where a former slave had to go.

From the perspective of free blacks--whether newly freed or whether born free to free parents--emigration was more complicated. Some free blacks chose, even without any compensation, to move to Liberia, or to Haiti or Canada. Why? Because even in states were slavery was illegal, discrimination was not. Schools, jobs, housing, public transit, the right to vote--any of that might be denied to someone purely based on race. In some cases, well into the second half of the twentieth century.

150 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln paid slaveowners $1million. Yes, that Abraham Lincoln.

The slaves in Washington D.C. were freed through "compensated emancipation." That means slaveowners were paid $300 for each of their slaves, who then became permanently free. The U.S. government picked up the tab, allocating a million dollars to buy the freedom of three thousand slaves living in D.C.

This was not the first time Lincoln advocated for compensated emancipation. Earlier in 1862, he proposed paying $400 per slave to emancipate all the slaves in "the border states"--states that had not seceded but still allowed slavery. Why? Here's how I explain it in The Secrets of Mary Bowser, by putting words into the mouth of Confederate cabinet member Judah Benjamin:

“Four hundred dollars for every slave in Delaware is but half the cost of one day of war for the Union. Four hundred dollars for every slave in Maryland, Missouri, the District of Columbia, and Mrs. Lincoln’s own Kentucky would be the cost of eighty-seven days of war. Lincoln gambles that compensated emancipation will shorten the war by that many days or more, by ensuring the loyalty of the border states.”

The larger compensated emancipation was never passed--and the slaves in the border states were the last to be emancipated, legally. They were not freed until *after* the Civil War, because the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to slaves in states that had seceded.

Tomorrow, I'll write about the other $100 Lincoln was willing to pay per slave in Washington, D.C.

"The chambermaid had left the room sobbing for joy...Were I a drinker I would get on a Jolly spree today"

I know that sounds like a scene out of a naughty film. But it's not.

The weeping chambermaid and would-be Jolly drinker (he prayed instead) were among the first slaves emancipated during the Civil War. In April 1862, eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, President Lincoln and Congress worked together (imagine that!) to pass special legislation freeing the 3,000 slaves in the nation's capital.

Emancipation Day is still celebrated each year in Washington, D.C. It's important not just for changing the lives of those 3,000 people, and their families and friends, but also for providing a significant precursor to the Emancipation Proclamation, and beyond that to the ending of slavery throughout the United States.

For those of you who aren't Civil War-obsessed, it means one more day before you have to file your income taxes, because April 16 is a holiday in D.C.

But really, who isn't Civil War obsessed????

There's an article in The New York Times today about Ford's efforts to revive Lincoln as car brand.

May I suggest possible new models:
The Emancipator
The Rail Splitter
The Great Orator
The Honest Abe
and for the sports car, The Abey Baby

Any others to add to the list?

The legacy of the Civil War lives on, from spittin' bullets 60 years after the war ended, to burying a Union soldier TOMORROW, here in Portland.

Today's Oregonian recounts the strange tale of the Civil War veteran whose remains will be interred (actually re-interred) here this week.

It seems a little weird to show up at the burial of someone who died decades before I was born. But how many more opportunities will there be to lay to rest the remains of a survivor of Vicksburg, Shiloh, Iuka, Memphis, and Andersonville?

In honor of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, here's my own Civil War vampire update.


1. Nicholas Cage was possibly a Confederate vampire. But probably not.

2. Lincoln did enjoy an evening stroll about Washington and might have taken down a vampire or two some night. But probably not.

3. Henry Ward Beecher decried avarice for visiting young men "in dreams, and vampire-like" feasting on its victim. This was in one of his "Seven Lectures to Young Men," delivered early in his career, before he became the subject of the sex scandal of the century . . . for preying vampire-like on one of the women in his congregation.

Actually the most UnDead thing about Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter may be that Johnny Cash seems to be doing the voiceover from beyond the grave.

Fort Pillow, perhaps most horrific massacre of the Civil War.

Community's Pillows and Blankets episode, definitely the most hilarious parody of KenBurn's Civil War.

When Confederate troops led by Nathan Bedford Forrest overran Fort Pillow in Tennessee, they slaughtered the black Union troops rather than taking them prisoner. This remains one of the most controversial episodes of the war.

On the other hand, the Community episode parodying Ken Burns' documentary was absolutely hilarious (and free of racist vitriol). I'm pretty sure the writers had no idea there was a Fort Pillow in the actual war ... probably for the best.

Another Passover-inspired Civil War fact: The African American spiritual "Go Down Moses," aka "Let My People Go," was sung during the War by enslaved blacks who took their freedom by fleeing to Fort Monroe, a Union army stronghold in Virginia.

The song was published by a chaplain who heard it there, and became popular in the North. It is sometimes credited as the first black spiritual, although I'm a little dubious about counting publication by a white chaplain as the marker of what was the first black spiritual; whoever was singing this song when they arrived at Fort Monroe probably knew other spirituals as well, and no one can carbon-date which was sung first.

"Go Down Moses" remains one of the best known and most sung of the early African American spirituals. For many people, the song seemed to capture a moral righteousness they believed the Union could and should claim (although publication of the song pre-dated the Emancipation Proclamation, and even the fate of the "contraband" fugitive slaves who'd stolen their own freedom by fleeing to Fort Monroe was not permanently settled at that point).

While visiting the Union encampments in Virginia, Lincoln reportedly joined in prayer meetings at which "Go Down Moses" aka "Let My People Go" was sung. It was subsequently performed by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s, by Paul Robeson in the early twentieth century, and by many Jews at Passover seders over this past weekend.

Please note that it would be incorrect to assume that Lincoln also chanted the Four Questions while visiting Union encampments, nor was he known to have broken into a rousing rendition of "Dayenu."

Hmm, I seem to have intermingled my Passover-themed Playmobil and my Civil War Playmobil sets.

Harriet Tubman was called "the Moses of her people," underscoring how important the Exodus story was for many enslaved blacks, and for the free blacks and whites who were inspired to fight against slavery. However, Charlton Heston was never called "the Harriet Tubman of his people."

During her years in slavery, Tubman suffered what today we might call a traumatic brain injury. Some scholars believe that injury led her to have visions--perhaps delusions--of invincibility, which influenced her decisions to return to the South to lead other slaves to freedom. I don't think it detracts any from the bravery of what she did, either during those liberation runs or during the Civil War, when she gathered intelligence and accompanied Union troops on raids into rebelling states.

Happy Passover and Good Friday!

You know you are a book geek when . . . although half your luggage is books, you *still* stop into a local bookstore during the trip, just to see what they stock.

This wonderful bookstore on Spring Garden Road in Halifax, Nova Scotia has an amazing selection. I was head over heels when the staff told me they've already order The Secrets of Mary Bowser. I'll be sending friends and family in Halifax there (note: complete strangers should also feel free to patronize Bookmark).

Di-VERSE Civil War fact: Sweet ol' Emily Dickinson wrote most of her poems during the bloodiest years of the Civil War. An average of over one poem PER DAY.

Creepy little meditations about what it means to live in a time when an unprecedented number of people are dying, and how to assimilate that death and destruction into your daily life (which, when there are wounded veterans returning to your town, is not so separate from the War).

I spent today listening to wonderful high school students compete in Poetry Out Loud, a national program encouraging poem recitation. Of the 12 competitors we heard at Powells, 3 will advance to the state competition at the end of the month. So in honor of them, and Emily Dickinson, here's a reflection for today's Civil War fact:

My Portion is Defeat—today—
A paler luck than Victory—
Less Paeans—fewer Bells—
The Drums don’t follow Me—with tunes—
Defeat—a somewhat slower—means—
More Arduous than Balls—

’Tis populous with Bone and stain—
And Men too straight to stoop again—,
And Piles of solid Moan—
And Chips of Blank—in Boyish Eyes—
And scraps of Prayer—
And Death’s surprise,
Stamped visible—in Stone—

There’s somewhat prouder, over there—
The Trumpets tell it to the Air—
How different Victory
To Him who has it—and the One
Who to have had it, would have been
Contender—to die—

File under: I want a pony. And also my freedom, and that of 4 million other slaves.

Mary Bowser was only one of many African Americans whose intelligence proved critical to the Union army.

"On Jan. 24, 1862, a slave named Harry escaped to the Union picket line. Rather than return him to his owner, as other officers might have, Captain William Heine took him on as a guide and servant. He gave him a uniform, a pistol, a sabre and 'a good horse.' A full year before the Emancipation Proclamation or the enlistment of black soldiers, Harry became the first black cavalryman of the war. He knew every road and path in the area, and . . . [five days later] he was leading an armed raid against his former owners." Harry's story is included in a great recent piece in Disunion in the New York Times.

Great bikinis of the Civil War. Let's face it, we've all googled ourselves. But when I googled to try to find the UK cover for my book, imagine my surprise to get this search result.

Turns out, a Brit website, bookgroupbooks.com picked my book for its choice for a best book club read for May (meaning it's released in May. You can read it any ol' month thereafter).

And on the same page of the blog, they have a list of best 2011 bookclub books for women, BECAUSE EVERYONE KNOWS THE PICTURE IS WHAT GETS YOU PEOPLE TO READ ONLINE POSTS is illustrated with this picture of Filipinas in bikinis.

Petticoat Dis-Junction: a (transgendered) Civil War fact in honor of International Women's Day.

Women fought on the front lines in the Civil War. Some even sported facial hair, although alas not as fab as their male compatriots. Loreta Janeta Velazquez (pictured above) fought for the Confederates, disguised as a man. Jennie Hodgers fought for the Union, disguised as a man. Turns out, when you didn't do physicals as part of enlistment/draft, it was much easier to disguise self as what self was not.

Mary Bowser, of course, did not disguise herself as a man. She simply made use of the disguise provided in a culture that didn't find a black woman capable of "intelligence," in either sense of the word.

Happy International Women's Day, whatever you're wearing.

In a Shakespeare v. Ben Franklin Smackdown ... I know who this writer would root for. Or should I say, for whom this writer would root.

Shakespeare wrote. A lot. For example, he wrote, "Never a borrower nor a lender be." (Apparently that did not apply to body parts, as he was one to implore, "Lend me your ears.")

Franklin wrote as well, although he did many other things, too. Like founding a library.

When it comes to books, I am all for being a borrower and a lender. I am a heavy user, currently having over a hundred books out from the library, with 15 more on hold. But my addiction extends beyond the books.

Because I'm not satisfied with using public library books in the privacy of my own home. Last night, I was at the fabulous culmination to our library's Everybody Reads program sponsored by Multnomah County Library--and just so you know how rocking our library life is here, I was out until past midnight. This afternoon, I'm leading a history workshop at the Canby Public Library. Tonight, I'm having dinner with librarians from FIVE different library systems in two states, to talk with them about Mary Bowser.

Tomorrow I may be going through library withdrawal. If you see a jittery, bespectacled woman outside your local branch library, that would be me.

Books do not fall from the sky. Which is why as part of Portland's Everybody Reads program, I'm teaching a seminar on HeidiDurrow's The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, looking at the 'literary lineage' of the novel.

We've covered everyone from William Blake to Hans Christian Andersen to Nella Larsen to Langston Hughes to Audre Lorde -- in just three sessions. And tonight, we'll be hearing from Heidi herself, when she speaks at "The Schnitz" here in Portland (for out of towners, the Schnitz is a lovely performance venue, not a sausage stand).

It's made me wonder what people will see as the literary precursors to my novel. I've got my own list, but readers may see some connections I don't.

Civil War thought du jour:

Jeremy Lin-coln

Abraham Lincoln never had an ice cream sundae. Neither, for that matter, did Dolley Madison.

Ice cream sundaes did not exist until the 1890s.

This *is so* a fascinating fact related to *The Secrets of Mary Bowser,* on account of Mary not being able to go out for an ice cream sundae that did not yet exist. You may set a scene in an ice cream emporium in the 1850s, but you do not want to fudge the historical accuracy by having anyone order a sundae.

Ha ha, get it? "Fudge"!

Things that make authors vomit . . . today's fascinating fact about The Secrets of Mary Bowser is a brief quiz! No puking required!

One of the many things that happens between an author handing in the final manuscript and a book being published is the book manuscript going out to various reviewers.

So in honor of the fact that Kirkus, once described by the New York Times as 'reliably cantankerous' will post its review of The Secrets of Mary Bowser on Monday, here's a quiz.

Which recent bestsellers did Kirkus sum up with the following phrases:

1. This genuine page-turner offers a whiff of white liberal self-congratulation that won’t hurt its appeal and probably spells big success.

2. Juicy melodrama obscured by the intricacies of problem-solving.

3. A solid sophomore effort, and hopefully a sign of even better things to come.

4. While no masterpiece, this work nevertheless contributes in good measure to the current and very welcome revitalization of the historical novel.

And NO, none of those are about my book.

(btw, Kirkus does a huge amount of plot summary, so if you read a review of my book, it will completely decimate the actual pleasure you might have gotten from reading the book. I will post their one-sentence assessment when it goes live on Monday, so you can see how I fare compared to 1-4 above).

Civil War fact du jour: Sure you know about Obama 's Navy Seals. But did you know Lincoln had a secret Air Force?

Here's a lovely picture, courtesy of Harper's Weekly. This was big-time techno-warfare, enabling Union trips to reconnoiter over Confederate lines.

Speaking of Oscar trivia: yesterday, I ask about the first black Oscar winner. What other African American women have won best supporting actress awards?

Octavia Spencer won tonight. Mo'Nique won three years ago. But in the 70 years between Hattie McDaniel in 1939 and Mo'Nique in 2009, there was only one other black woman to win.

Hint: everyone let out a big whooooopey when it was announced.

Today's Civil War fact is also a bit of Oscar trivia:
Who was the first African American to win an Oscar?

That'd be Hattie McDaniel, for her role as Mammy in *Gone With the Wind.*
An offensively stereotyped character in an offensive film. But as McDaniels put it, better to make $700 a week playing a maid, than $7 a week being one.

She did both in her lifetime. And she also was part of a lawsuit to challenge racial covenants (neighborhood "agreements" making it illegal to sell or rent homes to blacks--or other groups, such as Jews).

There are a lot of enslaved women in my novel, and not a Mammy-stereotype among them. I wish McDaniel had lived long enough to see an America that's more interested in these kind of stories.

One of the weirder types of research I did for *The Secrets of Mary Bowser* involved figuring out what medical remedies people tried in the mid-1800s. This is gross and hilarious stuff, and I only wish I could have worked more of it into the book.

So here's a tip that didn't make it in, courtesy of The Family Nurse, published in the 1830s: spirits of turpentine can be used "to bathe the loins and seat of the kidneys" to cure children of "involuntary discharges of urine."

Which seems like bad medicine, because I think most people, upon finding their loins and kidney seats bathed in turpentine, would be discharging some rather unpleasant material, regardless of age.

What do Jefferson Davis and Humphrey Bogart have in common?

Probably damn little, aside from this Civil War-ish factoid. Today is the 150th anniversary of the inauguration of elected Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Don't be confused: the same dude was already Confederate President, having been appointed to the position a year earlier by a provisional constitutional convention. He was then elected president in November, 1861, and officially inaugurated in February 1862.

It was a rainy, miserable inauguration day. But it did end with a raising musical number . . . "The Marseillaise." Which as we all know is French for, "that catchy tune they sing during Casablanca to piss of the Nazis."

The first admonition not to judge a book by its cover came in 1860, just one year prior to the Civil War. Actually, the warning was against judging a book by its binding. But still.

Civil War fact of the day: during the war, paper was in such short supply through much of the Confederacy that people would reuse sheets, writing over an old letter or receipt by turning the sheet a quarter-turn and scrawling in a different direction. Which is what the talented designer at William Morrow did to make this pretty cover.

As for the orange ribbon, it's taken from one of my favorite early scenes in the book. I've never liked the color orange much (and neither does Mary Bowser) but yet I love this cover. Insert joke about importance of overcoming color prejudice here.

Welcome to the special place in my mind where Godey's Ladies' Book meets the J. Geils Band.

Ever wonder where the phrase "fashion plate" comes from? In the mid-nineteenth century magazines like Godey's began including "plates" or pictures of the hottest fashions. Get your corset gussied up tight, ladies, because they are showing some bare elbows in Paree.

The advent of print media technology that made such plates cheap enough to reproduce (not to mention postal service that made magazine delivery more feasible) contributed to a new era of female consumerism. These plates were so treasured that women would sometimes save them and hang them as wall art (think of it as the Christie Brinkley poster thumbtacked to the teen bedroom running that J Geils soundtrack).

Women of the emerging American middle class--aspiring to be Victorian "angels in the house"--could now be told how to dress, and how to comport themselves, with charming regularity. An exciting new era, even if that baby does look a little Edward Gorey-esque. At least the young girl approaching it is armed with a saber. I'm sure everything will turn out just peachy, aren't you?

President's Day Factoid: if the main character of your novel were about to look Abraham Lincoln in the eye, how would you know what color those eyes were?

Right after the Confederate capital of Richmond fell to the Union army, President Lincoln came to see the captured city. He visited the Confederate White House, which Jefferson Davis had fled, and even sat in Davis' office chair. You *know* I was not going to miss a chance to stage a scene in which Mary Bowser meets the man with whom she'd allied herself as a Union spy.

And thanks to a detail obtained for me by a very helpful gentleman from the Lincoln Presidential Library, Mary looks the Great Emancipator right in the grays of his peepers to congratulate him on the victory.

When it comes to historical fiction, the devil is in the details.

Fear of a red tractor. That is what keeps a novelist up at night.

Remember the good ol' days when barber, surgeon, and dentist was a single occupation?

Okay, maybe those days weren't so good. But these days, everyone's a literary critic. Including Dr. Miller, who's also my dentist.

Last year, he told me about a book he'd been reading. A book he really liked. Until he got to a description of a field wherein there sat "a red John Deere tractor." He immediately put the book down, never to finish it. Because, as he put it, "everyone knows, John Deere has never made a red tractor. That was put in there by some New York editor."

Only an Oregon dentist can make New York editor sound like such an unseemly villain.

But Dr. Miller was onto something. Writers are always trying to add specificity to our descriptions, to make things more real. Except that when you get that *real* detail wrong, you have blown it big time.

As it happens, one of my New York editors, the lovely Laurie Chittenden, is originally from Virginia. She suggested that the bird's nest I'd tucked into a magnolia tree on the very first page of my novel should have gone into a dogwood, because that's the state tree of Virginia.

Now, I'm an obsessed lunatic. I'd already checked on whether magnolias grew in Richmond. But here was a bona fide Virginian making the case for dogwood. So what did I do? I emailed one of the Virginia state arborists, just to make sure that a bird would actually nest in a dogwood if it were in the exact location of the tree on page 1 of my novel. Only when he said yes did I make the change.

As you can imagine, this level of obsession takes an awful lot out of a novelist. I was reading the galleys of my book last fall, and lo and behold, I realized I'd made a reference to a straight razor. You know, the olde timey open-bladed razor that any nineteenth-century character would be familiar with. And so I took my big purple pencil (the red pen of galley proofing) and Xed it out.

Why?

Because nobody called a straight razor a straight razor, until after there were safety razors (that olde timey kind everyone's dad used). Until then, they were just razors.

I swear, sometimes writing historical fiction is like pulling teeth. Just joking, Dr. Miller!

The nineteenth-century was a period of amazing innovation. In facial hair.

Indeed, the less-than-Civil War obsessed individual may not realize that sideburns were named for Union General Ambrose Burnside. But as this quiz from the fine folks at Smithsonian.com makes clear, when it came to fantastic facial hair configurations, Burnside had stiff competition.


Another fascinating fact. Especially for *The Secrets of Mary Bowser* in which a certain handsome barber figures prominently.

Tomorrow: razors! tractors! and my dentist!

Forget the cheesesteak. In antebellum Philadelphia, it was all about the pepperpot.

Given the popularity of yesterday's rat 'n' squirrel bake-off, I thought it would only be fair to discuss the culinary obsessions of the North. Or at least of Philadelphia, where about half my novel is set.

So if you were feeling peckish in the City of Brotherly Love circa 1851, you just needed to prick up your ears for the cry, "Pepperpot, smoking hot." That meant the pepperpot vendor--always an African American woman, in the depictions I've seen--was plying her signature dish. For Portlanders, think of it as being like a food cart, but without all that bulky cart business. For the rest of you, think drive-through without all that internal combustion engine.


What was in pepperpot? A lot of meat, usually tripe, oxfeet, whatever else was cheap, and then a lot of spice.

And yes, Mary does try pepperpot when she arrives in Philadelphia. Does she like it? Let's just say regional cuisine can take some getting used to.

Today's Civil War Fact: You do NOT want to buy the Jefferson Davis Cookbook.

Why not?

During the Civil War, one of the most successful Union strategies was the blockade of the Confederacy. Which meant food shortages. At a time when people in Richmond were desperate with hunger, Jeff Davis purportedly proclaimed, "A fat rat is as good as a squirrel."

A rather distressing sentiment for his constituents, both because he was advocating eating rats, and because it reveals that he saw squirrel as some standard of culinary excellence.


(Plus he may have hurt the feelings of rats who felt judged on their body size. I can just imagine some non-fat rat hearing Davis compare its more corpulent companions to mmmm tasty squirrels and thinking, "what am I, chopped liver?")

Nothing says "America's great love of history" like a Civil War reenactment encampment. Complete with PortaPotty.


Squint and you can see it, there in the background.

How is this a fascinating fact? Um, what if I mention that during the Civil War there were no chemical toilets? So often they used streams/rivers near the encampment. But not always ones DOWNRIVER from the encampment.

Not the only reason there were so many disease-induced fatalities during the War, but perhaps the grossest one.

Spend Valentine's Day at the Pleasure Garden! The antebellum Pleasure Garden, that is.

Today's Fascinating Fact from The Secrets of Mary Bowser is not about the Civil War, per se. It's about where Mary goes for a date when she is living in Philadelphia in the 1850s. Unlike me, Mary did not get to spend her teen years hanging out at the Multiplex. She got to hang out at the pleasure garden.

Less kinky than it might sound to modern ears, the pleasure garden was a feature of many 19th-century cities. Living in Philadelphia, Mary's pleasure garden of choice was Lemon Hill.

As you can see from this photograph (downloaded from the Lemon Hill website), there is no place kids would rather be. Well, maybe that is less true now that they have the Multiplex. Not to mention the Youtube. But for Mary, it really was a hot time in the city.

It's a fact: there were no Starbucks back in the days of the Stars and Bars. Which perhaps is why you never see a portrait in which Robert E. Lee is sipping a Triple Venti Sugar free, Non fat, No foam, extra caramel, with whip caramel macchiato (btw, I do not drink coffee; I had to google to get that description. I know the punctuation is off, but I'm scared to touch it, because I have no idea what any of it means).

In fact, coffee was one of the many items in short supply due to the Union blockade of the Confederacy. At least, real coffee (you know, the kind made from coffee beans) was in short supply. So desperate coffee drinkers turned to all sorts of ersatz alternatives. The most popular of which was parched corn coffee.

Which makes you wonder what the *unpopular* alternatives were.

And so concludes today's fascinating fact.

92 more days till publication! Only 92 more facts . . . oh it is so hard to choose. Lemme know if there's a fact you'd like to share or a question you'd like me to answer. Something that has something to do with my book, not with my fantastic fashion sense (answer to that is always LEOPARD).

Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis both got plastered. Or at least their walls did.

While I was researching my novel, I was fortunate to travel to Richmond, Virginia and visit the Museum of the Confederacy. It's located in the former White House of the Confederacy, which means I toured the actual rooms where Mary Bowser spied on Confederate leaders by posing as a slave.

At one point in the tour, the guide called our attention to the wallpaper in one of the rooms, which was patterned to look like wood paneling. The guide told us the same wallpaper was used in the White House in Washington, D.C.

It seems a nation can be torn apart by slavery and by war, and yet unite around household decor. Or maybe that's the other way around? Anyway, if you have a chance to visit the MOC, definitely check out the wallpaper.

Did you know that Clint Eastwood in the campiest film EVER made?

And that it happens to be about the Civil War?

Wounded prisoner, remote girls' boarding school.



How's that for today's fascinating Civil War "fact"?

Today's fascinating fact is more of a fascinating phenom, namely the mid-nineteenth-century obsession with death and mourning. In the antebellum period, death was part of life. Families experienced the death of children. Most people died at home (rather than in hospitals). And then the Civil War brought death on an unprecedented scale.

Even before the war, mourning was a highly ritualized event.

Entire stores, such as Beeson and Son's in Philadelphia, were dedicated solely to selling mourning attire. Yes, Goth chicks, a store where ALL THE CLOTHES were black.

Godey's Ladies' Book, which was sort of the Cosmo magazine of the day, but without all the sex tips, ran articles about what to wear and do in mourning (alas, these did not come in Cosmo-quiz format).

And of course, there was the exceptionally creepy practice of wearing jewelry made out of your dead loved one's hair. And not just a single lock, like some hairy version of the Italian horn. Women wove whole landscapes crafted out of different shades of dead beloveds' hair. I have yet to see the 21st century Goth chicks take that one on.

While you await the 95 more days till *The Secrets of Mary Bowser,* you can bide your time learning more about nineteenth-century-mourning attire here: http://www.librarycompany.org/laurelhill/dressed.htm

And don't worry, I won't be wearing anybody's hair but my own on book tour. Well, maybe some of the cats' but that's pretty much par for the course.

We've had some great but TOP SECRET (appropriately enough) news about The Secrets of Mary Bowser, so me and the boys celebrated with some sushi and sake.




If it seems like this is a stretch for a Fascinating Fact about the Civil War, please consider that the Union Navy was indeed involved in an incident in the Straits of Shimonoseki during the Civil War.

So yes, the Civil War in Japan, I am totally claiming that as a countdown fact, even if there is no evidence of Ulysses S. Grant ever ate the crunchy salmon skin roll.

97 Days till Publication, and here's today's fact:

Sic 'em. Or really, *Sic Semper Tyrannis* 'em. This lovely Latin phrase is on the Virginia state seal. Which, as you might guess, is NOT what this photo depicts.


This is an image of the regimental flag of the USCT 22d, a Pennsylvania unit. USCT stands for United States Colored Troops, the units in which African Americans served during the Civil War.

There are many lovely facts about the USCT to share . . . but I wanted to start with this one: the use of the same motto on the flag as on the Virginia state seal. Oh and of course that leaves-nothing-to-the-imagination image of a black soldier in uniform taking the Confederate prisoner at bayonet point. Which would have distressed Virginia's Confederate troop more?

The image was one of several USCT flags painted by the Philadelphia artist David Bustill Bowser.

Hmmm, Bowser, where have I heard that name before? Oh, but the relationship between David Bustill Bowser and Mary Bowser is definitely a story for another day. A day that is 96 days from now!

Tune in for another fascinating fact tomorrow . . .

Great sporks of the 19th century! Sounds like a Victorian curse, but actually it's literary inspiration.
AND it's today's Fascinating Fact in the 100-day countdown.

A few years back, I snapped this photograph while visiting a bunch of plantations and other historical sites in Virginia, North Carolina, and Louisiana, to research how they represented slavery. This picture was taken in a reconstruction of a slave cabin. I doubt the glass window was original; glass was expensive, certainly more of a luxury than most slave owners would have seen as befitting a structure that they perceived as more like a barn than a home. But the unfinished walls and mismatched furnishings give us some sense of how slaves lived.

The wooden utensils especially stuck in my mind. A wooden knife--who could imagine such a thing?--probably wasn't very useful. But the other sporkish cutlery . . . that was a perfect example of the everyday experience of enslaved people. As I was writing *The Secrets of Mary Bowser,* I wanted readers to understand in visceral, specific ways what it would be like to grow up surrounded by wealth and luxury--and yet live as a slave. For example, I wrote one scene in which Mary, still a child and still a slave, is asked to sit down to dinner with a white family. She is astonished at the difference of eating food "served hot in the dining room instead of snatched down cold afterward in the kitchen," and finds "the heavy silverware felt cumbersome compared to the wooden spoons" with which she always ate.

It's only a small detail. But in some ways the small details can help us understand the enormity of history.

99 Days to Publication, so here's today's entry in the 100 Fascinating Facts Countdown:

Did African Americans own slaves? It's a good question for black history month, and the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

The short--and surprising--answer is yes. But as they like to say on Facebook, "It's complicated." Or at least more complicated than a simple yes suggests.

For one thing, the vast majority of slaveowners in the U.S. were white. And even most whites didn't own slaves. So it's important not to overplay the idea of black slaveholding. But in Virginia, where my novel is set, there were blacks who owned slaves. And although they were only a small fraction of all slaveholders, today's fascinating fact is about understanding why blacks owned slaves at all.

We're 100 days away from the publication of *The Secrets of Mary Bowser* --and to celebrate, I'm launching a 100 Fascinating Facts Countdown (tip of the hat to Heidi Durrow for the idea).

The first fascinating fact is of course the one that started me on the journey to novelist: Mary Bowser was a real person. She was born a slave, freed and educated in the North, but then made the amazing choice to return to the South and *pose* as a slave in the Confederate White House to spy on Confederate President Jefferson Davis, passing what she learned to the Union through a spy ring run by her former owner. In other words, she sacrificed her freedom to help four million slaves gain theirs.

That fascinating fact took me on a path of years of researching the Civil War, which I had actually always thought was kind of boring. As you can imagine, I was totally wrong. And whether you find history fascinating or still need to be convinced, give me a 100 days, and I bet I can win you over.

What do Jon Stewart and I have in common?

Besides a deep fear that someone will unearth photos of us from our bar/bat mitzvahs and put them on the internet? (C'mon, no one wants the word to know just how gawkward--that is not a typo, that is a word I just invented--they were at age 13)

What Jon Stewart and I have in common is we luvvvvvv talking about books about slaves in the White House.

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What do Jon Stewart and Mary Bowser have in common?

They both lived in Virginia. Stewart went to Virginia to be educated at William and Mary College in the 1980s. Bowser left the state in the 1850s, after she was freed from slavery, to be educated in the North. But there the comparison falls apart, since she went back to Virginia to become a spy for the Union army, whereas he ended up in New York doing really funny late night TV.

Still, wouldn't it be beautiful if they could come together in a seven-minute book interview segment sometime this spring?

Years ago, a guy I met in an elevator asked me What determines the value of art?

I should mention that the elevator was in a building full of Chelsea art galleries, the guy was wearing a uniform from a delivery service, and my guess is he'd just happened by some piece of art that was selling for more than he made in a year.

Let's face it: art can seem intimidating to a lot of people.

So when I was asked to do a talk at Portland Art Museum, I picked a piece I really love. I thought about how to connect it to my writing. And then I set out to get the audience as excited as I was about it.


How would you describe what you see? I asked, as we stood before Marie Watt's mixed media sculpture. Here's what they told me.

What's blue and gray but NOT studied by blacks? Great @MorningEdition NPR interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates about why African Americans are less likely to study/commemorate/obsess about the Civil War than white Americans. (You can also read Coates' smart essay on the subject at the Atlantic).

Of course, as the granddaughter of Eastern European immigrants, raised in suburban New York, I never thought I'd find myself one of those who obsess about the Civil War (and yes, visit reenactments and battlefields on "vacation") . . . But the story of Mary Bowser hooked me to think about the experience of blacks during the War. It's not just that the War ended slavery; at the time, no one knew whether that would happen. So what interested me is understanding what it was like to be black, living in a place at war, hoping it would end slavery but not knowing if that would prove to be the case.

I'm hoping the novel will leaders readers of all races to understand that experience. Free and enslaved African Americans made tremendous contributions during the War, and I think this story will be a great way to learn about that--without having to hit the history textbooks (or even spend your summer touring battlefields--which I admit is kind of a mega-history-geek pursuit). And if it encourages more people to want to study the experience of people of color, especially women of color, rather than just battlefield statistics and the names of the heralded generals, I'm sure Coates won't mind seeing the phenomenon he discusses finally start to shift.

As we gather with family and friends to give thanks and overeat pie, let us all pause for a moment to obsess about staffing at Civil War military hospitals, shall we?

Here's an article I published about Chimborazo Hospital in Disunion, the New York Times' ongoing coverage of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. The race and gender roles at the hospital show how Southern society changed over the course of the War.

Nineteenth-century literary allusion du jour:

"November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year," said Margaret, standing at the window one dull afternoon, looking out at the frostbitten garden.

"That's the reason I was born in it," observed Jo pensively, quite unconscious of the blot on her nose.

Jo March and I have so much in common: authorial aspirations, inky noses, November birthdays.

But I did not have a disagreeable birthday. Instead, I had an affair.

Although my pub date is still a few months away, last week I did the first public reading for The Secrets of Mary Bowser. Normally, stuffed sinuses are not what you want when you do a reading. But when the reading is part of an event called Oregon Jewish Voices, a little nasal tonality can be right on target.

I wasn't exactly sure how my novel--in which the main character is so not Jewish that her mother is known to break into an occasional chat with Jesus--would fit into an evening of Jewish authors. So I figured I'd let the audience decide.

I started by reading a poem I wrote about visiting a friend in Germany. The poem explores how the war (not the Civil War, that other war, the one that can be hard to talk about with Germans, but even harder to avoid talking about) shadows our interactions, even in another century. As I noted to the audience, it's pretty clearly a work of "Jewish literature." Jewish person (me!) has an experience that is shaped by, and shapes, her Jewish identity, and then she reflects on it in her writing.

Then I read the prologue and the end of the first chapter of The Secrets of Mary Bowser. Although I've done readings for other things I've published, this was the first time I'd read to an audience from the novel, and it was incredibly moving to hear their real-time responses to the characters and scenes. Almost instantly, I could feel a whole auditorium full of people being caught up emotionally by this story, which has already had me caught for so long. It was about the greatest feeling an author can experience.

A girl never forgets her first time. Especially if it happens at the Airport Holiday Inn.

Just to be clear, I do mean her first time signing a new book.

I had a very memorable two days autographing bound galleys of The Secrets of Mary Bowser at the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, which brings together bookstore staff and librarians from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. These are the geekiest of book geeks. In other words, my peeps.

And two of the very bestest peeps I got to meet are Gabe Barillas and Jim Hankey, from HarperCollins.



They're like the Ernie and Bert of book selling, albeit without the stripey shirts and the rubber duckie. If the world didn't have authors, there would be no books. But if the world didn't have Gabe and Jim and their colleagues, there would be no way for readers to get books. And wouldn't that be a very sad time at the Holiday Inn?

Had breakfast today with the smart and talented Heidi Durrow. Her first novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is the 2012 Everybody Reads pick for the city of Portland (actually for the whole county, because that's how our library system rolls).

If you haven't read the book, you should. The voice and plot are incredibly compelling. Her style is so concise and free of artifice, it's kind of like the MacBook Air--you can't believe how much it packs in.

The main character, Rachel, is the daughter of a Danish mother and a black American G.I. father. Much of the book is about her struggle to understand what this lineage means, and how it defines (or doesn't define) who she will be. I think what fascinates me most about the novel is that Durrow draws on a long literary lineage--full of European and American literary tropes and themes that date back centuries--and that in some ways, the novel is about understanding what this literary lineage means, and how it defines (or doesn't define) what twenty-first century American literature can be.

And Durrow pulls it all off without making a reader who doesn't know the literary lineage feel left out.

Just deserts means that which is justly deserved.
Whereas just desserts means skipping the entree and going right for the ice cream.

And while I am a huge ice cream fan, I'm deeply indebted to the copy editrix at William Morrow for making sure the characters who deserve a comeuppance get a comeuppance, and not an ice cream sundae. Especially since there was no such thing as an ice cream sundae in the 1850s and 60s, when my novel is set.

That is one of the most challenging parts about writing historical fiction . . . we have stuff, but also words/phrases, today that people didn't have "back then," whenever the back then of a particular book happens to be. So just as surely as Mary Bowser and Bet Van Lew weren't riding around in a Prius, they also weren't chowing down on ice cream sundaes (c. 1897) or snickerdoodles (c. 1889).

Which is too bad, because if there is anything I would enjoy after a rough day trying to undermine the Confederacy, it would be an ice cream sundae, with a side order of snickerdoodles.