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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.