M.E. Torrey Follow

Author's Note

Fox Creek came about by accident. Decades ago, my husband asked if I wanted to accompany him on his business trip to New Orleans. I jumped at the opportunity, as I’d never been. I also thought, what a great opportunity for me, a fledgling writer, to base a story there!

Initially, I planned to write a ghost story for a middle-grade to young adult (YA) audience, set in the spookier corners of the city. How fun would that be? Aware of my own ignorance (a Northerner), I dove into research and was thus armed with at least a nascent knowledge by the time I stepped out of the airport and into the sultry air.

As part of my own excursion during my husband’s seminar, I rented a car and ventured north to visit several plantations. Although my YA novel (still unplotted) was to be set in New Orleans, I nonetheless felt drawn to the plantations—more specifically, to the history and legacy of slavery.

I wasn’t sure why I felt such a pull. Maybe it was because I’d read too many novels about plantations, each time hoping that maybe this was the novel to include the "other side" of the story. But each time I finished, I was left dissatisfied. Why were there only White characters and storylines? Didn’t those characters—or their authors—recognize that their very lifestyle was dependent upon enslaved people toiling day after day?

Looking back, I know how naïve I was. I’d started reading adult-level novels in sixth grade, so I had no context for critiquing them—no understanding that these types of novels often amounted to a White glorification of a bygone era. Instead, I just felt a deep unease—nameless and simmering.

So, when the chance came to see the plantations for myself, I knew I had to go. I don’t know what I was expecting—perhaps a more balanced history? A recognition of the enslavement of millions of individuals? But the plantation tours were much like the books: centered on a White perspective, with drawling hostesses hooped to the nines in crinoline, each plantation steeped in a pleasant, curated version of Southern hospitality.

After each tour, I was left to wander the grounds on my own—and that’s when I would visit the slave cabins: silent witnesses to the disparity between a glorified White history and the suffering and blood of an enslaved people.

My ghost story plans evaporated like mist. Instead, I became consumed by the slave narrative, particularly how it intersected with the dominant White-centered narratives of the time. This intersection came into sharp focus one sunny morning, when I stepped out of my guest cabin at Tezcuco Plantation.

I was feeling buoyed by a sense of purpose, a calling. I walked across the dirt path to an abandoned well, overgrown with honeysuckle, the air heady and sweet.

A Black woman was sweeping the ground near the well.

"Good morning!" I chirped.

What happened next rocked me to my core. I will never forget the long look she gave me. I may as well have run into a brick wall.

Her look seemed to say: You, a White woman, having just spent the night as a guest at a plantation, are not my friend. Do you not know that the ground you stand on is soaked in the blood of my ancestors? I refuse to be a part of your fantasy.

Without a word, she went back to sweeping.

Each time interactions like this occurred, a few more scales fell from my eyes. I saw a shantytown crammed with Black families, huddled in the literal shadow of the stately townhomes where wealthy White families lived. People walking down the street—White with White, or Black with Black—rarely together. The Confederate statues and flags. The museums explaining the "War of Northern Aggression." (This was the ’90s and early 2000s, remember.)

Over the course of my research, I returned to Louisiana multiple times—each time a little wiser, each time the weight of my understanding growing heavier. I read dozens of slave narratives written by those few who had escaped and could tell their stories. I read narratives from the Louisiana Writers’ Project (1934-1943)—oral accounts told by Black people who could still remember being enslaved. I also read dozens of diaries, letters, and logs written by elite Southern Whites and plantation owners—both men and women—to help me understand their view of the world.

In particular, I ran across three diaries of slave owners that influenced me greatly in the writing of Fox Creek. The first account is the diary of Louisiana Creole sugar planter, Valcour Aime. Known affectionately as Le Petit Versailles, his plantation was the stuff of fairytales—fountains, botanical gardens, a zoo, and even a miniature railroad built to transport guests around the estate. Believed to be the wealthiest man in Louisiana, upon Aime’s death, it was discovered that he was deeply in debt. His plantation was subsequently sold piecemeal, and nothing of it remains today. Papa Leon is loosely based on Aime.

The second account was the diaries written by James Henry Hammond, governor of South Carolina from 1842-'44. One day in 1852, he was "dreadful ill" and saddened to find himself "abandoned" by all, as he believed himself a good man: "I, who never willfully harmed or desired to harm a human being, who never wronged one that I know of." This statement, taken against the backdrop of his horrifying treatment of his slaves, including the habitual rape of young teens—both White relatives and Black slaves—is stunning. Hammond’s belief in his goodness, his inability to see beyond his own needs and desires, and his placement of himself as the central figure in his worldview of domination, was critical to my understanding of how a patriarchal, slave-owning culture could prosper.

The third account, and one I relied on heavily in forming William Jensey’s character, was Plantation Life in the Florida Parishes of Louisiana, 1836-1846: as Reflected in the Diary of Bennet Hilliard Barrow.

Most entries were mundane:

February 23    Cloudy    cold     too wet to plow

March 25    Clear     gave the women a dress

June 12    Cloudy warm — 6 hands in swamp getting out cypress fence

July 31    Cloudy sultry morning — 9 women spinning — Finished a shop & dance room for my negros . . . one child verry ill Sunday croup & worms     light shower at noon — never saw better crop . . .

But every so often, punctuating the humdrum of everyday life like lightning bolts, we see the undercurrent of the plantation:

Nov 2 Cloudy cool — Dennis came in sick on Tuesday — ran off again yesterday . . . will carry my Gun & small shot for him — I think it will break him of his rascality . . .

Nov 28 Cloudy damp & warm — Whiped all my grown cotten pickers to day, Dennis did not come up When called, ran off I expect . . .

Nov 29 Dark Foggy morning, warm    caught      Dennis Last night at the scaffold yard . . . gave him the worst Whipping he ever had — & ducking — Finished picking cotten

It’s easy to conclude that Barrow—like Hammond, and even like Aime—was a terrible person. But humans are complex beings, and Barrow was no exception. He loved his wife and children. He took care of his neighbor’s fields when they couldn’t. He did his civic duty in the community. He cradled a small bird, noting its characteristics. He enjoyed life to the full: horse racing, fox hunting, or a fish fry with friends. Like Hammond, he stated: "I acted for the Best and so far have never injured any human being to my knowledge . . ."

In forming my characters, I felt it vital to present the slave owners as everyday people—not as the Simon Legrees of movies and literature, although, like Morton Cobb in my novel, those psychopaths certainly existed, and, even flourished under such moral license. Instead, I wanted to present slave owners as relatable. Why? Because, in my opinion, people like Barrow weren’t outliers in the human spectrum. They were ordinary people, helping friends and defending family, believing themselves "good" even as they perpetuated and were blind to the suffering and cruelty surrounding them.

Finally, after three years of full-time study, when the voices of my characters would no longer stay still, I began to write. I would like to say that my writing was linear: that I started one day and added to the manuscript on each subsequent day until the day came when I wrote "The End." But life intervened.

During that time, I was contracted by both Knopf Books for Young Readers (Random House) and Dutton (Penguin) to write eight books for middle-grade and young adult audiences. Somewhere in there, I also attended seminary and earned a Master’s in Religion, with an emphasis on global eco-justice—justice for both the environment and the marginalized peoples who often bear the brunt of climate change, pollution, and habitat destruction.

And then I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and, at the same time, co-founded an organization, Orphans Africa, which builds boarding schools for orphans in various locations throughout Tanzania. We’re still building schools. We’re still working hard.

So, for my novel Fox Creek, it’s been a long haul—nearly thirty years in the making. Taking so long to finish the book has had a consequence I never saw coming: the cultural milieu has changed. I am a privileged White woman writing about Black characters. In the 1990s, conversations about cultural appropriation were rare—either that, or I was not listening for them. Now it’s front and center. Who am I to speak through a character who is Black? After all, White people have whitewashed Black history to the point where, even today, many still believe the fallacies—such as the idea that Black people were better off as slaves, or that they were all happy.

Cultural appropriation has been used to erase the voices of marginalized peoples. After all, who writes the history books? People of privilege and power—the victors, the oppressors. People like Governor Hammond. And who doesn’t write the history books? Those who are vanquished, those living on the edges—the invisible, the powerless.

I see this dynamic in my work in Tanzania. We work with orphans—some of the most economically disadvantaged children—in a country where nearly one out of every eleven people is an orphan, and the median age is just eighteen. It’s not hard to imagine how an orphan in that situation might become just another burden in an overextended community. In the remote regions where we work, there are no social services. Orphaned children are simply too young, too poor, too hungry, too invisible, too sick (fill in the blank) to survive. And when an orphan dies, there is no ripple effect. No one outside their village knows that anything has happened. Certainly, no history is being written by a people struggling just to stay alive.

So, with regard to cultural appropriation, all I can say is this: from the time I first set foot in New Orleans, I felt compelled from deep within to write this book, as if the Universe were saying, Look . . . listen . . . write.

At the same time, I would remind my readers that I am, at heart, an artist—an artist of words, who paints the world through the prism of her eyes and the voice of her heart, as all artists must. I paint the people in many shades of color. I paint the men, the women, the children. I paint the background. I paint the culture. I paint those who suffer, and those who cause harm. Please, hang my portraits—my paintings—beside those of others, and let them stand the test of time.

And finally, I believe that what ultimately connects us, in Truth, isn’t our gender, our culture, our skin color, or even our shared traumas—although these can be powerful unifiers. What connects us, in Truth, is the beating heart of who we are as human beings.

For all readers, especially White Americans, when we name former slave owners as "other" than ourselves, un-relatable, we create a distance between us and them, thereby escaping the burden of our history. It’s an easy out. But in order for us to grow as a nation, we must see ourselves re!ected in their lives—not in the sense of condoning their actions, but in the sense of understanding how the perpetration of such atrocities could have occurred in the first place by seemingly normal human beings. We must ask ourselves, in what ways are we blind today to the degradation or oppression of others? For, I believe, that only in asking this question, framed alongside our shared history, can we truly start the task of healing the chasms that divide our great nation.

I pray that, together, we have the courage to stand in the muck and ugliness of one another’s pain, as well as in the beauty, freedom, and creative expression of our diversity and our differences. I pray that we connect with one another so deeply that we forge a bond that extends beyond any lived experience or action. For it is in this collective understanding that we are enlightened by a love for one another that transcends all.