Finding the Story

Give Me Liberty was born in the back of a New York City cab.  I’d just had lunch with my wonderful editor, Katherine Tegen.  Right before she got out of the taxi, Katherine suggested my next book should be about the American Revolution.  As iconic as Johnny Tremain was, she said, it’d be nice to add something new to all the stories about the splash of tea in Boston’s harbor and Paul Revere’s ride.

 Huzzah! As the colonists would cheer.   Writers are always thankful for ideas rich with potential.   Now all I needed was a good story.

I looked to Virginia.  Its role in our Revolution, especially leading up to the war, provided the perfect complement to the classics Johnny Tremain, My Brother Sam is Dead, and The Keeping Room.   Those books explore the protests and armed clashes in Massachusetts—the shots "heard round the world."    Virginia was the other hotbed of dissent, the place where the words that sparked and explained the defiance and the dreams of colonists were mostly penned—in Williamsburg.

At the beginning of each book, I use an "epigraph"—a quote that hints at its thematic spine.   For Give Me Liberty, it’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ “All the changes in the world, for good or evil, were first brought about by words.”   So true for our Revolution and its Age of Enlightenment’s ennobling, norm-shattering concept of democracy, of each person having the right to liberty and freedom of choice.

Today, it's hard for us to recognize what a radical notion it was that each human being—no matter how poor or "lowborn"—had the innate ability, intellectually and morally, of understanding circumstances and making sound choices, and therefore the right to govern themselves.   That a country’s “aristocracy” should be born of hard-work, learning, and applied talent — not bloodlines.   It was a hope, a leap of faith in “the common man” that would throw out kings and turn the world upside down, to quote a song of the times.  

Without the words of Thomas Jefferson or Patrick Henry, the courageous risks taken by the Sons of Liberty in the Boston Tea Party might have seemed simply vandalism by angry “rabble.”   Without words that legally and morally justified a unified rebellion, the Revolution might have died right there in Lexington and Concord.

So, I had my main theme: how words and abstract ideals could completely alter people’s lives and beliefs and spawn a nation.   I just needed a plot and some characters!   To “show rather than tell” the choices, risks, terrors, heartbreaks as well as the moments of courage, hard-won redefinitions, and selfless comradery that TJ and Henry’s writings would demand of ordinary yeoman citizens — many who couldn’t even read those words but heard and heeded them.

Because I’m a former journalist, I "report" my novels. Research is the treasure hunt.   Rooting through information about Virginia battles, I discovered a gem—a little known but crucial battle in December 1775 at Great Bridge, just outside Norfolk, Virginia.

Here, the Chesapeake Bay opens onto the Atlantic Ocean.   Here, untrained volunteers in the 2^nd Virginia Regiment and Culpeper Minutemen stood up to well-equipped, professional British soldiers and not only held their ground, but sent the Redcoats scattering.   Virginians reclaimed the strategically vital port town of Norfolk.   Had they not, the British would have bottled up Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay all the way up to Baltimore and cut the colonies in half.

The battle was a perfect climatic ending.   Now all I needed was to find and write a plausible story to get us there.   And create characters readers would come to care about and want to follow through the journey!

Again, the facts of that battle told me what to do: Runaway slaves also fought at the Battle of Great Bridge, but not for the Americans, for the Redcoats, as part of the Royal Ethiopian Regiment.    That terrible irony insisted I create two characters with opposing story lines and very different experiences in their quests for liberty and self-determination.   Friends who will have to face one another in battle and make a terrible choice: Nathaniel, a young fifer with the 2^nd Virginia Regiment and the runaway slave Moses, who’d been his friend and protector against a cruel master.

So, discovering that one little battle provided me with an ending, two main characters, a moral dilemma, and a full and honest look at our history — both triumphs and mistakes in our continuing quest for a more perfect and just union.   Life and human beings are not one-dimensional, nor should be our storytelling about it.

Nathaniel's personal odyssey has a big arc.   An indentured servant, he’s battered down to a timid, hesitant boy when we first meet him.   He’s terrified of taking sides or expressing his own opinion since that had always brought him terrible trouble with his masters.   I decided to make him an indentured servant after reading that, at one point, nearly half of Virginia's residents had willingly sold themselves into years of bondage in order to buy their passage across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World—America's promise was that enticing.   A powerful symbol.

The cost of that boat trip from England to Virginia could be as little as seven pounds when Nathanial would have made the crossing.    But a bank failure had brought hordes of people to London, desperately looking for paid work and unable to find it. Scores of poor families embarked together for America, hoping to start anew.   But once they hit our shores, many were forcibly separated, their indentureships sold to different people.   Often adding to their plight was the fact a cargo ship’s below-deck hull in which they made the six-week passage was dank, crowded, and disease ridden.   If a parent died past the halfway mark, their child was made responsible for paying off the deceased’s passage as well.   Which is what happens to Nathaniel.

Slowly, Nathaniel is coaxed into believing in himself and the Revolution by Basil, a lovable, slightly eccentric old schoolmaster (in love with words and learning and music) and a hotheaded apprentice named Ben, an ardent patriot.   Both open his mind and heart.

All three work for a carriage-maker based on Elkanah Deane, whom I discovered reading the Virginia Gazette of the 1770s.   A sequence of ads he ran made it clear that Deane’s livelihood was destroyed by the shifting loyalties and protests of the Revolution.   His trajectory made me far more sympathetic to those who couldn't make themselves take up the patriot cause because of deep, personal ties to England.   I hope Nathaniel’s story captures that hard reality for many Americans as well. In truth, only about a third of us were patriots.   Another third were active (and dangerous) loyalists (see Hamilton and Peggy!). And the last third philosophically neutral, desperate for the end to seven years of fighting which destroyed crops and entire villages and broke apart so many families.  

In so many ways, Give Me Liberty is about finding the courage to make choices, and then living the consequences, whether uplifting and freeing or arduous and poignant.   Wondrous freedoms and rights bring wonderful responsibilities (like voting!). An apt theme and contextual, humanizing overlay to the history we learn in school, I hope— for teens especially, in the midst of their own self-discovery and search for life-definition.