Do we really need another story about the enslaved? With classics such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Octavia Butler’s Kindred, among others, hasn’t the subject been exhausted? Or are there still tales to tell?
I don’t know how your school approached the subject of slavery, but my education on the topic was sorely two-dimensional. Slavery was bad. Enslaved Africans escaped north via the Underground Railroad using the North Star as their guide. The Civil War broke out. The North won and slaves were freed. End of story.
A few years ago, I picked up a slave narrative and began to read a piece of history that wasn’t threaded through any of my school textbooks. It lived and breathed of real people making nuanced decisions out of a whole slew of motives. Transfixed, I read another. And another. I found so much more humanity contained in the accounts of enslaved people told in their own words.
For instance, I learned rather quickly that not every runaway utilized the underground railroad. There were nearly as many ways to escape as there were enslaved people seeking freedom. William and Ellen Craft eloped using public transportation. They evaded capture during their thousand-mile journey as Ellen pretended to be a white slaveholding man and William her personal slave.
Henry “Box” Brown mailed himself in a wooden crate to abolitionists in Virginia. Harriet Jacobs spent seven years hiding in a nine by seven-foot-wide attic only three-foot-high before escaping by boat. Moses Roper used cunning, pretending to have lost his passport stating he was a freed slave and thus obtaining one from sympathetic strangers. They even recommended him for employment.
To my astonishment, I learned that not every slave ran north, at least not right away. For some, the siren call of freedom could not overshadow their longing to be reunited with family members. For them, loyalty inspired courage.
These are some of the more famous accounts of those who escaped slavery, but I found just as much inspiration in the myriad of narratives detailing the lives of those who bore up under it. Some resisted passively, some aggressively. But for those who chose not to run, their courage, grit, and determination surfaced in other ways. So many other ways. Because we’re not talking about formulas here. We’re talking about living, breathing people who made hard decisions under dire circumstances.
These stories pulled at my heart and I knew I wanted to include a fictional narrative in my novel that honored the tenacity and bravery of these men and women. I fashioned Mercy, a mulatto slave born in the early 1800s, and wove her tale into Mercy Will Follow Me in the form of a journal. She’s broken my heart; She’s given it wings. She’s helped me find my brave. I believe she can do the same for you. You can download the beginning of Mercy’s Journal for free at www.sarah-hanks.com/ebook.
Mercy Will Follow Me- A Novel of Redemption
Natassa seems to have it all – a devoted husband with a good income, beautiful children, a faithful best friend- but it only takes one night for her world to crumble, catapulting her into a journey of trauma and healing, old pressures and new friendships. Will she learn to stand her ground or will she always live in someone else’s shadow?
DeAndre longs to break free from the neighborhood that keeps dragging him down, but the streets are made of quicksand. Dreams can hardly take flight there, even if he paints them wings. And when he does the unthinkable, could mercy ever be a possibility?
In the 1800s, a mulatto enslaved girl is torn from her mother and left to figure out who she is on her own. Through her time as a house slave in Tennessee and Kentucky, Mercy grapples with her deep ache for her Mama and her understanding of black and white. Which is more important to her? Freedom or loyalty?
Join these three characters, see how their stories intertwine, and dare to believe that mercy will follow you. Pre-order your copy at www.sarah-hanks.com.
Sarah Hanks has spent the last eight years delightfully merging her two main passions – writing and equipping children- by writing a variety of Sunday school curricula for churches in her community. She wrote her first novel when she was seventeen and continued to write fiction “on the side” until recently deciding to pursue writing professionally. She and her husband have eight children of their own, a couple of whom seem to have inherited their mother’s love for playing with words and crafting stories. Though Sarah dreams of a cabin by the beach, the family of ten lives together in beautiful chaos in St. Charles, Missouri. She buys ear plugs in bulk.