Here's the Trailer for "Yankee Daughters"

Nine Women Who Would Have Adored A Dozen Cats

I think all this election craziness has finally gotten to me.  I opened Facebook and saw this kitten picture:

And it immediately reminded me of this picture on the back cover of my new book, "Yankee Daughters."

Would my grandmother, my mother, and my aunts all be horribly offended by the comparison? I hope not. There's something sweetly endearing about both groups.

What's All This Stuff about Pre-Orders?

Let’s talk about pre-orders. If you spend any time exploring Amazon’s Book Department, you know that major publishers almost always offer their books for pre-ordering — sometimes as much as six months to a year in advance of the publication date. if you order the first book in a series from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, you are almost certain to get an e-mail inviting you to pre-order book number two.  Now Kindle Books are also offering pre-orders.  Why? What’s in it for the author or publisher?  And what’s in in for you, the reader?

Take a look at the reader first, using my upcoming book as an example.  it’s early November, and Yankee Daughters won’t be available until December 7, 2016. Why would you want to order it now? Well, first, there’s the simple matter of forgetfulness (and that’s something that happens to everybody, not just us seniors.) Between today and December comes the whole holiday season that starts this month, with all of its distractions. And when December arrives, you’re going to be exhausted. Will you remember to order my book on December 7th? Probably not. But if you have pre-ordered it, it will arrive, just when you need an excuse to take a break from wrapping packages and baking cookies.

You’ll find cost-savings, too.  Most pre-orders carry a reduced price tag. Yankee Daughters is available for pre-ordering at $2.99.  On December 7th, the price will be $4.99.  What’s even better, you don’t have to pay a thing until the book ships. So order it now and by the time your bill arrives in January, you won’t even notice that you’re paying for it.

Here’s the link: https://www.amazon.com/Yankee-Daughters-Grenville-Trilogy-Book-ebook/dp/B01M1LPY2H

A Giveaway for Launch Day

                     

A Giveaway for Launch Day One day. Two winners. Three Books On December 8, 2016, two lucky readers will be chosen in a computer-driven random drawing to receive the complete trade paper set of the Grenville Trilogy: Damned Yankee, Yankee Reconstructed, and Yankee Daughters -- a $55.00 value. Copies will be signed and bookmarked. How do you get in on this giveaway? There are three paths--the choice is yours. 1. Volunteer to receive and read an advance review PDF copy of Yankee Daughters. Then, on Wednesday, December 7, 2016--(the date is important!)-- post a brief review of the book on its Amazon page. You don't have to give it five stars.  You don't even have to like it. Just leave a comment or two that will be helpful to other readers. (If you choose this option, please act quickly and contact the author directly here to find out if copies are still available.) OR 2. Pre-order the Kindle version, which will be released on December 7, 2016. Then send me a screenshot, or a snapshot, or forward an email copy of your receipt from Amazon to this email box: cschriber@me.com.  OR 3. Visit our Katzenhaus website to learn more about our books. Then fill out and submit the "Please Keep in Touch" form on the 2016 Publications page. It asks only for your name and e-mail and will be used solely to send you very occasional newsletters about our latest books. We never sell our subscribers' names or e-mail addresses. That's all there is to it, but your entry will help to promote Yankee Daughters and send it off to a roaring start. Thanks for your participation. --Carolyn

Farmhouse Lessons

From time to time, I'm going to post some clippings from my Pinterest board entitled "Words of Wisdom from a German Grandmother." Each of them plays a role  in my upcoming book, "Yankee Daughters."

Jamey ducked out, barely missing Nora, who came in with a pail of milk, and Millie, carrying a small basket of eggs. “That red chicken is hiding her eggs again,” Millie reported. “I thought she was pretty when we got her, but she sure is ornery!”

Katerina grinned without turning around. “Schön, wie schön tut,” she replied.

“Yes, Mama, we know! Pretty is as pretty does,” Nora replied.

A Prescription for a New House

"This is an important ceremony. First I take a broom in. That’s to sweep out any bad luck and to make sure that our home is always free from hidden dangers. Then I have a loaf of bread, which promises that the family will always have our daily needs met. Next comes a cup of sugar, to add love and sweetness to our lives. And finally, there’s a shaker of salt, to give our lives here flavor and fun.” Katerina gathered her small basket and made a show of stepping into the cottage and arranging the ceremonial items on the shelf in the kitchen. “Now, with God’s blessing, we are ready to move in!”

"Yankee Daughters," Chapter 17

Wise Old Sayings Stiill Hold True

From time to time, I'm going to post some clippings from my Pinterest board entitled "Words of Wisdom from a German Grandmother." Each of them plays a role  in my upcoming book, "Yankee Daughters."

A Preview of Coming Attractions

This has already been posted over on Katzenhaus Books, but I'm repeating it here to make sure everyone receives the announcement.

A special "heads-up" for those who are awaiting the third volume of the Grenville saga. "Yankee Daughters" will not be available until sometime around the end of the year. However, I have started two new Pinterest boards to whet your curiosity.

One contains the names of all the new characters being introduced in this third generation of the family. Many of them are based on members of my mother's family, so I've used those real pictures to illustrate the fictional characters. I've changed their names, but there's often a hidden clue. For example, if I had an aunt named Rose, her fictional name might show up as Lily or Iris.

The second board draws on other illustrations of the real pertinent objects, events, and places in the novel. Many were old photos taken in and around Beaver County, Pennsylvania. Others are "ripped from the headlines" of contemporary newspapers. The idea here is to immerse you in the period, roughly from 1886 to 1920.

And eventually (maybe even today)  there will appear a third board dedicated to the repertoire of "wise old sayings" -- the majority of which were cited as Biblical truths by my grandmother (who is Katerina McDevlin Grenville in the new book) and passed down through her eight daughters. Some of them are better in German than in English, but you'll get both versions.

Hope you'll drop by and get a taste of what is to come. You can  find them all on my Pinterest page:  https://www.pinterest.com/roundheadlady/

Go Tell Your Daughters!

I've shared this from my Facebook feed.  Thank you, Megan.

The 14th Amendment (In case You've Forgotten)

The Fourteenth Amendment went into effect on this date (July 28) in 1868. That means it has been the law of the land for 148 year. The full text reads:

Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section. 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Section. 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section. 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section. 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

There have been some modifications, of course, particularly in section 2. The Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, and the Twenty-Sixth lowered the voting age to eighteen.  Sections 3 and 4 have reference to the Confederacy. But Section 1 remains the foundation of this country's democracy. Why have so many people forgotten this fundamental statement?

A Forgotten Ancestor

Philippina Jung Schweinsberg's daughter Maria was born on this date, July 20, 1862. She died on May 2, 1871, at the age of eight. We tend to forget how precarious life was in those days.

A Little Family History

This tiny lady, Philippina Jung, is the maternal great-great-great-great-grandmother of my youngest cousins in Ohio: Amanda, Haley, Olivia, Mitchell, Logan, and Jessica.  She was born on August 5, 1831 in Dietschweiler, Kusel, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany and  died in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, on July 25, 1906. This picture was taken around 1901.

Today would have been her 163rd wedding anniversary, She married Johan Frederick Sweinsberg (who had emigrated from Hesse, Prussia, in 1852) on July 17, 1853. Together they had nine children, and she outlived seven of them.

Their third child and oldest daughter was Karolina, who married Joseph McCaskey, the youngest brother of James McCaskey, our family's own Civil War casualty and the subject of my book, "A Scratch with the Rebels." Karolina's eight daughters included my mother, Margaret, and her next oldest sister, Florence Decker, from whom all the above-named cousins are descended.

Amazon Has Some Suggestions for You

Take your pick: a creative biography, a historical monograph, or a novel.

"Vive la France! Vive la République!" -- A Little Irreverent History for Bastille Day

Prise de la Bastille by Jean-Pierre Houël

What we call "Bastille Day" is the French national holiday, marking the beginning of the end for the French monarchy and the rise of the French Republic.   What happened? A mob of revolutionaries (300, maybe--estimates of their numbers vary, since they increased as the day went on) attacked an infamous fortress that was being used as a prison for political prisoners. No one was quite sure how many prisoners were there, either, because none of them were ever brought to trial. 

One of its most famous inmates was the Marquis de Sade. You may remember him as the French aristocrat whose claim to fame was as a rapist, a pedophile, and a writer about explicit acts of sexual cruelty. His name gave rise to our word sadistic. Anyway, in 1789, he was locked in the Bastille on a charge of treason, but the walls could not silence him.  Several days before the riots broke out, he was caught hanging out of one of the windows and shouting about prisoners being murdered inside the Bastille. He was quickly removed to an insane asylum, so he missed the beginning of the revolution. Once it started, however, he was freed and continued his exercise of perfect freedom unrestrained by morality, law, or religion—free, that is, until Napoleon had him recommitted to the asylum in 1803 for various acts well beyond the standards of morality. He died there in 1814.

But back to the Bastille. On July 14, a violent mob attacked the Bastille because of a report that it also held a large cache of ammunition and gunpowder.  The commander had several cannons, but in an attempt to pacify the crowd, the told them the cannons were unarmed. Instead, the mob took that as an invitation to take control of the fort.  At the end of the ensuing fight, about 200 attackers were killed, along with the hapless commander and seven other  defenders. The mob took control of the armaments and released the seven pathetic prisoners, who turned out to be minor offenders, not  the symbols of royal oppression they had hoped for.

Nevertheless, the Storming of the Bastille marked the beginning of the French Revolution and the eventual doom of Louis XVI and his cake-eating queen, Marie Antoinette. The first celebration of the  Fête de la Fédération was held on July 14, 1790. Reports of the occasion speak of a four-day celebration of freedom marked by fireworks, lots of wine, and people running naked through the streets to display their “freedom.” Be that as it may, the celebrations continued every year. As an uninformed tourist in Paris on July 14, 1983, I learned the hard way that no one sleeps in Paris on that night while the revelry continues in the streets.

Another Free Book for Lovers of the Low Country of South Carolina

Left by the Side of the Road is a collection of short stories about life in South Carolina's Low Country during the Civil War. It is not a continuous novel, or even a novella. There is no single plot or story line. The collection is simply that--a series of glimpses into the past. 

What do they have in common? Some of these people have appeared in A Scratch with the Rebels and Beyond All Price. Others made cameo appearances in The Road to Frogmore. All of them are here because, even though their stories were fascinating in their own right, they did not fit into the novels where they first appeared. These are characters and events that were literally "left by the side of the road" as other historical novels took shape. These vignettes allow them to speak for themselves. Together they provide a multi-faceted glimpse into the stories behind the Civil War. 


Meet some fascinating people here: Slaves abandoned by their owners when the Union Army invaded coastal South Carolina . . . Government officials charged with reorganizing captured territory . . . Army officers and the women who accompanied them . . . Free blacks determined to rescue their brothers and sisters from slavery . . . An opera singer with a penchant for pornography . . . Abolitionists with competing visions for the future of newly-freed slaves . . . A talented and sympathetic nurse who was once a runaway, a fugitive from justice, and a battered wife . . . 

This short story collection is now available on Kindle Select. Members of KOLL or Amazon Prime can read it for free today. And starting tomorrow and running through midnight on Tuesday, [June 5-7, 2016] anyone can download a personal copy of Left by the Side of the Road.

-- Compliments of the author, as well as all these interesting folks who keep demanding to have their stories told.

If this picture moves you, I invite you to read my blog posting on the origins of Memorial Day over on the Katzenhaus Books website: A Snippet of History for this "Holiday Weekend"

Everyone Wants a Happy Ending. Nobody Believes in One.

Most readers want happy endings, but readers of historical fiction also want the facts to be accurate. Therein lies a problem. Historians understand that most things end badly if you just wait long enough. Everyone dies, eventually.  History is fully of calamities that changed the world. Mt. Vesuvius erupted and buried the city of Pompeii along with everyone in it. Earthquakes have lifted up mountain ranges and split off pieces of continents (think British Isles and Japan, Russia and Alaska). Other continents may have sunk from view and human memory. Did Atlantis really exist?

In other cases, changes were not caused by massive geologic events but by microbes making their way through whole populations. Bubonic plague, smallpox, influenza, and polio all reached epidemic proportions before bringing about massive economic and scientific advances. Wars changed everything from the political structure of whole countries to the psychological struggles of the individuals caught up in horrors of warfare. Scientific discoveries, in their turn, have changed the way we liuve and the way we think.. The introduction of gunpowder,  the explorers who opened the Atlantic to travel and discovered a "New World," the Industrial Revolution, atomic energy, and space travel all come to mind.

 And then there are the great individuals who rose to enormous power and crashed to earth again in ignominy (think Socrates drinking hemlock in prison, Alexander the Great struck down by unexplained illness after a drinking bout, Julius Caesar stabbed by his closest friends,  Richard the Lionhearted dying of gangrene from a random arrow strike, Napoleon dying in exile).

No, I'm afraid we have to save the proverbial "living happily ever after" for children's fairy tales, the occasional Victorian novel ("God bless us, every one"), or the series finale of "Downton Abbey." No, in historical novels, as in actual history, the endings are not always pretty. And discerning readers usually want to know what really happened.

Those who have read Damned Yankee will realize that the book ended with a happy ending of sorts. The family struggles during the Civil War came full circle when the war ended, as they returned to their ancestral home in Charleston. But was it enough to end the story there? I didn't think so. When I looked back over the story line, I saw more questions than answers, and I think readers will do so, too.

Were Jonathan and Susan able to resume their lives in Charleston without more challenges? Will Jonathan finally find that satisfactory teaching position, and will Susan be content with her melodeon and her growing children?

Will the former slaves, Sarah and Hector, find what they are looking for in the South Carolina Lowcountry? Will their lives as free citizens be happier and more comfortable now that they have been emancipated? And what of their children, Eli and Rosie? Will they seek lives of their own or continue to see themselves as part of the Grenville family?

Will Charlotte and her new husband be happy living on the Cumberland Plateau on Tennessee while the rest of the family is in South Carolina? Will Johnny come to accept the loss of his leg in battle, and will he at last recover from the horrors of war that haunt him? Will Eddie become a successful farmer, and will he ever learn how to make really good cheese?

What of the youngest children--Becca, Robbie, and Jamey? Will they recover from the sacrifices of their childhood years? And what about Mary Sue, the statistical "Middle Child" who is still too young to pursue her own interests but too old to be treated as a child? Is she about to become another casualty of the war?

And what about South Carolina itself? Will the state that most people blamed for starting the Civil War be able to recover from the trauma of losing that war? Will a new ruling class emerge? Can the state's institutions be rebuilt on a stronger foundation, and will its new majority population of freed blacks be able to sustain their apparent gains in political and economic status?

These are just some of the questions that find resolution -- whether for good or ill -- in Yankee Reconstructed.  If you read the first book, you'll want to know what really happened. And you'll have a good chance to do that this coming weekend.

On Saturday, May 21, starting at 8:00 AM (Pacific Time), the Kindle edition of Yankee Reconstructed will be available for just ninety-nine cents. That’s a price reduction of something like 80%.  Get it quickly, because at 8:00 AM on Sunday, May 22, the price will jump to $2.99. That’s still a bargain at half-price, of course. But don’t delay further, because at 8:00 AM on Monday, May 23, the price reverts to the list cost of $5.99. This is a once-a-year bargain countdown deal. The clock will be ticking, and the remaining time will show up on the book’s Kindle page, for those of you who need to convert to other time zones. Click here to grab your copy:

www.amazon.com/Yankee-Reconstructed-Grenville-Sagas-Book-ebook/dp/B0169CM41A

Inside America’s Auschwitz: A new museum offers a rebuke — and an antidote — to our sanitized history of slavery

This article has already been spread over much of the internet, but it deserves the widest possible  dissemination. It is reproduced here with thanks to smithsonian.com.

                                        

                                                             Inside America’s Auschwitz
        A new museum offers a rebuke — and an antidote — to our sanitized history of slavery

   Jared Keller
   April 4, 2016

At first glance, the “Wall of Honor” at Louisiana’s Whitney Plantation slavery museum — a series of granite stones engraved with the names of hundreds of slaves who lived, worked and died there — evokes any number of Holocaust memorials. But as the future mayor of New Orleans noted at the museum’s 2008 opening, this site is different; this is America’s Auschwitz.

“Go on in,” Mitch Landrieu told the crowd, according to the New York Times. “You have to go inside. When you walk in that space, you can’t deny what happened to these people. You can feel it, touch it, smell it.”

The former indigo, sugar and cotton operation, which finally opened to the public after years of careful restoration in December 2014 as the country’s first slave museum, is a modern avatar of injustice. Nestled off the historic River Road that runs alongside the slow, lazy crook of the Mississippi, the estate was built in the late 1700s by entrepreneur Jean Jacques Haydel upon land purchased by his German-immigrant father, Ambroise. It was the younger Haydel who expanded the estate and established the plantation as a key player in Louisiana’s sugar trade, transitioning the main crop away from the less-profitable indigo markets. A couple of years after the Civil War, a Northerner by the name of Bradish Johnson bought the property and named it after his grandson Harry Whitney.

The restored property, a mix of original structures and replicas, includes an overseer’s home, replica slave cabins — scenes from Django Unchained were filmed right next door — and a blacksmith’s shop, among other buildings. Even when nearly deserted, it feels like the place could spring to life at any moment as the slaves return from the adjacent sugar cane fields. The 15-year restoration effort was backed by John Cummings, the local lawyer and real estate mogul who purchased the land from a petrochemical company and invested $8 million of his own money into restoring the property and developing the museum — reportedly out of his own sense of white guilt over the horrors of slavery, according to the Times. “When you leave here,” he told the New Orleans Advocate, “you’re not going to be the same person who came in.”

That is the key to how the Whitney Plantation is unlocking the grim story of America’s greatest shame, a tale too often masked by a genteel preservationist approach to plantation history that has pasted romantic Gone With The Wind wallpaper over slavery’s appalling reality.

“Often, plantation exhibits were established for those who lived through the Civil Rights era and yearned for a less complicated time,” says Ashley Rogers, director of museum operations. “And that’s an easy thing to accomplish when you have a ‘chandelier’ tour. Where the previous focus at plantations has been on the house and the culture of Southern gentility, things are changing.”

And the Whitney is taking the lead. “We care about the Big House, but it’s not about that,” says Rogers. “This is a slavery tour.” The Whitney Plantation is explicitly not a rosy exercise in Southern nostalgia. Part reminder of the scars of institutional bondage, part mausoleum for dozens of enslaved people who worked (and died) in the sugar fields of the Haydels’ and those across the South, the 250-acre plantation serves as a monument to the terror of slavery, and a rebuke of the structural racism that persists today. In the same way countries like Germany and South Africa have built an entire pedagogy of reconciliation as they retroactively come to grips with their historical demons, the Whitney Plantation is an attempt to force the United States to grapple with the long shadow of American racism.

This focus on the slave experience is deeply enmeshed in every moment of the Whitney’s tour. Visitors are initially gathered outside the historic Anti-Yoke Baptist Church built in 1870 and the humanity of the slaves is immediately driven home. Inside the church, attendees are surrounded by clay sculptures of the slave children who lived and, in short order for many, died on the grounds of the plantation, a ghostly monument to their lost childhoods. Withered and raw, the sculpted children are the most visceral reminder of those who suffered — and whose stories make up the heart of the tour. Tourists are given a physical souvenir, a pass on a lanyard with a profile of an enslaved resident of the Whitney. Mine came emblazoned with a famous quote from John Little, a fugitive slave who escaped his bondage in 1855: "Tisn't he who has stood and looked on, that can tell you what slavery is — 'tis he who has endured."

The Federal Writer’s Project (FWP), established by President Franklin Roosevelt as part of his Depression-era Works Progress Administration, is the reason slave narratives like Little’s exist at all, and only because of a historical stroke of luck. Some 6,600 writer and editors were deployed across the country as part of the FWP, including a unit formed in the spring of 1939 to record and preserve the oral histories of America’s last generations of slaves.

With the somber tone established, a visitor’s horror builds as the tour passes the Wall of Honor, the chirping of birds and the distant hum of machinery in the still-active fields providing an incongruous soundtrack. The slaves emblazoned on the monuments mostly lack surnames; a full name for disposable property must have seemed a waste of effort. The walls are dotted with Bobs and Josephs, Amelias and Marys.

But interspersed throughout is something more telling of the slave experience than a last name: testimonials to the brutality doled out by plantation overseers. “They took and gave him 100 lashes with the cat of ninety-nine tails,” wrote Dora Franks of her uncle Alf, whose crime was a romantic rendezvous off the property one night. “His back was somethin awful, but they put him in the field to work while the blood was still runnin’.” Another story ends with a single terrifying phrase: “Dey buried him alive!”

As the tour passes massive bronze sugar kettles, the slave quarters and the kitchens, the narrative of persecution is a relentless wave of nauseating statistics. Some 2,200 children died enslaved in the home parish of the plantation between 1820 and 1860; infant mortality was grotesquely common. Some 100 slaves were forced to work around the clock during the short autumn harvest season to keep the massive sugar kettles going. Slaves laboring in the dark routinely sustained third-degree burns and lost limbs, although this rarely ended their servitude.

Amputations were frequent; punishment by the whip common. A trip to the Big House — at one time called “one of the most interesting in the entire South” by the Department of the Interior — reveals incredible architecture and design, including rare murals by Italian artist Domenico Canova. But the elegant front portico looks out toward the river, turning its back on the daily parade of torture and terror just steps away from the backdoor.

The Whitney museum has structured its entire pedagogy around the guided experience. It concludes with a reminder that the racial injustices of the 19th century didn’t simply disappear with the Emancipation Proclamation. The guide described the excitement curators felt when they first took possession of the Big House and found stacks of well-preserved records of the post-Civil War system, a low-wage cousin of the exploitative sharecropping system, of in which the cost of doing business always mysteriously remained one step ahead of the farmers’ revenues.

According to Rogers, this new approach to a long-romanticized aspect of Southern history is having an impact. The Whitney Plantation saw 34,000 visitors in its first year — nearly double the expected turnout, if still lower than visitation figures for other, more established plantations — and the museum has discovered a growing audience among schools and, especially, African-American tourists, for unsanitized history. And Rogers suspects they are having an impact outside the Whitney’s own audience. “Other museums are changing how they do things,” says Rogers. “Plantations now mentions slaves and slavery more explicitly in their listings.”

Louisiana is the perfect home for the Whitney’s unique project. The state was home to dozens of plantations during the heyday of slavery in the antebellum South, with 146 listed in the National Registry of Historic places. The Evergreen Plantation, the Whitney’s neighbor in Wallace, remains one of the most intact examples of a traditional plantation; the Destrehan Plantation played home to a tribunal and executions following the largest slave uprising in American history, the 1811 German Coast Uprising.

 The Pelican State wasn’t ground zero for America’s slave trade, but the plantation system has became an integral part of the state’s cultural heritage; some 1.9 million tourists visited historic sites in 2015, including the popular Rosedown Plantation in St. Francisville, generating a whopping $1.2 million in revenue.

 

Book Club Refreshments for Readers of "The Road to Frogmore"

For each of my books, I eventually create a Pinterest board for use by book clubs. Each board offers a bit of background to the story, a quick author sketch, discussion questions, and a bibliography of related readings. My favorite part, however, is always a suggested menu, based on meals eaten in the book itself.

Laura and her housemates were on limited rations.  The Army provided them with small allowances of commodities such as flour and sugar, but for the most part, they relied on the same sources of food as did the slaves.  They had their own gardens for vegetables, and a few chickens to provide eggs (or meat, if the chicken quit laying eggs.).  Most of their protein came from seafood or the white fish that could be pulled from the freshwater streams in the area. They had no access to alcohol, so this luncheon will be one fit for teetotalers.

Laura’s diary describes some of their meals in detail. At almost every meal they ate turtle soup, so that might be a natural choice, if it were not for the fact that now, most turtles in the Carolinas are endangered species, and trying to find recipes for turtle soup is likely to yield an internet lecture on why the turtles may not be eaten. I’ve included a recipe, but I really don’t expect anyone to serve it.

The slaves the missionaries had come to help continued to work for them as cooks and fishermen, so Laura’s table served Gullah recipes, which fall into two categories.  One set starts with seasonings of tomatoes, onions, and peppers, along with a bit of fatback or bacon, adds some sort of seafood, and then serves the resulting dish over grits.  The recipe here is for the iconic shrimp and grits of South Carolina.

The other variation starts with the same seasonings to create a type of gumbo, although this is not the gumbo we’ve come to know from New Orleans.  The Gullah variety uses okra as the thickener instead of a rich dark roux and is served over rice, which continued to be grown on the plantations of the Low Country.  Either dish, accompanied by some fried green tomatoes, would provide a satisfactory and authentic Gullah lunch.

Another possibility is to rely on that perennial favorite, Frogmore Stew, a tradition that also began with the slaves of St. Helena Island. What does one do when no one has enough to provide supper?  You get together with the neighbors, and each cook throws into the pot whatever she has -- a chicken, some sausage, a few potatoes, an onion, some cobs of corn, some shrimp, or crabs, or oysters, or fish.  It all boils together, and then is poured out onto a table, where the diners gather around and help themselves.

If the group does not want to eat a sit-down meal, they might snack on boiled peanuts and soft ginger cookies. Peanuts were a staple of slave diets. The cookies remind the reader of the ginger cakes that Lottie Forten baked for her friend, Dr. Seth Rogers, surgeon of the famous 54th Massachusetts.

If this menu were completely legitimate, the only beverage would be molasses water, which the slaves loved and the missionaries drank grudgingly.  If you want to get an idea of what it tasted like, think of a glass of coke poured over ice and allowed to sit for several days, until the ice all melts and the soda goes completely flat. A pitcher of lemonade might be better to bring this meal to a close.

The Road to Frogmore,  a biographical novel by Carolyn P. Schriber, was published in 2012. In 2013, it won a Silver Medal from The Military Writers Society of America. A digital version will be available for free in the Kindle Store from Monday, April 25, 2016, through Wednesday, April 27, 2016. Don’t miss this chance to read the story of a remarkable woman.  

Busier than a Long-Tailed Cat in a Roomful of Rocking Chairs

That's a phrase my mother used to describe someone who suddenly had too much to do. It's also a term used in the world of traditional publishing.  It refers to a book that starts off with slow sales but then begins to get some notice in odd places and eventually becomes a perennial best seller.  In the traditional publishing world, a new book generally gets a grace period of about six months to hit it big.  Publishers all try to get bookstores to give their newest volumes front and center space -- a shelf or display all to themselves -- cover facing outward -- signs in the window -- ads in the newspapers.  But if it doesn't work, the book disappears into the back of the store, stored spine-out on a shelf with several hundred other  wonderful books that just didn't quite make it.  A Long-Tailed Cat is a book that customers keep asking for, even after the publicity hype is over.  Most books hit the remainder table outside within a year, and after that are either returned to the company or sold off in bulk to fates better not even thought of.  Long-Tailed Cats survive.

In the world of electronic publishing, however, there are no storefronts to dominate, no bookshelves to fill with the covers facing outward, and no need to move out to make room for the newcomers.  Remainders are a thing of the past.  Electronic books  (at least theoretically) can live forever.  And that means that we can have lots more long-tailed cats!  

The Road to Frogmore was published inNovember, 2012. Sales were steady but slow.  There wasn't a "buzz" about the book -- for almost a year  When things happen in threes, however, I am superstitious enough to take notice, and Frogmore had its three in the fall of  2013.  In September, Frogmore won  a Silver medal for Creative Biography from the Military Writers Society of America. Not long thereafter, the quarterly magazine of that organization announced that The Road to Frogmore had been chosen as Book of the Month for last November.  And then a second commendation included it on the Author of the Year's recommended reading list for Winter 2014.  

Then, in January, 2014, I was surprised by an announcement that the Association of Independent Authors had decided to feature the trailer for Frogmore on its front page for the month of January. (You can view it here). Immediately there was a flurry of new sales, as word of the book begins to spread out.  This true story of  a strong and determined woman, who almost single-handedly established successful schools for newly freed slaves in South Carolina during the Civil War, is not fluffy reading, but it tells an inspiring story.  Those looking for both entertainment and enlightenment will find them here.

The Road to Frogmore, will be available for free in the Kindle Store from Monday, April 25, 2016, through Wednesday, April 27, 2016. Don’t miss this chance to read the story of a remarkable woman.  It may turn out to be a long-tailed cat