The historical resources I have leaned on have been many and varied, but I would particularly like to acknowledge the historic preservation work at James Madison’s Montpelier and their efforts to honor the lives of the enslaved community.

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my relative Barbara Cross, for not letting the old stories die, and an even bigger debt of gratitude to my great-great-grandparents, Suzie and Henry Taylor, whose story fascinated me enough to write this book.

Finally, I’d like to thank my entire family for their constant love, encouragement, support and patience. Viola, Mara and Daniel Huf, thanks for always cheering me on. And the biggest thank-you to my husband, Peter Huf, for so viel mehr als ich hier erzählen möchte.

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About the Author

TAMMYE HUF is a former teacher and now works as a translator and copywriter. Her short stories have been published in various magazines, including Diverse Voices Quarterly and The Penmen Review. She was runner-up in the 2018 London Magazine Short Story Prize. Originally from the United States, she moved first to Germany and then to the UK with her husband and three children.

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Author’s Note

Up until the summer of 2020, a slave auction block sat on a street corner in downtown Fredericksburg, Virginia. I’ve passed it many times over many years, and when I decided to write this book inspired by my enslaved great-great-grandmother and Irish immigrant great-great-grandfather, I knew I would incorporate that auction block. For years it stood as a quiet reminder of a horrible past but also a reminder that the long fingers of history stretch right up to the here and now.

Today that slave auction block is housed in the Fredericksburg Area Museum, not all that far from the plantation on which I modeled Jubilee—former president James Madison’s Montpelier in Orange County, Virginia. If you visit Montpelier, you’ll see Jubilee’s walled garden, the “Big House” with its wide, columned porch, the “carry-through” cellar passageway, and the view of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. Thanks to recent historic preservation efforts, you can also see re-created slave cabins and the artifacts discovered in archaeological digs of the former slave quarters. Walking the grounds of Montpelier, the plantation of the “Father of the Constitution,” it’s hard not to be acutely aware of the divide between the aspirational “more perfect union” that Madison wrote about and the reality that existed.

As an African American woman married to a white European man, I felt a strong connection to my great-great-grandparents’ plight and a huge admiration for two people who had every reason to give up on each other but did not. Their lives are a testament to the fact that the world is full of people quietly doing extraordinary things all the time. Their story gives me hope, because if they could overcome the incredible obstacles of their time and move past the seemingly insurmountable racial divide, then we, in our more enlightened age today, must surely be able to do the same.