In my research, I also looked at Haitian history, the founding of Black colleges, Black spirituals, Black nineteenth-century travelers, Haitian voodoo, and, because Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward was a homeopath, homeopathy. As a medical practice in the nineteenth century, it was closely aligned with progressive ideals, so people who were part of the abolitionist movement found themselves involved in these health-alternative or progressive health circles, and because it was a newer area of medicine, schools admitted Black people and women. That is how Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward in the historical record was admitted to a homeopathic school in New York. They didn’t know she was Black because of her light skin, and then once she was in the school and they figured it out, she argued to stay. I became super interested in those twin things: that intense interest in making the world better and this interest in health and healing, and the metaphors around that, like what it means for a community to heal.

LB: The book takes place partly in Haiti. How did you go about researching nineteenth-century Haitian politics and its impact on Black Americans during Reconstruction?

KG: In 2018 and 2019, I had fellowships with the Radcliffe Institute and with Princeton, and at Radcliffe I was able to dive deeply into Haitian history. Haiti has a very robust literary tradition, but because I don’t speak French or Creole, I didn’t always have access to all the sources or information I needed. But the Haitian historian Malick W. Ghachem happened to be a Radcliffe Fellow while I was there, so he was super helpful. I’m also really lucky there are other great scholars in the US studying this period right now, like Brandon Byrd at Vanderbilt University, who wrote a wonderful study of Black expatriates in Haiti in the 1870s and 1880s. It’s lost to us now in 2021, but for a good chunk of the twentieth century and life after the end of slavery in the US, Black Americans were intensely interested in Haiti. They saw it as an experiment that could prove Black people were able to self-govern. And as Haiti succeeded, they saw it as an argument that they should be a part of the American project and the American nation. I wanted to revive that lost history in the novel and counteract some of the reasoning around Black history that thinks of Black Americans as somehow more American than we are part of an African diaspora.

I also visited Haiti in person for about four or five days in February 2018, which was extremely helpful. I went to Port-au-Prince and Jacmel. What is so wonderful about Haiti is how everyone there knows their history and is so deeply steeped in it. You can be walking along, and someone will say, that is where the Polish soldiers came in 1815 to help us out with the revolution and their descendants are still here, and that’s why those people over there have green eyes. It’s really fascinating, that deep understanding and connection to history and place. It’s also always fascinating to go to countries that are so geographically close to the US and have had horrible relationships with the US, and to hear their understanding of and how they talk about that history.