Before I delve into that, however, I want to point out that the American Civil War was a very fraught and painful period in history. While this series aimed to be inclusive and incorporate people of color as researched during the Victorian era, the concept of race is not anachronistic, though more modern terms for racial identity might be. In the interests of being as transparent about race as possible so as not to erase the harms of oppression, for race identifiers, I opted to use skin tones for white, mixed-race, and Black characters instead of harmful descriptors of the period as well as the modern capitalized version to center the appearance of Black characters in the story.

It is my hope to encourage discussion about positive allyship and what this means in the context of current race relations without being performative, othering, or supremacist. On the advice of a sensitivity reader, these references were incredibly helpful to me: bell hooks’s essay, “Eating the Other,” from her 1992 book, Race and Representation; Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination; and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article, “What This Cruel War Was Over,” in The Atlantic.

I based my heroine, the Kestrel, on real-life female spies during the era. Elizabeth “Crazy Bet” Van Lew was a white Civil War spy from Richmond, Virginia, who freed all her slaves when her father died and used every penny of her wealth toward the Union cause. To stay under the radar and fool everyone around her, she pretended to be vapid and witless, which was effective at making her invisible. Van Lew got the nickname “Crazy Bet” because she mumbled nonsensically to herself and pretended to be flighty and distracted in order to escape notice. In 1863, Union General Benjamin Butler recruited her to head up the espionage network in Richmond. She visited imprisoned Union soldiers and brought them clothes, food, and medicine, while ferrying coded messages hidden in vegetables and eggs and written in invisible ink that could only be seen when milk was poured on the messages.

Another real-life spy who makes a cameo in my story was Mary Richards, also known as Mary Bowser, Mary Jane Henley, and Mary Jones. She was a free Black woman who was an essential part of the Union intelligence ring. She had a photographic memory and was a brilliant actress. Working behind enemy lines, Mary Richards was a maid in the house of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and reported back on plans and documents that she saw while cooking and cleaning. There are many different stories about her identity as well as her role as a spy, but there’s no doubt that she was an intelligent and extraordinary woman. Known later on for facilitating education for her freed fellow men and giving speeches across the United States about her experiences during the war, she was reported to be funny, smart, and sarcastic. The last recorded sighting of her was in 1867.