Freedom Fire, page 19
“Uh … hi,” Magdalys called back. “I’m looking for —”
“MAGDALYS!” someone yelled directly across from where she stood.
She knew that voice.
Magdalys looked up, tears already welling in her eyes. The attic window was open and Montez Roca’s long, bespectacled face was poking out of it with the biggest smile she’d ever seen.
“What are you doing here?” he called. Then his eyes narrowed. “And what’d you do to your hair?”
He was alive. Montez was alive. And she’d found him.
All her memories of who he’d been came crashing into the sudden vision of who he’d become: a soldier. Hardened by battle, sure, but still somehow glowing with that excitement for life she knew so well. It wasn’t just that she feared he’d been killed, she realized; she didn’t know who he’d be after all that had happened, even if she could reach him.
A feeling swelled in Magdalys: waves of sadness and joy seemed to have smashed into each other and were rising.
She didn’t know how to meet Montez’s gaze, this bookworm turned sniper who was her brother, like somehow if she locked eyes with him the whole moment would go up in smoke, become another fever dream of bone hills and gaping maws in the earth. She’d fought so hard to get here and still, none of it seemed possible. But there he was, alive and in the flesh. One of the lenses in Montez’s glasses was cracked and he had a bruise on his forehead, but otherwise, he looked pretty okay.
“We came to get you out of here,” Magdalys said, as more faces emerged from the darkness behind shattered windows. “All of you.”
“Hey, Montez,” Mapper yelled.
The caws of approaching sinorniths came from not far away, and from even closer, more shouts from the Bog Marauders, already regrouping.
“Did General Grant send you?” Wolfgang asked. “Are you with the Union Army?”
Magdalys shrugged. “We weren’t when we started out, but somewhere along the way, I think we may have mustered in.” She looked over at Mapper. He nodded enthusiastically. “I have a letter from the general that’ll explain everything.”
“Excellent!” the corporal yelled as a cheer rose up from the mansion. “There should be a division of General Banks’s army heading west from New Orleans to dislodge some Confederate blockade runners in Brownsville, Texas, and spook Emperor Maxwell’s forces out of Matamoros, across the border. We were hoping to link up with them. Of course, we gotta bust out of here first, and to do that we’ll need all the help we can get, but especially the kind that comes sauntering into battle on the back of a giant toad!”
“Now that that’s settled,” Magdalys said, finally meeting her long-lost-could’ve-been-dead-apparently-a-sharpshooter brother’s eyes, “let’s fight our way out of this swamp together.”
Once again, let me get this out of the way right off the bat: There were no dinosaurs during the Civil War era! In fact, there were no dinosaurs at any point in time during human history. The Dactyl Hill Squad series is historical fantasy. That means it’s based on an actual time and place, events that actually happened, but I also get to make up awesome stuff, like that there were dinosaurs running around. So some of the people, places, and events are based on real historical facts, some are inspired by real historical facts, and some are just totally made up. Throughout this note, I’ve given some recommendations on books that helped me pull all this together; some of them were written for adult readers, so make sure they’re the right ones for you before diving in.
Magdalys Roca and the other orphans are not based on any specific people, but there was indeed a Colored Orphan Asylum, and their records speak of a family of kids mysteriously dropped off from Cuba without much explanation. That was part of the inspiration behind this book. You can read those stories and more about the Colored Orphan Asylum in Leslie Harris’s book In the Shadow of Slavery.
Cymbeline Crunk and her brother, Halsey, are inspired by Ira Aldridge and James Hewlett, two early black Shakespearean actors who performed in New York City. Hewlett cofounded the African Grove Theater, the first all-black Shakespearean troupe in the United States. Halsey and Cymbeline Crunk are entirely made-up characters. You can read more about Hewlett in Shane White’s book Stories of Freedom in Black New York and more about Ira in Ira’s Shakespeare Dream, by Glenda Armand and Floyd Cooper.
General Philip Sheridan was a famous Union general known for his charisma and aggressive military tactics. He would go on to lead the cavalry division of the Army of the Potomac in the last year of the war. He wrote about his life and his time in the Civil War in the autobiography Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan.
The Card brothers were real scouts under General Sheridan who proved crucial assets during the Tennessee campaigns of the Army of the Cumberland. Much of what happens to them in the book is taken from real-life events, although it has been condensed and the dates moved around.
General Ulysses S. Grant was the leading commander of the US Army by the end of the Civil War and went on to become president of the United States. During the war, he quickly became one of President Lincoln’s favorite generals for his unwavering commitment to victory and determination under fire. While he was never known to have an allosaurus named Samantha or a microdactyl named Giuseppe, he did spend time in New Orleans just after the fall of Vicksburg and suffered a riding accident while reviewing troops that left him bed-bound and in a cast at the Saint Charles Hotel for several days.
Big Jack Jackson was a real US soldier who was liberated from slavery by the Union Army and fought valiantly at the Battle of Milliken’s Bend, where he was killed in action.
Both the Louisiana 9th and the Louisiana Native Guard were all-black divisions of the US army. The Native Guard didn’t fight at Milliken’s Bend but were involved in a famous assault at Port Hudson. While the soldiers we meet here are entirely made up, many of their names are taken from actual soldiers who fought in those units, including Cailloux, Octave Rey, Hannibal, and Solomon.
In the case of the Louisiana Native Guard, the word Native refers to natives of Louisiana, not Native Americans, as Amaya at first thinks. It’s unclear when the word Native became commonly used for Indigenous people. At this time in American history, the US Government was fighting a war of extermination against the many Indigenous nations, many of whom they’d already forced to relocate during the Trail of Tears a few decades earlier.
You can read about the Native Guard in the Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience During the Civil War by James G. Hollandsworth Jr.
While Dr. Pennbroker is a fictional character, over a dozen black surgeons served in the US Army during the Civil War, including Dr. Anderson Ruffin Abbot and Dr. Alexander T. Augusta.
General Ely Samuel Parker was a real-life Seneca lawyer, engineer, and diplomat. Both Harvard University and the New York Bar Association refused him entry because of his race. He eventually went on to become a key engineer and general during the Civil War and one of General Grant’s right hand men. After the war, he went on to be the first Native person to hold the position of Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
Allan Pinkerton founded the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1850, and the organization went on to serve as President Lincoln’s bodyguard and intelligence service during the Civil War. It later became the largest private law enforcement agency in the world, and was notorious for violently disrupting the Labor Movement.
Elizabeth Crawbell is entirely made up, though she was inspired by two real-life Confederate spies: Belle Boyd, a teenager who became a famed courier and secret agent, and the widow Rose O’Neal Greenhow, who monitored Union troop buildups and coordinated spies from her Washington, DC, residence. Both were captured by the Pinkertons. You can read more about them and two women who worked for the Union side, Emma Edmonds and Elizabeth Van Lew, in Karen Abbott’s Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War.
Corporal Buford, Lieutenant Hardy L. Hewpat, Earl Shamus Dawson Drek, and his crimson dactyl are totally made up.
Dactyl Hill is based on a real historical neighborhood in Brooklyn called Crow Hill (modern-day Crown Heights), which, along with Weeksville and several others, became a safe haven for black New Yorkers escaping the racist violence of Manhattan. You can find out more about Weeksville at the Weeksville Historical Society and in Judith Wellman’s book Brooklyn’s Promised Land.
The Colored Orphan Asylum was on Fifth Avenue between Forty-Second and Forty-Third Streets in Manhattan. It was burned down in the New York Draft Riots. All the orphans except one escaped, and the organization relocated to another building.
By the second half of 1863, when this book takes place, the Union Army had just achieved two major and decisive victories after two and a half years of the Civil War. At Gettysburg, the newly promoted General Meade repelled General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, effectively ending the Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania; and in Mississippi, General Grant sacked the fortress city of Vicksburg after a prolonged siege. Starting earlier that same year, the US government finally allowed black soldiers to be mustered into service, although they insisted on paying them significantly less than their white counterparts. From Maine to the Midwest all the way down to Louisiana, many thousands answered the call anyway. Besides fighting valiantly in combat, they agitated successfully for equal pay, and eventually made up 10 percent of the Union Army. You can read more about the famed Massachusetts 54th and 55th regiments in Thunder at the Gates by Douglas R. Egerton and Now or Never! Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry’s War to End Slavery by Ray Anthony Shepard. A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865 is also a fascinating historical overview written twenty years after the war by a former soldier and one of the first African American historians, George Washington Williams. There are numerous other books about the Civil War, but one of the best is Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson.
The Battle of Chickamauga took place over several days (not one like it does here), just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee. While some of the details depicted are made up, a few major parts really did happen that way, including the wider strategic questions the Army of the Cumberland faced once they’d chased General Bragg’s Confederate forces out of Tennessee. After a vicious back and forth, the near-stalemate was broken when a miscommunication on the Union side led to one regiment being moved out of the way just as the Confederates charged, which then divided the Federal forces in half and collapsed their front lines. General Thomas famously held out, covering the retreat of the other units, a feat that earned him the nickname “The Rock of Chickamauga.” General Sheridan’s division was cut off from the rest of the army during the rout, and then regrouped and made their way back to try to reinforce Thomas as night was falling, although it’s unclear how much help they were able to provide.
The Battle of Milliken’s Bend, which Montez was wounded in, was indeed an important moment in the victory at Vicksburg, as the 9th Louisiana Regiment of African Descent and others repelled an attempt by the Confederates to reinforce their besieged troops.
The song that Sabeen sings, “John Brown’s Body,” was a popular Civil War marching tune in the US Army. John Brown was an abolitionist who led a raid against Harper’s Ferry in 1859. The original melody comes from an old folk hymn called “Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us.” Soldiers in the black regiments sang a version too — the one Magdalys hears them sing while marching through Tennessee. Julia Ward Howe wrote the most famous rendition of the song — “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” — after visiting Union soldiers in 1861.
The Knights of the Golden Circle were composed of various pro-slavery advocates throughout the Americas who were dedicated to bringing an expansion of the slave states into the Caribbean and Central and South America that they dubbed “the Golden Circle.”
Federal naval forces led by General Farragut took over New Orleans very early on in the war and the city remained in Union control the whole time. A city known for delicious food and a mix of cultures, New Orleans is considered the birthplace of jazz, which grew in part out of the second-line funeral tradition that Hannibal tells Magdalys about.
The Mardi Gras Indians are a New Orleans cultural tradition dating back to the nineteenth century, when black Americans wanted to honor the Native Americans who had helped them out during slavery. To this day, the different Krewes create brightly colored, feather-adorned regalia and parade through the streets of New Orleans on certain days of the year.
Of course, a lot less is known about dinosaurs than about the Civil War–era United States. Because of this, and because this is a fantasy novel, I took more liberties with the creation of the dinosaurs in this story than I did with the history. Experts can make intelligent guesses based on the fossil data, but we don’t really know exactly what prehistoric animals looked like, smelled like, or how they acted. In the world of Dactyl Hill Squad, the dinos never went extinct, but humans did subdue and domesticate them as beasts of burden and war.
The brachiosaurus was a humongous herbivorous (meaning it ate plants) quadruped (meaning it walked on four legs). Its long neck allowed it to eat leaves from the tallest trees. It lived during the Late Jurassic Period and probably didn’t hoot the way the ones in the Dactyl Hill world do.
Sauropod is a general term for the gigantic quadrupedal dinosaurs with long necks, long tails, and relatively small heads. In the Dactyl Hill Squad world, they are used for transportation, cargo carrying, and construction.
As Magdalys points out, pterodactyls weren’t dinosaurs, they were pterosaurs, flying reptiles closely related to birds. They flew through Jurassic-era skies munching on insects, fish, and small reptiles. Generally about the size of seagulls, they weren’t really large enough to carry a person. A group of pterodactyls is not called a squad (although maybe it should be!) and scientists don’t suspect them to have been pack dependent as described in the book. But who knows?
Raptors were a group of very intelligent, bipedal (meaning they walked on two feet) carnivores (meaning they ate meat). They had rod-straight tails and a giant claw on each foot, and they hunted in packs during the Late Cretaceous Period.
Triceratopses were herbivorous quadrupeds about the size of an ice cream truck that roamed the earth during the Late Cretaceous Period. They had three horns: one protruding from the snout and two longer ones that stuck out from a wide shield over their eyes that stretched out over its neck.
The diplodocus was one of the longest known sauropods and it roamed the North American plains toward the end of the Jurassic Period. It was over ninety feet long! Basically the size of a nine-story building turned on its side.
Pteranodons were large, mostly toothless pterosaurs without long tails. In fact, their name means “toothless lizard.” Quetzalcoatlus, the largest of pterosaurs, was big as a fighter plane — forty-five feet long. They ruled the skies of the Late Cretaceous Period.
Archaeopteryx, which means “Old Wing,” are considered to be the oldest form of bird. About the size of a raven, these Jurassic-era dinosaurs had sharp teeth, a long bony tail, and hyperextensible second toes called “killing claws.” Yikes!
Sinornithosaurs were Cretaceous Period birdlike dinos once believed to have a venomous bite, although experts now don’t believe that to be the case. They glided and hunted through the skies of what we now call China, and their name means “Chinese bird lizard.”
The parasaurolophus were Late Cretaceous Period plant eaters that walked on both four and two legs. They had a long bony crest that extended from the backs of their heads.
Dimetrodons, also known as finbacks, were short, four-legged synapsids (creatures that roamed the earth forty million years before the dinosaurs) that were recognizable for the tall sails protruding from their spines. They are related to modern mammals.
Spinosauruses were large theropods that hunted the wetland areas of the Cretaceous Period. They had long, crocodile-like snouts, and the boney spines extending from their vertebrae were probably connected by skin to give a sail-like look.
In this messy, broken time of mass shootings and state violence, it’s important to note that guns almost always create more problems than they solve. More than that: Young people suffer with trauma from those problems in increasing and heartbreaking numbers. This is an adventure story, and it takes place during a war, in an era when folks were being kidnapped and sold into slavery and an invading rebel army threatened the nation’s capital. Guns are one of the parts of life in that time that I chose to include in this story, but I hope that a) the dangers, both physical and emotional, of gun violence ring loud and clear on the page, and b) we one day live in a time when gun violence doesn’t exist anymore at all.
Rifled muskets are enhanced versions of the old Revolutionary War firearms. The rifled muzzles gave these weapons greater precision, and their caplock mechanisms made them easier to load and fire than their flintlock ancestors. Rifled muskets, both Enfields and Springfields, were the most commonly issued guns on both sides of the Civil War.
Many rifled muskets were armed with a bayonet, a sharpened sword attached to the muzzle that could be used to stab an attacker.
The carbine is smaller and lighter than the rifled musket, with a shorter barrel. Because they are breach-loading, meaning you insert the bullets at the middle of the gun instead of into the muzzle, they are easier to shoot from horseback (or dinoback) and thus were favored by cavalry (mounted) units.
The Gatling is a multibarreled rapid-fire gun invented by Richard Gatling, a North Carolinian who, horrified that more soldiers died of disease than from combat during warfare, decided to invent a weapon that would “supersede the necessity of large armies.” Which doesn’t totally make that much sense and definitely didn’t work out that way, but hey … He sold his new weapon exclusively to the US Army, but it didn’t see too much action during the Civil War as it had only just been invented.
