The Mapmaker's Children, page 32
Makes 50 dog bone–shaped CricKet BisKets®.
2. INGREDIENTS:
2 ½ cups organic whole-grain flour
2 tablespoons organic ground flax meal
2 large organic eggs, beaten
¾ cup canned organic pumpkin puree or fresh pumpkin baked soft and mashed
¼ cup cold water, give or take a splash
3. INSTRUCTIONS:
Preheat oven to 350° F. Grease two baking sheets or line with parchment paper.
Combine flour and flax meal in a bowl. In a separate bowl, combine beaten eggs and pumpkin until smooth. Add wet ingredients to dry. Then add cold water, a tablespoon at a time, until the dough comes together to form a spongy ball.
Roll dough out to ¼- to ⅓-inch thickness. Draw signature biscuits using knife (two heart tops with bridge between) or 2-inch dog-bone cookie cutter. Place cut biscuit shapes on baking sheets. Use tines of fork to embellish: gently stick into middle, wiggle, and remove; carve logo initial C. Reroll scraps and repeat until dough is used up.
Bake 20 to 25 minutes, until the tops of the biscuits have dried out completely. Remove from oven and flip biscuits over. Return to oven, rotating trays front to back, and bake another 20 minutes, until crunchy as hardtack. Let cool on wire racks. Store in an airtight container until ready to ship to customers or give immediately to eager pup patrons.
4. ADDITIONAL INVENTIONS BASED ON ORIGINAL:
* Apple Hill® CBs: substitute ¾ cup applesauce for pumpkin puree in original recipe and spelt flour for whole-grain flour; add 1 teaspoon of cinnamon.
* Miss Cleo® CBs: add ½ cup organic blueberries.
* Ladybug® CBs: substitute ¾ cup pureed organic baby carrots for pumpkin puree in original recipe; add 2 tablespoons whole toasted flaxseeds.
Author’s Note
MAPPING SARAH WITH SARAH
According to the moleskine journal I tote just about everywhere, the first scratch of an idea for this novel came on June 5, 2011. I couldn’t get a woman’s voice out of my head. She kept saying, A dog is not a child. At the market where I was buying peppers, at night while listening to my husband snore, while brewing my tea and baking biscuits, while walking my dog through our neighborhood…she called to me from the steps of the Apple Hill house.
When I finally wrote down the phrase on June 5, I swung open the front door and out came a dozen hastily penned pages of contemporary New Charlestown. As with my other novels, I knew the names immediately: Eden and Jack Anderson.
It’s funny how characters come full-formed to an author. Our duty is to dig, gently but fervently, to unearth the narrative around them. And so I excavated the fictional landscape. I knew the Andersons lived near the true Harpers Ferry and Charles Town cities in West Virginia. I Googled home addresses: Liberty Street, Duncan Field Lane, Washington Street. All were lined with Queen Anne homes featuring elaborate porches and gabled roofs. Beautiful architecture. The real estate listings said they were facades to older foundations dating back to the 1800s. My story wheels had begun to turn. I had a place, a vision of the setting.
I immediately began outlining Eden’s chapters, but it wasn’t until September 2011 that John Brown’s name appeared in my journal. A genealogy tree transcribed from the Internet wormed its way down the page alongside another scene I couldn’t get out of my head. Scribbled illegibly as if I might blink and forget: Jail cell. Warden. John, hung before noon. Wife. Daughters. Then there she was, Sarah Brown.
Her character details spilled out like a cup running over. Freddy, Ms. Silverdash, Cleo, and the Miltons, too. All seemed to crowd my imagination, hollering to have their names added to the playbill, to be remembered.
SARAH BROWN
Courtesy of the West Virginia State Archives
By October, I’d begun historical research on the Brown family, Sarah in particular. I was fascinated by her nearly forgotten life. A gifted artist, early feminist, abolitionist, friend of the famed Alcott family (Louisa May and the rest), familiar with all the leading men of the Underground Railroad and John Brown’s Secret Six Committee, highly educated, a minter, an orchardist, a teacher of orphans, devoted to children not her own, called the most beautiful of John Brown’s offspring, and yet never wed, never engaged, even as all of her siblings married off. It grated on me—not knowing her story.
So I began what would end up totaling over three years of mapping Sarah across the country. In Concord, Massachusetts, I visited Orchard House, where she stayed with the Alcotts while at Franklin Sanborn’s private school; Boston, where she visited “Friends” of her father, John Brown. In Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, I walked the town from beginning to end, the railroad tracks to the riverbank. With my own dad by my side, I went into the firehouse where the infamous Harpers Ferry Raid met its bloody finale. There, Sarah’s brothers and other raiding men died together, slave and free, black and white, all dust now.
In the swelter of that 2012 summer’s day, we were silenced by the ominous substance of history underfoot and rising up in the Virginia heat. Then my dad said, “All those sons—those boys…dead. A tragedy.” His words gave me goose bumps.
A hundred and fifty years later, a father stood mourning lost futures. I have two brothers, Jason and Andrew. As a sister, I can’t imagine the pain of losing them. Call me selfish, but if I were in Sarah Brown’s shoes, I’d just want my family back—even though the cause was righteous, her loss was considered the catalyst for the Civil War and a nation’s emancipation from slavery.
I visited Charles Town next. The old courthouse where John Brown was imprisoned, put to trial, and hung still stands stately and white across the street from the clock tower bank, town hall, and steeple church. So quaintly Americana and yet its history is steeped in violence and heartache. It was there that I clearly saw Sarah and Eden, side by side, as an iconological mirror.
I continued to follow Sarah’s trail from West Virginia across the continent to Red Bluff, California. The gracious director of Archives and Collections at the Saratoga Historical Foundation Museum opened the doors to me off hours for a private research visit. She patiently answered my litany of questions, provided me all the documents the museum had on hand, allowed me to take photos, walk the rose-brambled grounds, and stand before Sarah’s paintings.
AUTHOR SARAH MCCOY AT THE SARATOGA HISTORICAL FOUNDATION MUSEUM.
The five on display are the only publicly remaining artworks by Sarah Brown: pencil and crayon portraits of John and Mary Brown; oil paintings titled Peaches, View of Mt. Diablo, and Carmel Mission. Between her art education and commissioned pieces, there must’ve been more. But like her life, they seemed to have come and gone without detailed chronicling and, so, they’re buried beside the people she aided as an abolitionist, the orphans she nurtured, the family, friends, and local community to whom she remained devoted.
JOHN BROWN AND MARY DAY BROWN: PORTRAITS BY SARAH BROWN
Courtesy of the Saratoga Historical Foundation
I walked the town of Red Bluff, too. Though 3,000 miles apart, its Main Street was nearly identical to Concord, Harpers Ferry, and Charles Town, with residents going about their daily errands, children following along, and businessmen waving hello to one another just as they did in the nineteenth century. I went to Sarah’s gravesite, sat beside her on a bed of pinecones, and listened to the autumn leaves whisper. I say confidently that I felt Sarah there in Madronia Cemetery and believe she was a guardian angel to the writing of this novel. With me in my darkest hours was a woman who made an unconventional life into an extraordinary legacy. I gained strength in the faith she displayed. I was inspired by her as a creative, independent woman.
But please understand, I didn’t set out to write a biographical account of Sarah Brown or a romanticized version of the facts. My role as the storyteller was simply to use the tools of my craft and imagine what Sarah’s life might’ve looked like, how she felt, her struggles and joys, what she might’ve dreamed, even as I dreamed her into existence. I did my homework for years: researched newspaper articles, letters, distant Brown relations alive today, Sarah’s real-life art, Underground Railroad artifacts, symbols, and codes, bootleggers, baby dolls, and a colossal amount of John Brown information available in library archives.
The pictorial symbols I described are factual to the documented Underground Railroad and Slave Quilt codes. I united those cryptograms with the speculated use of children’s dolls to smuggle contraband, spy messages, and medicines to slaves in antebellum America and during the Civil War. Most informative to my story development was the debate surrounding the “Nina” doll on display at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia. The family who donated “Nina” claimed her to be an example of the doll-smuggling theory. Passed down through the generations as legend, she gained celebrity today due to her ambiguous past. “Nina” fueled my imagined trajectory for Sarah and Eden.
Admittedly, I took liberties with some of the historical events and facts. I was more concerned with capturing Sarah’s heart and future impact on Eden in the present day than on writing an official profile. This book is wholly my own invention.
As a writer and a reader, the most satisfying part of mapping any characters (historical, contemporary, real, and fictional) is the emotional journey taken beside them as they discover their independence and develop into stronger people. I believe we become stronger from these characters’ pasts, presents, and futures. We learn to view the world and all of our lives, here and gone, as one giant map. Paths, decisions, history, and destiny interconnect even if we can’t blatantly see the linking tracks. But, given distance and a stilled perspective, they are unmistakable and ultimately divine. This is what Sarah and Eden demonstrated to me. I hope their stories, two in one, proved the same to you, my esteemed community of readers—present, future, and perhaps even one never-to-be-forgotten woman from the past.
Acknowledgments
My eternal thanks to…
The courageous women (family, friends, neighbors, strangers, those here and gone) who openly shared their intimate struggles, fears, physical pains, and emotional battles in defining and creating a “family.” Equal thanks to the men who supported and loved these women through every hour. This novel is in honor of all of you.
Mollie Glick, my super agent (it’s official, you have the keychain), literary match, and dear friend. Emily Brown, a wicked smart addition. Kristin Neuhaus for trumpeting this book across the globe before I’d even finished the last word. And everyone at Foundry for being nothing short of phenomenal.
My Wonder Woman of an editor, Christine Kopprasch (certified by scandalous apron), Maya Mavjee, and Molly Stern for being lionhearted champions. To my Charlie’s Angels fierce team at Crown: Jay Sones (a.k.a. Charlie), Annsley Rosner, Sarah Breivogel, Rachel Meier; and perpetual Angels: Meagan Stacey, Emily Davis, and Kira Walton. To Bonnie Thompson for having the eaglest of eagle eyes (yes, I verbed a noun in not-quite homophonic alliteration) and Mary Doria Russell for the brilliant introduction.
Katie Alexander, the Saratoga Historical Foundation’s Archives and Collections director, who was wonderfully kind to open the museum off hours so I might stand before Sarah’s paintings, stare, dream, take notes and photographs, ask a thousand questions about the Brown family, and generally consume her entire afternoon. My visit to the Saratoga Historical Museum was instrumental in knowing Sarah’s life in California.
The Madronia Cemetery staff for allowing a Virginia lady in Texas boots to sit beside Sarah Brown’s grave, collecting leaves and pinecones, running my fingers over her etched headstone, and mumbling awed hellos without shooing me off as a lunatic vagabond.
The following institutions and collections that served as tremendous resources: the University of Virginia’s John Brown Archive and newspaper scans from the Staunton Spectator; the University of Missouri–Kansas City’s compilation of John Brown’s transcribed letters; the West Virginia Division of Culture and History, the Virginia Military Institute Archives, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Harper’s Weekly archive; the Miller-Cory House Museum for their list of colonial herbs and usages; Alice Keesey Mecoy’s blog “John Brown Kin”; the John Brown Wax Museum, the Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, the Harpers Ferry Historical Association, the Jefferson County Museum, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, the Jefferson County Public Library; PBS’s History Detectives program with special thanks to historian Gwen Wright; the Museum of the Confederacy, the Louisa May Alcott Orchard House, the Saratoga Historical Foundation, and the EVMS Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine.
I must give due reverence and credit to the writers who dug into history for me and presented the information in packaged books, essays, articles, and other primary sources. I could not have written this book without their precedential work and the comfort of having these authorities stacked across my writing desk: The Browns of Madronia by Damon G. Nalty; The Californians: After Harper’s Ferry: California Refuge for John Brown’s Family by Jean Libby; Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Antebellum South by Gladys-Marie Fry; and to the fiction that informed and lit my imagination: Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks; Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier; Little Women by Louisa May Alcott; and Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen.
Immeasurable thanks to friends who shared their innermost heartaches and joys—and never once balked at my pointed questions, inane bantering, or irrational tears. Thank you for your uncensored, treasured friendship and for allowing me to be part of your families: Christy and JC Fore, Stacy Rich and Eric Schatten, Mary and Courtney Holland, Kristin and Jason Romesburg. Your little ones, my honorary nieces and nephews, are proof of modern miracles and ancient promises.
Significant thanks to my shining-star person, Christy Fore. Without you, my creative process would not be complete. I would not be complete. I could go and on…as you know and have e-mail evidence, but I’ll leave the gushing to our secret correspondences. Much love to Kelsey Grace and Lainey Faith (because they deserve to have their names in this book, too).
Endless thanks to bookish friends who have supported, loved, and cheered me from coast to coast and around the globe while researching and writing this novel: truest “Peppah Sister” Jenna Blum, Caroline Leavitt (cowgirl boot blinger), Beth Hoffman (#Happydale), Emmy Miller (goddess momma), Robin Kall Homonoff and my honorary MOT family (Emily, Burt, David, Ari), Chris Bohjalian, Jen Pooley, my SSS (you know who you are, Lovin); Edan Lepucki, Patrick Brown, and D’Bean for proving that writer parents are über-cool (organic pomegranates and yoga pants forevah!); Therese Walsh (T-ea sis) and my Writer Unboxed friends; Kathy Parker, Marcie Koehler, and the Best Book Club beauties; the independent bookstores and book clubs across the nation and globe who’ve crusaded and cheered my work, you are the fuel to my rocket ship, unquestionably.
To my family, no acknowledgment or reverence or gratitude is enough. You are the underpinning of my spirit. Without you, I’d be a lost button. Your daily support, prayers, and eternal love through sunshine and rain are the true definition of family: my dashing younger brothers Andrew and Jason McCoy, my best friends and heroes; my grandparents Wilfredo and Maria Norat, Grandma Mona Louise McCoy, and all my relations, near and far. Special thanks to Aunt Gloria O’Brien for showing me the beauty of an adoption family. Titi Ivonne Tennent for truly being a second mother, singing “Going to the Chapel” in the car on my wedding day, three-way hugging me from sobs to laughter that October 2013 afternoon, and so much more. You are my magical God-mommy.
Most of all, thanks to my parents, Eleane and Curtis McCoy. I am humbled and grateful beyond life and breath to be your daughter. Mommacita, you know the true beats of my heart. Daddio, to whom this book is dedicated, you are the reflection of agape. Thank you for driving me to West Virginia and walking Harpers Ferry corner to corner in the blistering heat with a smile and equal zeal for my characters. We’ll never know why they moved that old firehouse, but we’ll always have KFC buckets of chicken on the road trip.
To my husband, Brian (a.k.a. Doc B), we’ve been riding this trail together since high school but over the years of writing this book, your courage, unflappable good nature, and faith have led us to blessed new territory. Daily, I’m awed by your talents and compassion, and bolstered by your abundant love. Thanks for asking me to the prom those decades ago and for telling me I’m always enough—sometimes a plenty handful. Play that K-Ci & JoJo cassette tape. I thank God that I finally found you.
About the Author
SARAH MCCOY is author of the New York Times, USA Today, and international bestseller The Baker’s Daughter, a 2012 Goodreads Choice Award Best Historical Fiction nominee; the novella “The Branch of Hazel,” in Grand Central; and The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico. Her work has been featured in Real Simple, The Millions, Your Health Monthly, Huffington Post, and other publications. She has taught English writing at Old Dominion University and at the University of Texas at El Paso. She calls Virginia home but presently lives with her husband, an Army physician, and their dog, Gilly, in El Paso, Texas. Connect with Sarah on Twitter at @SarahMMcCoy, on her Facebook fan page, or via her website, www.sarahmccoy.com.
Sarah McCoy, The Mapmaker's Children
