“‘I Am Myrtilla’s Daughter’: Weaving Scotland, Slavery, and Siths into Historical Fantasies” 

Below is the full transcript of my 2023 Zena Sutherland Lecture, delivered May 5 at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago. The video may be viewed on YouTube; an excerpt will be published in the December issue of The Horn Book.

Good evening. I’d like to thank the Chicago Public Library, the University of Chicago, and the Zena Sutherland Lectureship Committee for hosting this annual event. I am honored to be with you tonight to deliver the 2023 Zena Sutherland Lecture. 

My talk this evening is titled “‘I Am Myrtilla’s Daughter’: Weaving Scotland, Slavery, and Siths into Historical Fantasies.” I am going to try my best to pronounce Gaelic words correctly and apologize in advance for the mistakes I am likely to make. I’ll share a clearer image of Myrtilla’s tombstone later in my presentation which should run about an hour. I went through all my albums this week and discovered some fun photographs like this one of me with my older sister Karyn; we’re wearing one of our mother’s matching fashion creations. I don’t know if all kids wore kilts in the 1970s or if it was a Canadian colonial thing but it shows how Scottish culture has been a part of my life from a very early age. 

I feel I ought to begin by addressing the elephant in the room. I’m sure many of you saw the announcement a month ago and wondered, ‘Who is Zetta Elliott?’ I was also surprised by my nomination and didn’t expect to face a large audience tonight. A few Chicago authors made a point of telling me how well-attended past lectures have been (“Neil Gaiman did the Sutherland!”) and I thought I could hear in their voices a hint of confusion: “How did SHE get this gig?”

I have no idea. Only the nominating committee can explain why I’m up here tonight. It might have something to do with the unavailability or expense of celebrity authors. It might be that the committee shares the secret mission of the unknown, irrationally optimistic party that keeps nominating me for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. This year’s winner was Laurie Halse Anderson—an impressive honor for an important author.

I am realistic about my profile within the children’s literature or “kid lit” community. My books have earned a few prizes but I haven’t won any of the major awards—like the Newbery, the National Book Award, or the Coretta Scott King Award. Of my forty-two titles for young readers, two-thirds had to be self-published; I struggle to find an agent, and they struggle to place my many manuscripts with traditional publishers who often find my work “too sad.” A prospective fifth agent recently asked me how many books I’ve sold over the course of my career and when I tallied my numbers, the total neared 600,000. But none of my books have ever made the NY Times bestseller list. I don’t really “do” social media; I’m not adept at firing clever “clap backs” on Twitter and haven’t made a viral TikTok video that landed me on late night television. 

Like so many other authors, however, I have had to deal with book banners, though on a relatively small scale. Last year my picture book A Place Inside of Me: A Poem to Heal the Heart was challenged in Virginia by a parent whose child thought it was about skateboards. Spoiler alert—it’s not. My poem, written twenty years ago and beautifully illustrated by Noa Denmon (who won the Caldecott honor award for her debut) shows the range of emotions experienced by a Black boy after the police-involved shooting of a girl in his community.

When the school principal in Hanover County decided to keep our book on the shelves, a local elected official got involved, taking to social media to call our book “garbage” and implying that it is anti-police. The progressive members of the community responded by inviting me to be a special guest at their inaugural book festival; I traveled to Richmond, did a school visit, signed books at the Book Bar, a Black-owned bookstore, and I spoke to the press. One reporter from a Black newspaper asked to talk to me but about twenty minutes into the phone interview he abruptly asked, “Why aren’t you famous?”  

My flustered response must have been inadequate because his piece never ran in the paper. I begin with this anecdote because I would like us this evening to consider the way fame and visibility shape systems of recognition. When I do school visits, students sometimes approach me to ask, “Are you famous?” And I always reply, “If I were famous, you wouldn’t have to ask.” It seems that kids aren’t entirely sure what fame is, but they know from an early age that it makes a person important. 

I don’t generally have a problem writing in relative obscurity; I realized a long time ago that the kinds of stories I produce aren’t generally valued by “the market,” and part of “getting ahead” means “playing the game” which, to me, is clearly rigged. Fame was never a professional goal of mine—instead I aspired to what I have very nearly achieved: sovereignty and security. The commercial success of my Dragons in a Bag series enables me to write what I want, when I want, how I want without having to worry about sales.

When another White mother in TN tried to have A Place Inside of Me pulled from the shelves—this time because she claimed it made her child think that Black people are inferior—she went before the school board and nostalgically yearned for the good old days when children’s books were about chickens. So I made her a book about a chicken—which is, of course, all about decentering Whiteness and giving everyone an equal opportunity to tell their story, their way. My kid lit scholar friend Laura Jimenez called it “meta and cutely disruptive.” 

I donated a hundred copies to the two counties where my book was challenged; it seemed a fitting way to thank community members whose pressure ultimately kept A Place Inside of Me on the shelves. I probably won’t ever earn enough in sales to cover the cost of self-publishing Chicken Wonders…Why? and that’s okay. The point was to affirm my values by crafting a narrative that demonstrates the power of stories to connect rather than divide us. 

During the pandemic I discovered a guilty pleasure on HBO. The Other Two is a comedy about Brooke and Cary Dubek, two adult siblings living in the shadow of their adolescent brother Chase who achieves sudden superstardom when his homemade music video goes viral. He’s given a record deal but when it becomes clear that Chase can’t actually sing, his savvy, scheming publicist (played brilliantly by Wanda Sykes) finds other ways to capitalize on his popularity. Meanwhile, Cary’s acting career is stalled because he can’t even get an audition without having at least 50K followers on social media. Brooke helps manage Chase’s career, overbooking him even when she can see that he’s unhappy. She ditches her “loser” boyfriend Lance only to watch him find mega success as a designer of unwearable luxury sneakers. Their mother’s warm personality wins her a talk show but Pat’s desire to please others leaves her exhausted and exploited by an entertainment industry that manipulates and monetizes everything. 

The Other Two is a hilarious take on twenty-first century celebrity culture, and a sobering reminder that meritocracy is a myth. Chase’s lack of talent is no barrier to his continued success because he has a team of people working to ensure that he remains a highly visible, lucrative commodity. Brooke and Cary don’t want to live in their little brother’s shadow but can’t succeed in their own careers without buying into the very system they despise. Fame brings wealth and access to opportunity, but it also leads to envy and isolation. Each family member has to decide what they’re willing to sacrifice to achieve professional success.

I don’t mean to suggest that all famous people lack talent; obviously, many artists are rightfully recognized for their brilliance. But a recent article in Poets & Writers, “Literary Prizes Under Scrutiny,” confirms what many writers of color already know. The article summarizes the findings of two studies conducted by Claire Grossman, Juliana Spahr, and Stephanie Young, poet researchers whose survey of US literary prizes for adult fiction reveals that these awards are “‘increasingly powerful shaping mechanisms’” which give select writers “attention…a wider readership and professional opportunities.” The number of literary prizes has increased exponentially since the start of the twentieth century (going from 1 in 1918 up to 80 in 2020), yet it wasn’t until the 1990s that writers of color have finally begun to win recognition for their work. But the vast majority of those winners hold graduate degrees from MFA programs at elite schools and since “literary production in the United States remains disproportionately white,” these prizes do not fundamentally change “a still-exclusionary literary landscape, offering only ‘a limited, curated version of diversity,’” according to the researchers.

Most writers never win an award for their work and most can’t earn a living by writing full-time. Despite the challenges I have faced, I consider myself fortunate; after teaching at the college level for almost a decade, I quit my last professor job in 2014 and eventually found my footing after struggling financially for the first few years. I am not famous, but I’m doing okay. A friend recently asked me if I felt there was a conspiracy to exclude me from certain kid lit conferences. I have undoubtedly annoyed certain influential individuals and I’m sure there are writers who find it professionally disadvantageous to publicly fraternize with me. At 50, I am too old to be “discovered” in an industry fixated on what’s new, what’s now, and what’s next. But it is fascinating to witness those “powerful shaping mechanisms” that allow other writers—and their behind the scene teams—to capitalize on their fame and build empires that extend beyond publishing into other branches of the entertainment industry. 

I grew up with the fraught legacy of the British Empire and harbor no imperialist ambitions myself. When I left Canada, I wanted nothing more than to become African American. As a child, teen, and young adult I consumed, studied, and adored British literature; Charles Dickens was my particular favorite and I strove to write like him. I started grad school at NYU in 1995; when a friend from Detroit read a story of mine and declared that it sounded “soooo British,” I was mortified. I was just beginning to decolonize my imagination, a challenging process I described in my 2010 Horn Book essay. I eventually came to realize that hybridity for me would always be so much more than biraciality. I could not outrun or entirely reject my British heritage; my affection for some aspects of the culture imposed upon me and my ancestors did not nullify my rage, but I felt at ease only when I embraced the complexity of colonialism. Living in New York City helped, since many African and Caribbean immigrants from previously colonized countries were navigating the same choppy waters.

But it was here in Chicago that I finally became a US citizen in 2021 after living in this country for almost thirty years. I am also a citizen of Canada and St. Kitts-Nevis, where my father was born a subject of the King of England in 1941. He migrated to Canada as a teenager but was not welcome in his stepmother’s home. My grandfather tried unsuccessfully to enlist my dad in the army and then Aunt Ellen stepped in to save the day. She had been a member of the Pilgrim Holiness church in Nevis, and so sought out the same denomination when she emigrated to Toronto. When her fifteen-year-old nephew needed a plan for his life, Ellen found a way for him to attend the affiliated Pilgrim High School and Bible College in Allentown, PA. She appealed to the congregation for help with housing and a tiny Scottish woman, Nellie McKay, offered to host my father in her Toronto home when he wasn’t boarding at school in the US. 

My maternal grandfather (on the far right, below) was minister of that Pilgrim Holiness church; it’s where my parents met and when they married, Nellie became Grandma McKay, my Scottish granny. I don’t know much about her—where in Scotland she was born or when she left for Canada. I only know that she taught my mother how to make Yorkshire pudding, she had a son named Fred who towered over her like a giant, and she knit cardigans for my brother, sister, and me. She attended my dad’s graduation in Allentown in 1966 and when Grandma McKay died, my father wept as if he had lost his mother. Again. I am named after his biological mother, Rosetta Elliott, who died in an asylum in Antigua a year before my father moved to Canada. I have no photograph of Zetta, only Aunt Ellen’s memory that my grandmother had “hair down her back.”

I learned early on how to live with shameful silences and unexplained absences. One strategy was to escape into a book where families were whole, happy, and complete. Another was to make up stories that filled the many uncomfortable gaps in my own reality. Thanks to my steady diet of British fiction, when I did dream of running away, I dreamed of England. I had the opportunity to study abroad while I was in college and jumped at the chance to visit England in 1991. Though I couldn’t afford to stay in Arundel for the whole academic year, I did manage to visit Wales and Scotland that fall. I remember Edinburgh being windy and sunny, and I had gingerbread—the cake, not the cookie—for the first time. 

I returned to the UK again and again over the years, sometimes as a tourist, sometimes as a scholar presenting at conferences, and more recently as an author conducting research for my books. In 2018 I began to think seriously about moving to Scotland after attending a publishing conference in Edinburgh. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon made a surprise appearance so the conference organizers asked us to store our bags in the cloakroom. “It doesn’t lock,” they admitted, “but we’ll have someone keep an eye on your things.” Everyone else complied without hesitation so I did, too. We then went upstairs to hear the First Minister’s speech and I marveled at the ease of this unexpected encounter with the Scottish leader. There were no metal detectors, no wands, or pat-downs. Because there was no need. Scotland had one mass shooting at Dunblane Primary school in 1996 and it never happened again—ever. As a progressive country led by a woman, Scotland was at the top of my “if I ever leave the US list.” New Zealand was next for the same reasons. Today, of course, both women have resigned as leaders of their respective countries but gun control is still in effect. 

Then in August of 2022 I got an update from Ancestry.com. I have submitted my DNA to three genealogical sites and gotten disparate results so I wasn’t surprised to see that they now claimed I was 37% Scottish. A few years ago they declared I was 11% Scandinavian, which is also impossible. My mother’s family is deeply invested in origin stories. They are stories—I have no proof that they’re true—but they shaped my understanding of my roots and my role in the world. I was always told that my mother’s father was of Irish stock; my uncles easily adopted Irish accents when impersonating their elders, though my grandfather, his parents, and his grandparents were all born in Canada, not Ireland.

My maternal grandmother presented as White but identified as Negro and prided herself on being the great-grand-niece of Bishop Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. She believed her great-grandfather, John Allen, was the brother or nephew of Bishop Allen. When I moved to Philly in 2018, I hired a genealogist who found several John Allens from that era—and one was an inmate at Eastern State Penitentiary. He was likely White but I keep open the possibility that our ancestor might not have come from such an illustrious family. 

It was easy for me to dismiss the sudden Scandinavian results but I lingered over the Scottish ones. I checked 23&Me and sure enough, they, too, declared that I shared the most DNA with folks from Glasgow (however, this week they’re saying I’m most closely related to folks in central Ireland so who knows). Intrigued, I reached out to a genealogist specializing in mixed Scottish and Irish heritage; she took a quick look at my family tree on Ancestry and immediately spotted a Scottish ancestor. My grandfather’s paternal grandmother, Isabella Stark, listed her mother’s birthplace as Scotland. I recently received a letter from my Uncle Phil letting me know that my grandfather’s mother, Jenny Caldwell, was also of Scottish descent (the MacDougal clan, according to my uncle).  

So last summer I returned to Scotland for the third time to see if it still felt like a potential home. The genealogical updates were interesting but, in some ways, irrelevant. I don’t feel a need to prove that I’m Scottish to justify my presence there; the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of Canada and St. Kitts-Nevis already bind me to the UK and as Sri Lankan-British activist A. Sivanandan famously remarked, “we’re here because you were there.” I don’t intend to apply for status in Scotland; I realize how privileged I am to have two passports already. I’m more interested in Paule Marshall’s “tripartite life” which saw the Caribbean American author dividing her time between homes in three countries. I love the US and feel lucky to live here but I fully understand why so many Black artists have become temporary expats. Sometimes we just need a break.

I do intend to hire another genealogist to trace my Scottish roots, but like many Black people, I’m not particularly curious about my White ancestors. Any I discover are likely to have been settlers who seized Indigenous land and/or participated in other colonial projects that resulted in the displacement and/or enslavement of my other ancestors. I have been working on an experimental memoir called The Hummingbird’s Tongue for over a decade, and I promise I will reveal whatever I learn about my White folks when I finally write that book. But for now I want to talk about historical fantasy, which is the genre of the two projects I am currently working on: a picture book called Blue Boy and a hybrid verse novel, The Ship in the Garden.   

When I arrived in Glasgow last August, I had a couple of hours on my own before meeting children’s literature scholar and author Breanna McDaniel for high tea at my hotel. Bre has made a sort of second home in Scotland and I was eager to learn how my friend had forged connections and built community. After tea, Bre gave me a tour of the city center, renamed “Merchant City,” and she shared Glasgow’s long buried involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 

The next day I signed up for a free walking tour, fully expecting that my older White male tour guide would omit the historical facts Bre had disclosed. But to my surprise, the guide—let’s call him Bob—acknowledged the source of Glasgow’s wealth from the very beginning and pointed out repurposed mansions that once belong to “tobacco lords” whose fortunes were built on the backs of enslaved Africans laboring in the Caribbean and North America. He revealed that Scotland was forced to align itself with England in 1707 because almost the entire nation invested in a failed scheme to colonize Panama. Bob also told us that some Glaswegian merchants were so wealthy they paid to have sidewalks laid for their own private use and doors were widened to allow servants to carry their masters inside on sedan chairs.

Near the end of the tour, Bob stopped in Virginia Court to tell us a heart-breaking story about an enslaved boy named Frederick who was given away by a tobacco merchant. Bob told us that merchants often offered incentives to get traders to buy loose tobacco leaves after all the bales had been sold—a pineapple, or a bottle of port. But one heartless Scot gave the child away instead. According to Bob—whose true passion was acting—Frederick managed to escape from his new enslaver but no one knew what ultimately happened to the little boy.

When the tour ended, I tipped the guide rather generously and went back to the hotel to write a glowing online review. For months in Chicago I had been hearing two words in my mind: blue boy, blue boy, blue boy. It happens sometimes. Before I moved into my Hyde Park apartment in 2021, I visited the neighborhood and heard over and over again: “There’s a boy in the lake, there’s a boy in the lake.” Within a few weeks, I sat down at my desk and wrote The Boy in the Lake, a graphic novel about Emmett Till gathering Chicago’s murdered children in Lake Michigan.

My blue boy remained a mystery for months until I reached Glasgow last summer, took that tour, and heard Frederick’s sad story. I revisited Virginia Court on my own, took more photos, and tried to imagine what might have happened to that poor child. We know well enough from our own contemporary standpoint what happens to vulnerable children who lack protectors. Earlier this year it was revealed that in the UK, asylum-seeking children were being abducted by human traffickers from hotels where they had been placed by the government. In this country, migrant children who crossed the border unaccompanied are working in dangerous conditions on construction sites, in factories, and slaughterhouses.   

I kept asking myself why the merchant would simply give away a valuable young slave who could be exploited for the duration of his life. Was Frederick related to the trader—an illegitimate child, likely product of rape? Perhaps it was simply inconvenient to have him around. Did my blue boy have a disability that made him less productive as a worker in the eyes of an enslaver? Did he contract an illness and weaken, leaving the merchant inclined to dispose of him? All the possibilities I came up with were disturbing and depressing.

Then, the day before I left Glasgow, I visited Kelvingrove Museum in the city’s west end and saw a striking 1890 painting by two of the Glasgow Boys, Edward Atkinson Hornel and George Henry titled, The Druids: Bringing in the Mistletoe (above, left). On the opposite wall was an 1889 painting by Hornel; it was darker and somewhat ghoulish but equally compelling. The Brownie of Blednoch (above, right) piqued my curiosity and later that evening I pulled up the poem that inspired Hornel. Written in Scots by William Nicholson in 1825, “The Brownie of Blednoch” tells the tale of Aiken Drum, a creature with a frightening appearance—claws, no nose, glowing eyes—who only wishes to serve a community and would do so indefinitely in exchange for a bowl of cream so long as they don’t offer him a new set of clothes. When one woman in the village breaks the rules, Aiken Drum departs, never to be seen again. 

I immediately decided that my blue boy had to have an encounter with Hornel’s brownie. One challenge in writing about the past is representing traumatic events truthfully without terrifying or shaming young readers. I’ve found that a dose of magic is like the proverbial spoonful of sugar; having Frederick find a kind of liberation through his encounter with the mythical creature seemed like an ideal way to balance the horror of child trafficking.

The day after I returned to Chicago, I wrote these opening lines:

Behind a wide blue door lived a wee blue boy. 
They called him Frederick.
Frederick was not his true name, 
and the grand house with the blue door was not his true home. 
But no one in the blue boy’s world seemed bothered by the truth.

Within a few weeks I had written a satisfying tale about Frederick’s unhappy life with a tobacco merchant in Glasgow. When my blue boy is gifted to another trader, he winds up in a household where the servants go to bed every night without cleaning up the kitchen. Frederick sees the maid leaving a dish of cream on the back step; she explains that it is for a helpful brownie that serves their household. Suspicious of such an arrangement, Frederick stays up and witnesses the goblin-like creature claiming his meager reward. 

Undaunted by the brownie’s appearance, Frederick welcomes him inside and watches as he gets to work. When the dishes have been done and the kitchen is spotless, the brownie lights his pipe and sits by the fire. He explains that he left his last household after the farmer and his wife presented him with a set of fine clothes. Frederick timidly asks whether the clothes would also make him disappear. “There’s only one way to find out!” the brownie cries before leading Frederick into the glen and over to an old oak tree where he stashed his fine clothes. Frederick puts them on and instantly disappears and the brownie returns to the manor house alone.

I decided I would add an author’s note and a study guide to help readers further explore Scotland’s ties to slavery. There was just one problem. When I searched online for sources to support my tour guide’s story, nothing came up. I looked into Virginia Court and discovered that it was built in 1814—but Glasgow’s tobacco heyday ended in the 1770s with the start of the Revolutionary War. Slavery was deemed inconsistent with Scottish law in 1778 and the trans-Atlantic trade in slaves was abolished in 1807. So how likely was it that a tobacco trader would still have an enslaved child in the early nineteenth century?

I reached out to a historian with expertise in slavery in Scotland; now based nearby in Wisconsin, Prof. Simon Newman introduced me by email to Dr. Stephen Mullen, a professor at the University of Glasgow. Together they had collaborated to produce a report for the university detailing the philanthropic donations made to the school over the centuries that could be linked to slavery. Dr. Mullen kindly shared his research with me which revealed that there was a Caribbean boy named Frederick who was trafficked into Scotland in 1762 by none other than James Watt, famed Scottish inventor of a more efficient steam engine that was used widely during the Industrial Revolution. Watt had many jobs over his lifetime and as a young man served as an agent in his father’s trading company, which did business in North America and the Caribbean. Apparently, the Watts were asked to procure a boy for Lady Spynie of Brodie House in the Highlands. Keeping an enslaved boy to serve as a page—an accessory, really—was the fashion in eighteenth-century Scotland. When the boy failed to arrive, the Brodies wrote to Watt and complained. Other correspondence discovered by Mullen revealed a description of the clothes Frederick had been wearing: breeches, a waist-coat, a black cravat, shoes, and a blue coat.

It was clear to me at this point that Bob, my actor/tour guide, had taken more than a few liberties with the facts. I tried reaching out to the tour guide company but got no response and so resolved to track Bob down when I returned to Glasgow for my birthday in late October. I went back to George Square, where the tours meet each morning, but couldn’t see Bob anywhere. I asked one of his colleagues if he was still working and she directed me to the Riverside Museum where Bob was doing a Halloween show. I bought a ticket for the nearby hop-on-hop-off bus and went over to the museum. Bob came out of a tent dressed like a vampire and listened patiently as I explained my project. There were a lot of things I could have said, but I kept my tone light and just asked if he would be willing to share his sources for the tale he told during our tour. I gave him my card and left the museum not expecting to ever hear from Bob again, knowing I would likely have to revise my picture book story. 

To my surprise, Bob did send me an email the next day. There was no message, no apology—just a link to a newspaper article about historian Stephen Mullen’s research into James Watt. I don’t know if Bob is still conducting tours in Merchant City or if he felt at all ashamed after having his elaborate fabrication exposed. In my more generous moments, I think Bob’s heart was in the right place; perhaps he felt Frederick could be made a more sympathetic figure by adding a bit more drama to his story. I, too, am adding fantastic elements to reshape my blue boy’s narrative. Of course, the difference is that we don’t expect tour guides to lie to us. Do we? They tell jokes and stretch the truth but always with a wink and nod. Wanda Sykes’ character on The Other Two would argue that all publicity is good publicity. To my knowledge, there are no monuments to Frederick in Glasgow, though I saw at least three of James Watt. Only one, at the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum, had a placard beside it acknowledging Watt’s ties to the slave trade. 

Last month my publisher flew me to Austin for the Texas Library Association’s annual conference. While waiting to board my plane, I noticed a blond boy, no more than ten years old, wandering through the gate area with a look of panic on his face. Just as I was about to approach the lost child, he made his way to the gate agent and asked for help. She made an announcement, the boy’s embarrassed father hurried over to the counter, and they were reunited. I blinked away tears while watching this scene and immediately thought of my blue boy. If he was somehow separated from his traffickers, would Frederick know how—or whom—to ask for help in a strange land? Did his mother surrender her son willingly, hoping Frederick might have better opportunities abroad or was he wrenched from her by force? If he spent the first few years of his life on a small island in the Caribbean, how would he find the long trans-Atlantic journey and the bustling, overwhelmingly White city of Glasgow?

But most of all I wondered, “Frederick, why aren’t you famous?” What “powerful shaping mechanisms” operated to elevate the enslaver James Watt while entirely erasing the child he enslaved? What sort of team would we need to assemble to ensure that this Black child’s harrowing narrative, obscured for over 250 years, is never forgotten again? An agent or a publicist wouldn’t likely take an interest in a long-deceased child of whom there is no visual or written evidence that might easily be adapted and monetized into misery porn. Could a social media influencer make Frederick a household name (or in Scotland, at the very least)? Or is it best to take a guerilla graffiti artist approach and “tag” every statue, portrait, textbook, institution, and website that even mentions Watt’s name?

Stephen Mullen’s findings certainly caused a stir when first published in 2020. I’m doing what I can, but without an agent of my own and with two dozen unpublished picture book manuscripts still languishing on my hard drive, I am not much of an asset to my blue boy. My unconventional fairy tale has what I consider to be a happy ending, but I expect many editors here in the US would conclude, as they often do, that my picture book is simply “too sad.” A friend in Glasgow shared the names and email addresses of four Scottish children’s book editors; two responded to my initial query last fall but there has only been silence since. 

The only upside of facing two decades of rejection in the children’s publishing industry is that I am generally prepared to self-publish everything I write. My academic librarian friend Edith Campbell helped me find an online database of Black Scottish artists; I reached out to Jacqueline Briggs, an illustrator based in Inverness, and commissioned a portrait of my blue boy. Jacqueline captured his sadness perfectly and agreed to do the remaining illustrations. We’re hoping to have the book finished sometime this summer. 

Self-published books generally do not get reviewed, added to library collections, or carried in bookstores. Would Scottish readers flock to Amazon to buy a picture book written by a Black woman from North America? I don’t know. UK children’s literature does not yet reflect the rich diversity of its population; things are gradually improving, but I don’t think US cultural imperialism is the solution. In March I met a White woman teacher who actually grew up a decade after me in the same part of Canada. She shared that her students had just finished a unit on Jewell Parker Rhodes’ Ghost Boys and I felt my smile falter. In my suburban Toronto high school, we read American “classics”—To Kill a Mockingbird, A Streetcar Named Desire, Catcher in the Rye. Just one Canadian author, Robertson Davies, made the ELA curriculum and not until my senior year. We never read any Indigenous writers or authors of color and I didn’t discover any Black Canadian authors until after I graduated from college. As a teen, I would have loved to read African American authors in English class, but those books likely would have been windows more than mirrors, to borrow Rudine Sims Bishop’s metaphor. Ideally, all students should have both with priority given to writers from their own country.

One thing I have learned over the course of my writing career is that a book cannot serve anyone unless it exists. My indie titles have circulated in ways I never could have imagined. One 2017 middle grade novel, The Ghosts in the Castle, will be included in an exhibit at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University this summer; my scholar friend Maria Sachiko Cecire has written about my novel and her essay will appear in the accompanying book. 

I grew up reading novels set in castles in England, but my own novel introduces young readers to four Black characters. Zaria is from Brooklyn, Winston is from Brixton, and the ghosts they meet while touring Windsor Castle are two African children made wards of Queen Victoria in the nineteenth century: Sarah Forbes Bonetta (below, left) and Prince Alemayehu (below, right). Sarah has learned how to move freely through the world since her death, but Alemayehu remains trapped in Windsor Castle. It’s up to the two contemporary children to find three things that will remind the prince of his home so that he can finally return to Ethiopia.

I am fascinated by the past but I am not a historian. I rely on the research that professionals publish and treat their meticulous findings like a sumptuous buffet—I take small bites of select dishes. When I’m writing historical fiction, I generally use just 10-15% of my research. Any more than that and the narrative becomes burdened by facts. I have been writing historical fantasy for twenty years. When I realized that most teens didn’t share my passion for the past, I began to write stories that deployed conventional tropes in unconventional ways. My novelette, Mother of the Sea, was selected by Maria Cecire for the ALA’s Great Stories Club for teens. It features a mischievous child who leads a rebellion on board a slave ship that is ultimately destroyed by a vengeful mermaid, the Yoruba orisha Yemoja. 

A Wish After Midnight and The Door at the Crossroads are time-travel novels that send two Brooklyn teens back to 1863 when New York City is being rocked by the Draft Riots. Ship of Souls and Cin’s Mark center on burial grounds in New York City and Philadelphia; in both middle grade novels, an African American boy must find allies to help him free the dead. I scared easily as a child and have never been drawn to the horror genre but I do write a lot of ghost stories. I find it’s an effective way to bring the past into the present and give voice to the countless souls whose stories have been suppressed for centuries.

Before I left Glasgow last fall, I took another walking tour. This one was organized by the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights and was led by two people of color (I later discovered that Nelson Cummins, pictured here, whose mother is from St. Kitts, is likely my cousin). We met at Glasgow Cathedral on a rainy Saturday morning and began by examining the statue of renowned Scottish explorer David Livingstone. Our guides pointed out the deeply problematic depictions at the base of this monument and several others that were hiding in plain sight. It was enlightening to see the city through the lens they held up to history, and I trusted their interpretation of the facts.

At the end of the tour, Nelson mentioned Pollok House, a stately home in the city that was popular with wedding planners. When Nelson explained the Stirling Maxwell family’s wealth was partly derived from past ownership of plantations in Jamaica and St. Kitts-Nevis, I went back to the hotel and tried to find out more. I discovered that I had just missed the deadline for a six-week storytelling residency at Pollok House, part of an initiative called the Facing the Past Project, which “explores the connections between National Trust for Scotland properties and historic enslavement.” 

This residency had my name written all over it. 

• Create a suite of between 4 and 6 stories exploring the connections between Pollok House, the Stirling Maxwell family and the Transatlantic Slave System. Your stories may explore African people’s experiences, focusing on creating empathy and describing a history of resistance despite gaps in the archive. 
• Develop at least two stories that will speak specifically to young audiences. We imagine age ranges of 5 to 10 years old and 10 to 15 years old. 
• Design and delivery of an immersive, inclusive events programme that will unveil the stories to visitors and team members. This programme could utilise a range of artistic mediums including installations, theatre, visual arts and many more. 

I immediately sent a query to the visitor service manager listed on the website and got no reply; I went ahead and submitted my application materials a few days later—still no reply. Two months went by and I decided to approach the woman’s supervisor. I couldn’t find an email address so reached out on Twitter and got a prompt reply asking me to contact him after the holidays. I did and within a couple of weeks was told that the lack of response to my initial query was due to an administrative error and the residency was now closed. I asked about the children’s books that were to be published by the trust and once again got no reply. So I decided to self-fund my own residency and returned to Glasgow for three weeks this past March. 

I felt better prepared for this visit. I knew how to pack and how to dress for the changeable Scottish weather. I knew how to budget for various expenses like that ride to and from the airport. I had a couple of contacts from previous visits that I could reach out to for support. I understood the basic layout of the city, knew how to take the train, and easily made the ten-minute journey to Pollokshaws West where Pollok Country Park is located. The park contains Pollok House, The Burrell Collection, and a few shaggy Highland cattle. It’s a beautiful expanse full of old trees, exuberant birds, and countless daffodils. 

I confess, I am easily swayed by beauty and had to remind myself to remain vigilant. When I first visited Scotland as a teenager in the 1990s, I toured the Palace of Holyroodhouse and marveled at its opulence. Stately homes no longer impress me now that I know the source of many British families’ wealth is tied to the slave trade and/or the compensation they received from the government when slavery was finally abolished (the formerly enslaved, of course, got nothing). I annually participate in NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) but decided that while I was in Scotland, I would write a poem day for the month of March as well. Mostly I wrote several haikus every evening as a way of documenting my impressions and discoveries. The haiku’s form forces me to wrestle with complex contradictions using just three lines and seventeen syllables; the suite enables me to link essential ideas into something like a narrative. 

sunlight seduces
the heart smoldering with rage,
turning pain to ash

yet our ancestors
labored beneath blazing suns;
their fury flourished

so guard your anger
against birdsong and blossoms—
beauty can block blame

My first tour of Pollok House was full of surprises. The website indicated that tickets were no longer available but it wasn’t due to demand; I could count on one hand the number of other visitors there that Friday. Rather extensive water damage was evident as soon as I entered the first room of the eighteenth-century mansion, which I found rather satisfying. A sign admitting the family’s connection to the slave trade contained more than one error: Sir James Maxwell, seventh baronet, was listed as Sir John and visitors were told he was overseer on a plantation in Jamaica rather than St. Kitts (a strange way to “face the past”). In the library, a docent informed me that of the seven thousand titles in the collection, just one was a work of fiction—a collection of ghost stories.

I took notes as I walked around the main floor and found the docents to be friendly and helpful. I asked about the fairy garden, which I had spotted on a map before I even left Chicago, and was given printed directions. They seemed fairly straightforward but the formal gardens are terraced and after a few wrong turns and flights of stairs, I found myself confronted by a ship. In the garden.

My mouth fell open and I immediately reached for my phone so I could take photographs of the replica merchant ship with its obvious Christian overtones. I sat for a while on one of the many memorial benches that line the square, hedged area and then I resumed my search for the fairy garden. I eventually reached what could more accurately be described as a hobbit village. I climbed a steep mound at the very top of the sloping garden and found the burned-out shell of a massive tree. Helen, the docent from the library, later told me it was called “the witch’s tree” and that children used to tie ribbons around its branches to make wishes come true. Angus, another docent at Pollok House, told me the beech tree was three hundred years old and had been struck by lightning long ago but the charred wood I saw was likely the result of arson.

When I returned for my second tour of Pollok House, I stopped a grounds man and asked if he knew when the ship had been built—and why. He said, “Let’s ask Neil,” and led me into the employees-only section of the garden where a carpenter told me he hadn’t designed the ship but had built it up from a rowboat about ten years ago. It was meant to honor the Stirling-Maxwell family’s history as trans-Atlantic merchants. I didn’t tell him that it reminded me of a slave ship—and that that’s how I would represent it in my novel. 

At this point, I had so much material that it felt as if my story was practically writing itself. Each time I returned to Pollok House and the gardens, I found new things to add. Sometimes I felt my blood boiling and other times I chatted amiably with the helpful docents or other park visitors who called the sunny square garden with the ship “a suntrap.” I had originally planned to incorporate a fairy into my novel, and learned from this seventeenth-century treatise that the Gaelic word for fairy was spelled “sith” but pronounced “shee”. But then I took a three-day tour of the Isle of Skye. I visited the famous Fairy Pools and the Fairy Glen, and at the end of a very rainy day, a bestiary I found in a bookstore in Portree introduced me to the urisk.    

Described as a type of water brownie from the Highlands, the urisk is a lonely creature who craves companionship but humans shrink from them due to their unusual appearance. I was going to read an excerpt from The Ship in the Garden, but I think it might make more sense if I read the summary instead:

During a school field trip to Pollok House, an eighteenth-century mansion built by wealthy Glasgow merchants, thirteen-year-old Kofi is paired with his racist tormentor Gavin. Kofi is new at St. Mike’s and rumors have spread about his suspension from Jameson, an elite private school. To ease his transition and offer protection, Kofi’s Ghanaian grandmother gives him an amulet to wear around his neck. Kofi promises Nana never to take it off, but the talisman doesn’t seem to help since Gavin bullies him daily. When Kofi witnesses Gavin’s theft of a book from the Pollok House library, he decides not to report it, but Kofi later finds the book lying open in the garden with blood smeared on its pages. Kofi worries that something bad has happened to Gavin since he also had a near-death experience after discovering a replica merchant ship in the garden. When Kofi shares his suspicions with a classmate, Kaylee insists that Gavin’s disappearance is deserved—maybe even karma. But Kofi feels bound to Gavin and so he returns to the garden and is stunned when he meets an urisk who admits to using Gavin as an offering to resurrect a beloved Caribbean friend who died at Pollok House while serving as a page boy to the Maxwell family. To save Gavin from a life of enslavement in the Caribbean of the past, Kofi must make a deal with the same witch who tricked the urisk. But the only thing Kofi has that the witch wants is the powerful amulet Nana intended for his protection.

This upper MG hybrid verse novel uses “Afro-urban magic” to bring the past into the present while merging African diasporic and European magical traditions. Scotland has begun to explore its ties to the trans-Atlantic slave trade but many prominent families still refuse to acknowledge the origin of their wealth. Not only did Sir James Maxwell work as an overseer on a plantation in St. Kitts, he also brought the wealth of his bride to the estate; Fannie Colhoun inherited the proceeds of her father’s plantations in St. Kitts and neighboring Nevis. When the historical record is incomplete and/or obscured, speculative fiction fills in the gaps and offers readers access to the interior lives of marginalized people. 

The three teen characters in The Ship in the Garden each represent “corners” of the triangular trade: West Africa, the Caribbean, and Scotland. Though Kofi’s ancestors may have been victims of the slave trade, in the twenty-first century he finds himself acting as a broker, trading with a mythical creature for the freedom of his vulnerable classmate. Kaylee, a mixed-race transgender girl of Kittitian descent, is determined to live authentically—something Gavin has been afraid to do. When Kofi shares with Kaylee the power of his grandmother’s amulet, she suggests he use it instead in service of the enslaved children brought to Scotland and lost to history. But Kofi fears Gavin’s racist beliefs make him more of a threat to Blacks in the eighteenth century, and so he enters the urisk’s watery realm to negotiate for his classmate’s release.

Like my picture book Blue Boy, The Ship in the Garden is a project I fully expect I will have to self-publish. Through my tour guide/cousin Nelson, I connected with Show Racism the Red Card Scotland and they took me to visit a class at Holyrood Secondary School. They were interested in my novel and offered some great suggestions, so there might be a market for my book, albeit small. I don’t generally think about markets and sales when I’m writing, but I have to when looking for an agent because being a good writer simply isn’t enough. So far, all the UK agents I’ve queried have either not responded or politely declined. I’ve been down this road too many times to be surprised or even angry. I save my rage for things like this:

Would my blue boy have been forced to wear such a collar? In March, I considered heading north to see the manor house where Frederick was meant to be enslaved. I just Googled “Lady Spynie, Brodie House” and believe it or not, this luxury real estate listing popped up. I sent it to historian Stephen Mullen, he did a little digging, and said he was fairly certain this was indeed Frederick’s intended destination.

I don’t hate Scotland for what it did to Frederick but I do hate that Canada was part of an empire in which it was perfectly acceptable to make my Caribbean immigrant father don this obscene Orientalist outfit to serve White women tea at the King Edward Hotel in the late 1950s. “I made great tips at that job!” my father told me when I first saw this photograph. I was in grad school then, and though I was working hard to shake off my family’s legacy of secret-keeping, I kept to myself the critique that might have hurt him even more. 

When I told a docent at Pollok House that I was from Nevis, Angus later followed me on Instagram and sent me a video by @History_Alice about an enslaved young woman from Nevis who is buried in a cemetery near Stratford-upon-Avon. Right now I know nothing about Myrtilla besides what’s written on her tombstone:

Here
Lyeth the body of
Myrtilla Negro slave
To Mr. Tho
Beauchamp
Of Nevis
Bapd October 20^th
Buried January 6^th
1705

That evening I sat down and wrote a few haiku in her honor. I’d like to close this evening with a slightly longer poem:

I am Myrtilla’s daughter
I am the bishop’s niece
I am the mother who wept for Frederick 
I am the ancestors’ instrument
I am the scribe who records all the voices
their secrets are wreathed round my neck 
like lace so that I may speak truths
of inelegant iron and silvered enslavement
the collars they wore  
the pain they bore
so that I could 
cross oceans 
today by 
choice

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