Samhain in St. Kitts

I finished my first Ireland story on Monday! I’m not happy with the title, “Samhain in St. Kitts,” but it’ll do for now. I’ve been working on the author’s note, which is stalled so I thought I’d post it in here to encourage me to finish it up. I’m writing it more for myself than for kids, I think, theorizing what I’m now calling my “Sankofa series” of stories that blend Black history and fantasy. That pretty much describes every novel I’ve written over the past twenty+ years, starting with A Wish After Midnight, but I think of these stories set in Ireland and Scotland as somehow different—they’re history, fantasy, and ancestry. I’ve written the Irish into a few of my books over the years, including my latest, The Oracle’s Door, but the intention now is different. It’s not exactly atonement but maybe an acknowledgement of…shame? rage? discomfort? There’s something I need to process personally and then there’s the silence I want to disrupt. Why don’t these books already exist? Why do Ireland and Scotland and England get to keep feeding their children fictions that bury facts? This is what I’ve got so far:

I visited Ireland for the first time in October 2023. I grew up in Canada believing my maternal grandfather, Frank Arthur Hobbs, had Irish heritage but genealogical research revealed his roots were actually English and Scottish. I learned that the ancestors I believed to be Irish were originally settlers who enabled English colonization of Ireland. Those same ancestors then left Ireland more than a century later to similarly displace the First Nations of Canada. It’s a complicated history that I don’t yet fully understand, but I wanted to make some sort of offering using my skills as a scholar and children’s book author.

With the Sankofa series I am generating narratives for young readers that reveal the links between the islands from which my ancestors originated. The genre of historical fantasy permits me to speculate when the “official” historical record fails to document the realities of marginalized and oppressed people. While in Dublin last fall, I visited the EPIC Museum and learned in a temporary exhibit (Entangled Islands: Ireland & the Caribbean) that the Irish were expelled from St. Kitts after the 1641 rebellion over fears they would align with the French against the English. Though my father was from the neighboring island of Nevis, I knew this historical event would form the basis of my first story about the Irish. It was about a week before Samhain when I left Dublin, and after reading an article in a local paper, I decided to imagine the Gaelic festival in a Caribbean context.

Irish indentured servants brought their cultural practices with them when they crossed the Atlantic to labor for a fixed term in the Americas. What if an Irish woman shared the rituals of Samhain with an enslaved African girl? Stripped of her true name and forced to speak English under threat of the lash, the girl nonetheless fights to retain her Yoruba identity and easily recognizes the trickster Orisha Esu when he appears at Samhain. Guardian of the Crossroads, Esu presents the girl with several options: return to the plantation from which she has fled, enter the realm of the Fae and enjoy eternal youth, or head into the mountains to join an interracial maroon community.

I guess I need to conclude with a paragraph about takeaways and what I hope to convey to kids, why this particular fiction should matter to anyone else but me…

In book news, Dragons in a Bag now has a lower price for a limited time; publishers claim middle grade sales are in a slump but I’m grateful for all the readers who are still supporting my series. The Sankofa series won’t enjoy that same kind of commercial success but these stories mean just as much to me.

I only had three gigs this month and one just canceled so I have plenty of time to work on my Amish novel and have started scouting farm stays in PA and IN. I’m heading to Terre Haute to celebrate a friend’s promotion so I might as well tack on a few nights in Amish country. At the end of the month I’ll be in Baltimore for a children’s book festival at the Reginald Lewis Museum—join us if you can!