Spotlight and Guest Post: White Man’s Graveyard by Sarah Angleton

White Man’s Graveyard
written by Sarah Angleton
published by Bright Button Press, 2020

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About the book – from Goodreads: Annie is a no-nonsense Pennsylvania teacher whose hunt for a home and family of her own inspires a commitment to the abolition movement. Sylvanus, the baby brother she helped raise, is an adventure-seeking physician who finds purpose on his way to Western Africa in support of the controversial colonization effort which seeks to establish a safe-haven for former US slaves in the colony of Liberia.

In the decades leading up to the American Civil War, the siblings find themselves on opposite sides of a monumental political argument as wide and complex as the ocean that separates them. Each must question what it means to fight for freedom and determine whether political and moral convictions are enough to sever the strongest of family bonds.

 

Who hasn’t thought how cool it would be to search through the dusty things piled up in the attic only to discover an old hand-written diary that serves as a treasure map leading to the adventure of a lifetime? In a way, that’s how my latest historical novel began.

It wasn’t in a dusty attic, but my grandmother had an old lawyer cabinet that had been passed down through several generations of my family. When she died, my aunt took the cabinet and soon discovered that one of its drawers had a false bottom, beneath which was a diary dating to the 1830s and once belonging to a woman named Annie, the sister of my grandfather’s great-grandfather. The diary had been presented to her by another brother, Sylvanus, upon his departure for Liberia as a missionary physician.

And that’s when my aunt got excited. She started to look into who these people had been and soon entrusted me, the writer in the family, with discovering and telling their stories. So began the treasure hunt of a lifetime that led me to learn a great deal of history that had been largely unfamiliar to me, but that felt really important and well worth knowing.

The book bubbled away on the backburner for several years as I chipped away at the mountain of research it required and wrote a few other books along the way, but the story of Annie and Sylvanus finally came to life a few months ago in a novel called White Man’s Graveyard.

In some ways it is the most rewarding thing I have ever written as it offered me a sense of deep connection to my family legacy. In other ways, it was the most difficult. The story involves the complicated history of the controversial colonization movement, which sought to establish a new American colony for the formerly enslaved in the years leading up to the American Civil War. It’s a history that is fraught with racial tension and far-reaching consequences.

I wasn’t always sure I was up to the task, and I had to allow that the book would have to include imperfect characters struggling with the issues, and that those imperfect characters were branches in my own family tree.

I think that what came out of the project was a story of family tension and reconciliation in the midst of conflict. My hope is that it speaks not only to a moment in history that should be better remembered, but also to some of the struggles of today to love the people we love even when we don’t agree with them because that just might be a treasure worth discovering

About the author: Sarah Angleton is the author of three historical novels, including companion novels Gentleman of Misfortune and Smoke Rose to Heaven, and she is the writer behind the Practical Historian humor blog and the essay collection Launching Sheep & Other Stories at the Intersection of History and Nonsense. She lives near St. Louis with her husband, two sons, and one very loyal dog. Catch up with her at https://sarah-angleton.com/.

 

 
 

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** This post first appeared on Every Free Chance Books (everyfreechance.com) on January 31, 2022.