Although the biography was just a book, Harriet Tubman became a real person to me. Her experiences--and the history of slavery--shaped my moral consciousness at a very young age. In later years, when I fell in love with other heroines of children's literature, like Laura Ingalls Wilder, I wanted those protagonists to agree with my various moral stances. "Do you suppose Laura Ingalls Wilder was against slavery?" I'd ask my mother while we shopped for "calico dresses" (so I could dress like Laura and Mary did on the prairies of South Dakota in the late 1800s.)
My connection to these characters was so real that it formed part of my identity: I was like "Laura" in this way, like "Anne" in that way, like "Jo" in another way. And I didn't want that identity shattered by moral incongruities, such as whether those women might have approved of slavery.
The Underground Railroad was my first link with African history. But I soon learned that I had another, more personal connection. My father, a geologist, had spent six months in Kenya's Rift Valley for his dissertation work in 1973. My mother and older brother, then two, had joined him out by Lake Turkana, in the middle of nowhere. My mother entertained me with stories of pit vipers and scorpions and the watering hole, which they shared with giraffes and zebras and wildebeast. When they flew back to the U.S., three months later, my mother was already going through morning sickness. Yep. You guessed it. Me.
So I spent my childhood being entertained with stories about how my mother endured morning sickness in the middle of the African bush, unable to stomach anything but canned fruit. I continually asked questions about Kenya, looking at pictures in my parents' photo album, and reading my mother's newspaper article on the experience, which she wrote shortly after returning.
I was hooked, though I didn't know it then.
When I was eleven, I wrote my first novel. It featured a young, white female who helped slaves escape from the Southern U.S. by hiding them, of all things, in a piano. (In my defense, we grew up with a baby grand. You could possibly hide a small person in a baby grand or a grand piano.)
