Atlanta, GA –  Summer 1881

When Mamie Harper arrives to substitute teach for the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary school, she witnesses terrible injustices with some of the older students who are washerwomen. Mamie’s upbringing as the daughter of the most famous Black suffragette in America means that she cannot be silent. She takes it upon herself to help the washerwomen find their voice and protest their mistreatment.

Reverend Gabriel Harmon is the summer pastor at one of the most influential Baptist churches in Atlanta. He’s shocked to see that the young woman who rejected his suit the year before is a new teacher in Atlanta. Determined to change her mind, he gets swept up in the washerwomen’s protests for better pay. When these two collide over these explosive events during a hot Atlanta summer, only one side will be able to win the battle. As they clash, they learn that there is another war, the war of the heart, that’s worth winning as well.

The year 1881 was a hallmark year in Atlanta history. Yet, the two real-life events that impacted Black women are rarely discussed in history classes. So, I wrote “The Washerwomen’s War” to figure out if these two events, the founding of Spelman College and the Black Washerwomen’s Strike, had anything to do with each other. I believed that they did. I decided to tell the story of the intersection of these two events from the point of view of an illustrious outsider, Mary Frances “Mamie” Harper, who was the real-life daughter of the famous Black Suffragette and poet, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.  Mamie is a young woman who is coming to figure out who she is in the world a part from her famous mother. When she re encounters a man she had the potential to fall in love with, but rejected him based on his profession, love is bound to happen.

“The Washerwomen’s War” will be out next week.  In the meantime, here’s a brief excerpt and an article where you can find out more about the strike. As usual, there will be more resources (and updates) at the end of the story when it is published in Daughters of A Nation

Milford, Georgia—June 1881

The one thing I swore I would never become is a minister’s wife. That’s not me.  Those women are saints. And sinners. There are some, like Mama Manda, who are nice, kind and gracious. The epitome of womanhood. Others are mean, like snake’s venom, ready to spit it out on some poor woman in the name of the Lord.

So when I wanted to kiss a man, I made sure that he was not a minister. Why start something that you can’t finish? No purpose in it, as far as I could tell. That meant that during my time at Milford College, it was only the males who were studying to become teachers who had a chance with me. Not the preacher ones. That made the choices less difficult.

There weren’t that many, mind you. Just some. Enough so that a young woman like myself could get a notion of what I wanted for my husband. And now I know.

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To learn more about the strike:

http://www.aflcio.org/About/Our-History/Key-Events-in-Labor-History/Atlanta-s-Washerwomen-Strike

I’ve just returned from Alabama where I attended my first Reader’s Luncheon as an Attending Author. Even though, I was not fully prepared for the extent of the swag (all I had was a $50.00 gift card to offer.  I felt such a kinship with the Little Drummer Boy) it was a wonderful time.  Many of the readers I spoke with spoke about how meaningful it was to have an afternoon to themselves away from their every day lives.  A number of them spoke of children or an aging parent to care for.

I have been thinking about the need for self-care in the first blog post of the month.  So this time, in June, I’m thinking  how important it is to schedule time away from the cares of life.  Believe me, scheduling that time is something that I still am working on.   I’m not really sure how I should answer. What do I do to “get away” from the pressures of my life? While I think about it, feel free to let me know what how  you “get away” in the comments.

It’s necessary to find time for yourself–another crucial aspect of #selfcare.

“This Little Light o Mine,” to me, is a spiritual song about the determination and value of self-expression.

The timing of my post on Mother’s Day coincides with my monthly post about self-care. I made this vow at the beginning of 2016 to dedicate one of my two blog posts per month and remind myself about how important self-care is.  Today, I don’t have any one example in mind. Instead, as I’m wrapping up work on The Songbird’s Stand, I’m reminded of how many women in our lives have been silenced by the pressures and expectations of their lives.

Some may be mothers, or some may be caregivers of others. Their voices may be silenced by these life pressures. Tillie Olsen, in the aptly named book of essays, Silences, estimates that the literary work of only 1 in 12 women has been published and put forward in the world. Granted, Silences was written some time ago, but I believe that this statistic is still accurate and probably is even higher for women of color.

So if you have a woman in your life, and she doesn’t have to necessarily be a mother, one way to gift her is to make sure that she has the time and space to help her find her way to self-expression—whatever it is. Everyone deserves the opportunity to be creative.  Women find themselves without this opportunity a lot of the time, and society as a whole, needs to hear more of these voices.

The need to find a voice is a theme of The Songbird’s Stand.  I’m working hard on bringing it to you soon.  Thank you for reading my blog and please, keep watching this space!

April is always a very busy time at my college. It’s the time of year when the students begin to apply all they have learned during the previous months.  Founder’s Day for the college happens in April. But another annual event takes place every April and that is the conference that celebrates Toni Cade Bambara.

I have seen how it is far too easy for the reading public to forget Black Women Writers. So, about 15  years ago, my college created this annual two-day conference surrounding the works and
legacy of Toni Cade Bambara who wrote amazing short stories, novels and essays. She was also a documentarian, an accomplishment I can only admire from afar.

So I take this post in April to celebrate this author originally born Miltona Mirkin Cade, who was also a professor at the same college where I teach. Her works are a rich writing legacy that we all should explore.  I celebrate her because she was taken from us much too soon at the young age of 56. If you want to know more about the writer that inspired and awed other Black writers like Toni Morrison, you should read any of her works and celebrate her singular point of view.

This week I celebrate my blog’s third birthday. Everything was so new back then in 2013. I was a newly minted Golden Heart nominee who had to have a landing page for potential publishing offers. I still had my mother then, and I was determined to make my place in the industry, and had lots of hope that I would succeed.

Three years later, my mother is not here and the realities of the publishing world have recently presented themselves with the closing of Samhain, leaving the continuation of my “Migrations of the Heart” series in limbo.
So I begin my third year of the blog at a bit of a crossroads. It’s the crossroads that I believe, in this current climate, all historical authors find themselves. Should I write in a different time period? Write new characters of different ethnicities? Call my inspirational writing a failure and write sweet instead? Write contemporary? My conundrum is not unusual or singular, but what will be different is how I plan to resolve it.
I will have to make some decisions about my 2016 that I didn’t realize I would have to make. I may not make all of the appearances I thought I would, which is one reason why I don’t have that as a page as part of this blog. That’s ok. But the one thing I’ll stick with, and that is the mission of this blog: to keep telling the stories of history that people have not known before. In whatever work I do, I’m going showcase the humanity, spirit and resilience of African American people. Yes, that means as one New York Times bestseller author once told me, “Some audiences are smaller than others.” However, with the selection of The Preacher’s Promise as the reading book club selection at Spelman College, I have hopes that other Historically Black Colleges and Universities and institutions will be more receptive to what I do in the future. I have hope that my historical approach will not whither away, but will continue to spread and grow.
So, at this Easter holiday and blog birthday, I’m renewing my promise. My faith and hope in my task remain strong. The approaches may change and be different, but the end goal with always be the same. After all, a large purpose of story is to see the humanity in one another. My promise is to make that purpose hold firm, strong and true.

The play, A Raisin in the Sun, is a piece of Black literature that is a strong part of my DNA.  I grew up quoting from it. My family would reenact parts of it, we had seen the Sidney Poitier movie way too many times, and every time it came to town in one form or another (play, or the musical called—Raisin!) we would go see it.  It never occurred to me as I grew up that the play reflected an author’s quest to tell a universally true story. That was something I learned about later, as a scholar, when I learned about the wonder that was Lorraine Hansberry.

Lorraine Hansberry lived only 34 years.  She wears this look on her face a lot of the time as if she just doesn’t care what you think of her.  Before she became the first Black woman playwright on Broadway and to win the National Critics Circle Award, she was an activist and pushed hard for Civil Rights for African Americans. She wrote for Paul Robeson’s progressive newspaper and for other liberal papers, outing herself as a lesbian in the 1950’s but again: She didn’t care what you thought.  She even married a Jewish man but divorced him a few years later.  Maybe he got on her nerves. She packed a whole lot of living into those 34 short years and left behind that great legacy of A Raisin in the Sun.

Hansberry came by her tenacity honestly.  A Raisin in the Sun is based on her family’s story of what happened when they attempted to improve their lives in the 1930’s and tried to move  to an all-white community. They stayed in the house and refused to move, even when their neighbors attacked them. Their situation became the basis of a Supreme Court case, Hansberry v. Lee.  Hansberry had the nerve to take the ire of their neighbors and turn it into a Broadway success. The play that lives is an example of how universal a story can be. Her tenaciousness and just plain guts reminds me of what it takes to show that one struggle can stand in place for the struggle we all face in this tumult we call life.

In the midst of these calls for diversity in publishing, I needed Lorraine Hansberry to uplift me and remind me that each day is precious and to make each day count for something in this life.  I hope she inspires you to do the same.