“This notorious woman shed human blood as lavishly as if it had been water. She procured and held in subjection a desperate gang, whose sole business was to perpetrate robberies and murders she planned, in which she generally took the lead, and frequently perpetrated murders single handed in order to rob.” –Hereditary Descent, O.S. Fowler 

He’s referring to Patty Cannon, whose crimes and murders were recounted in my last blog post. Although there are many unsubstantiated myths and legends surrounding this woman, the evidence discovered at her home confirmed that she kidnapped and sold black men and women into slavery, and that she was guilty of numerous murders, the remains of which were unearthed in her fields and garden.
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Fowler writes, “Her destructiveness and also acquisitiveness, as well as nativeness, were enormous, as seen in the engravings of her skull.”  

Patty Cannon was convicted of murder and taken to the jail in Georgetown, Delaware. While there, either awaiting trial or execution—there is some dispute—she died of what some believe was self-ingested poison. Tradition claims that no one came to claim her body and she interred on the premises at the Sussex County Jail.

A letter written by Alfred W. Joseph relates that not long after the turn of the century, several bodies were exhumed to build a parking lot.  His uncle by marriage, James Marsh, took the position of deputy sheriff and somehow came into possession of Patty Cannon’s skull. When he moved out of the area, he gave the skull to Alfred’s father, who for years kept it on a nail in his barn. After a time, to save it from damage or possible theft, he stored it in a box in his attic. In 1946, after his father’s death, Alfred inherited the artifact and in 1961, gave the skull on a loan to the Dover Library, where it was brought out for a Halloween display that also promoted reading about Cannon's disgraceful chapter of Delaware history.

In 2010, it was donated to the Smithsonian Institute. Dr. Douglas Owsley, chief of the Division of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian, plans to examine and preserve the skull as part of a larger study of life in the Chesapeake from colonial times to the 19th century. Owsley said the skull is showing its age. The lower jaw is missing and some of the facial bones have separated from the cranium, which itself is starting to split along natural growth lines.
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The grisly artifact's first examinations were performed by O.S. Fowler, a phrenologist in the early 1800’s, who was interested in Patty’s skull because of her dark family history. Phrenology is a process that involves observing and/or feeling the skull to determine an individual's psychological attributes. It was mostly discredited as a scientific theory by the 1840s and is today recognized as pseudoscience. Fowler, however, was interested in the possibility that evil traits could be passed down from the parents and evidenced in the shape of the skull. 

According to The Narrative and Confessions of Lucretia P. Cannon, a penny dreadful published in 1841, Patty Cannon’s father, L. P. Hanly, was the son of an English nobleman who disowned him after L. P. took to drink and secretly married a prostitute. With nothing left for them in England, Hanly and his wife traveled to Montreal where they set up a smuggling operation between Montreal and towns in New York and Vermont. The Hanlys lived a double life, prospering on illegal activities while giving the appearance of a respectable family. All was well until an acquaintance named Alexander Payne uncovered their operation and threatened to turn them in. Hanly decided that it was necessary kill Payne, but he was only partially successful—he split Payne’s head with an axe but was captured before he could escape. He was hanged soon after.

Her brother, James Cannon, was also said to have lived a riotous and dissipated life, and was hung for horse stealing in Canada. Patty’s sister, Betsy (possibly Twiford) was also descripted as “depraved and prone to violence.”

​Hal Roth, in his book, The Monster’s Handsome Face, interviewed George Figgs, a man who claimed to be a relation to Patty Cannon. Figgs claimed that his Aunt Midge Figgs Parkinson and her daughter, Sandy, did a lot of genealogical research in the 1970s and discovered that they were related to Patty Cannon. He said that his great-grandmother used to tell stories about Patty Cannon, claiming she was “so mean that she killed and ate one of her own children in front of her mob to quell a mutiny.” She was described as “a big-boned woman with Indian or Gypsy blood.”

Not surprisingly, he also said, “Her ghost and the ghosts of her band are supposedly roaming the swamps around the Pocomoke River; up in Nassawango Creek; down by Shad Landing. She had camps out there where she had slave pens. If anybody told on her, they would die, their children would die, and their animals would die. She was feared; that’s how she ran her regime.”

Unlike Harriet Tubman, who rescued slaves from Maryland and Delaware and led them North into freedom, Patty Cannon and her gang kidnapped free blacks and runaway slaves and sold them South into slavery for a profit. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if these two women had coexisted, but Harriet Tubman was just a child in 1829 when Patty Cannon died in jail.

Patty Cannon and her son-in-law, Joe Johnson, are the two names usually associated with the gang, which is often referred to as the Cannon-Johnson Gang. In the course of my research for my current work in progress, WHEN THE LAST MOON RISES, I learned that kidnapping was a Cannon family business and that Joe’s brother, Ebenezer, was an active member as well as some thirty to fifty other men. These included both white and black men, who were used to trick free blacks into boarding ships in Baltimore and Philadelphia, believing they were being hired for wages. Once on board, they were then taken captive. Any free black, slave, or fugitive slave who crossed paths with Patty or her gang on a dark, quiet road were also in danger of being kidnapped and sold south.

The gang operated from a house in Reliance, Md., about five miles west of Seaford, where the Cannons operated a ferry across the Nanticoke River. (It is today known as Woodland Ferry.) Because the house was located near the convergence of Sussex County in Delaware and Caroline and Dorchester counties in Maryland, Patty moved from county to county and state to state to escape the law. Her gang was so infamous they became known as the Reverse Underground Railroad.

Patty’s husband, Jesse Cannon, and their son-in-law, Joe Johnson, were both arrested at various points and ordered to be tied to the pillory and given thirty-nine lashes. The sentence for kidnapping also included having the soft part of the ears nailed to the pillory, then cut off. But in most cases, this part of the sentencing was pardoned by the judge.
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Many legends exist surrounding Patty Cannon, but hard facts are more difficult to find. Every account of her life has some variations, but they all center around the same theme: kidnapping and murder. 

It was murder charges that finally brought Patty to justice. For years, her neighbors had been concerned that there was more than just kidnapping going on, but had no way of proving it.

In April of 1829, a tenant farmer on Patty’s property was ploughing in a field, in a place generally covered with water and where a heap of brush had been lying, when his horse sunk in the mud. While digging the horse out, he found a blue painted chest, about three feet long, and in it the bones of a man. News spread among the community and it was presumed that they belonged to a slave trader from Georgia who had passed through a decade earlier and afterward went missing. It was believed that he had mentioned to Patty that he was in possession of a large sum of money, and was murdered by her to obtain it.

A black member of the gang, Cyrus James, was caught and turn’s state’s evidence, confessing that he had seen the Johnson brothers and Patty shoot this man while eating supper in her house, then force the body into the chest and bury it. He admitted that many others had been killed by Patty and that he could show them where the evidence was buried.

According to the Delaware State Journal, “The officers and citizens accordingly accompanied him to the places which he pointed out, and made necessary search. In one place in a garden they dug and found the bones of a young child the mother of which, he stated, was a negro woman belonging to Patty Cannon, which, being a mulatto, she had killed for the reason that she supposed its father to be one of her own family. Another place a few feet distant, was then pointed out, when upon digging a few feet, two oak boxes were found, each of which contained human bones. Those in one of them had been those of a person about seven years of age, which James said he saw Patty Cannon knock in the head with a billet of wood, and the other contained those of one whom he said they considered bad property; by which it is supposed was meant, that he was free. As there was at the time much stir about the children and there was no convenient opportunity to send them away, they were murdered to prevent discovery. On examining the scull bone of the largest child, it was discovered to have been broken as described by James.

“This fellow, James, was raised by Patty Cannon, having been bound to her at age of seven years, and is said to have done much mischief in his time for her and Johnson.”

She was also said to have been involved in the murder for which her daughter’s first husband, Henry Bruinton, was hanged, though she was not prosecuted. As the story goes: “Two traders, one of whom is named Ridgell, with a sum of money, came to Patty's one evening to purchase negroes; she artfully detained them by the kindest treatment, entertaining them with apple toddy and other gentle mixtures, while she sent out Bruinton and two men of the name of Griffin, to fall a tree across the Laurel road, to which town the travelers were destined.

“When they were gone, Patty, dressed in men's clothes and armed with a musket, started by a short cut through the forest, to join the murderers. When the traders came to the tree their horses stopped, and all four of the murderers, who were lying in ambush, fired at once. Ridgell was shot through the body; but he had energy enough, for the moment, to defend his life, and being armed with pistols, he and his companion fired into the cover where the murderers were lying, and drove them from the field. Mr. Ridgell was carried by his friend to Laurel, where he died that night. Governor Haslett offered a reward for the murders, and they were all arrested. One of the Griffins turned state's evidence, and convicted his brother and Bruinton, who were hung. Patty, the fiend in human shape, escaped on account of her sex, a nolle prosequi [unwilling to pursue] having been entered.”
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Cannon was arrested in April 1829 by the Dorchester County sheriff at the tavern where he found 21 people in chains ready for transport to the South. Cannon was handed over to the Sussex County sheriff and transported to Seaford by a mounted posse where she was taken to Magistrate Dr. John Gibbons from Lewes. She was then taken to the Georgetown jail to stand trial.
It is believed that Joe Johnson had already escaped south, taken a false name, and may even have taken the office of Judge of Probate in a Southwestern State. I have found no information regarding the fate of his brother, Ebenezer, and it is assumed that he too evaded capture. Her husband Jesse Cannon, is said in some accounts to have died by her hand after three years of marriage, although he was still alive in 1821 when he was indicted for kidnapping.

Patty Cannon was indicted on four counts of murder by a grand jury of 24 white males: an infant female on April 26, 1822; a male child on April 26, 1822; an adult male on October 1, 1820: and a “Negro boy” on June 1, 1824. The indictments were signed by the Attorney General of Delaware, James Rogers.  Witness Cyrus James stated he saw her take an injured “black child not yet dead out in her apron, but that it never returned.” 

According to a contemporary newspaper account: "This woman is now between 60 and 70 years of age, and looks more like a man than a woman, but old as she is, she is believed to be as heedless and heartless as the most abandoned wretch that breathes."

Patty Cannon confirmed the awful rumors about her and confessed to killing 11 people, helping to murder a dozen others, and to kidnapping and selling blacks into slavery.

On May 11, she was found dead in her cell. Speculation is that she committed suicide by taking poison smuggled into the prison, thus avoiding a public execution.

My novel’s title is taken from the statement: “When the last moon rises over the wicked pursuits of Patty Cannon and the Johnson brothers, it will be a blessed day indeed.”
 

My latest series, THE TIME RETURNS, explores the racial issues of the 1960s and their roots in the history of slavery. The titles for books 1 and 2 are taken from a song used by Harriet Tubman and other "conductors" on the Underground Railroad to communicate with potential "passengers." The song used coded language to communicate if it was safe for slaves to escape and reminded them to follow the Big Dipper to ensure they were heading north as they cut through swamps and fields toward freedom.

"When the sun comes back
And the first quail calls
Follow the drinking gourd
For the old man is a waiting
For to carry you to freedom

Follow the drinking gourd
Follow the drinking gourd
For the old man is a waiting
For to carry you to freedom
Follow the drinking gourd

The riverbank will make a mighty good road
The dead trees show you the way
Left foot, peg foot traveling on
Following the drinking gourd

Follow the drinking gourd
Follow the drinking gourd
For the old man is a waiting
For to carry you to freedom
Follow the drinking gourd

The river ends between two hills
Follow the drinking gourd
There's another river on the other side
Follow the drinking gourd

Follow the drinking gourd
Follow the drinking gourd
For the old man is a waiting
For to carry you to freedom
Follow the drinking gourd."

This is a painful and complicated American story. Thomas Jefferson was one of our most important founding fathers, and also a lifelong slave owner who held Sally Hemings and their children in bondage. Sally Hemings should be known today, not just as Jefferson’s concubine, but as an enslaved woman who – at the age of 16 – negotiated with one of the most powerful men in the nation to improve her own condition and achieve freedom for her children.

Sally Hemings (1773-1835) is one of the most famous—and least known—African American women in U.S. history. For more than 200 years, her name has been linked to Thomas Jefferson as his “concubine,” obscuring the facts of her life and her identity. Tradition holds that she is the child of Martha Jefferson’s father, John Wayles, and Elizabeth Hemings, an enslaved woman, making Martha and her half-sisters. When Sally Hemings was 14, she was chosen by Jefferson’s sister-in-law to accompany his daughter Maria to Paris, France, as a domestic servant and maid in Jefferson’s household.

In Paris, Hemings was reunited with her older brother James, whom Jefferson had brought with him two years earlier to study French cooking. They lived at Jefferson's residence, the Hôtel de Langeac. Maria (Polly) and Martha (Patsy), Jefferson’s older daughter who was already in Paris, lived primarily at the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, where they were boarding students. Shortly after her arrival, Jefferson’s records indicate that Hemings was inoculated against smallpox, a common and deadly disease during that time. She undoubtedly received training—especially in needlework and the care of clothing—to suit her for her position as lady's maid to Jefferson's daughters and was occasionally paid a monthly wage of twelve livres (the equivalent of two dollars). She learned French (historians do not know if she was literate in either language she spoke) and sometimes accompanied Jefferson’s daughters on social outings.

Madison Hemings recounted that his mother “became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine” in France. When Jefferson prepared to return to America, Hemings said his mother refused to come back, and only did so upon negotiating “extraordinary privileges” for herself and freedom for her future children. He also noted that she was pregnant when she arrived in Virginia, and that the child “lived but a short time.” No other record of that child has been found.

Sally Hemings had at least six children fathered by Thomas Jefferson. Four survived to adulthood. Decades after their negotiation, Jefferson freed all of Sally Hemings’s children – Beverly and Harriet left Monticello in the early 1820s; Madison and Eston were freed in his will and left Monticello in 1826. Jefferson did not grant freedom to any other enslaved family unit.

Beverly and Harriet Hemings were allowed to leave Monticello without being legally freed. Madison Hemings later reported that both passed into white society and that neither their connection to Monticello nor their “African blood” was ever discovered.

Sally Hemings’s descendants and historians have a range of opinions about the dynamic between Jefferson and Hemings, given the implications of ownership, age, consent, and dramatically unequal power between masters and enslaved women. Enslaved women had no legal right to consent. Their masters owned their labor, their bodies, and their children.

The nature of Sally Hemings’s sexual encounters with Thomas Jefferson will never be known.

The historical evidence points to the truth of Madison Hemings’s words about “my father, Thomas Jefferson.” Although the dominant narrative long denied his paternity, since 1802, oral histories, published recollections, statistical data, and documents have identified Thomas Jefferson as the father of Sally Hemings’s children. In 1998, a DNA study genetically linked one of Hemings’s male descendants with the male line of the Jefferson family, adding to the wealth of evidence.
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Jefferson never responded to the accusation. His recognized family denied his paternity of Hemings’s children, while his unrecognized family considered their connection to Jefferson an important family truth.

A Philosophic Cock, engraved by James Akin, 1804. This political cartoon mocked President Jefferson, the strutting rooster, with his concubine Sally Hemings (pictured as a hen)–at the same time denying her humanity and privacy.


Information in this post is taken from https://www.monticello.org/sallyhemings/
Follow the link for more details about the life of Sally Hemings. 

With Valentine's Day around the corner, thoughts of romance are in the air. My contribution to this February trend is a review on the 1967 movie, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"

As mentioned in a previous post about Richard and Mildred Loving, on June 12, 1967, in a unanimous decision, the justices of the Supreme Court found that Virginia’s interracial marriage law violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Not only did this ruling overturn the criminal conviction of the Lovings in 1958, it overrode the anti-miscegenation laws of sixteen states, including Virginia and Maryland.“Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the state,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote.

This movie followed, bringing public attention to the ruling. 

In the movie, one of the voices encouraging John and Joanna’s marriage was an Irish Catholic Priest and a friend of the family. Monsignor Ryan told Joanna’s father, “I've known a good many cases of marriages between races in my time. Strangely enough, they usually work out quite well. I don’t know why. Maybe because it requires some special quality of effort, more consideration and compassion, than most marriages seem to generate these days.”


The couple had met while in Hawaii, fallen madly in love and embarked on a whirlwind romance which culminated in a decision to be married within a matter of weeks. John Prentice is a doctor who had earned a great reputation for himself and was flying to Geneva the following morning. Joanna Drayton was determined to follow him in a week and to marry him there. But first, John needed to get permission from Joanna’s father.
Joanna is certain that her parents wouldn’t be the slightest put out by the fact that John is negro. After all, her father is known for his liberal opinions, which he printed regularly in black and white in his California newspaper. Her mother is an open-minded artist, and Joanna is very close to both her parents. She believes they will be happy for her and gladly give their blessing.
John isn’t quite as confident as Joanna, and it turns out his instincts are right. Despite all their talk about equality, her parents never considered the fact that their principles might be put to the test in such a real and personal way. It had all been very theoretical. Now they only have one evening to decide how they feel about having a black man for a son-in-law.
When John phones his parents to explain that he’s not coming to visit them before he boards another plane because he’s met a girl, he fails to mention that the girl is white. Joanna takes the phone from him and invites his parents to dinner, and when they meet her, they are as shocked as her parents had been meeting John.
Both their fathers analyze the relationship from a practical mindset and lay out all the potential consequences, while the mothers shake their heads and wonder why old men forget how it feels to be young and in love. Spoiler alert: in the end, Joanna's father gives his blessing. 

“But you do know—I'm sure you know—what you're up against. There'll be a hundred million people right here in this country who'll be shocked and offended and appalled at the two of you. And the two of you will just have to ride that out. Maybe every day for the rest of your lives. You can try to ignore those people, or you can feel sorry for them and for their prejudices, and their bigotry and their blind hatreds and stupid fears. But where necessary, you'll just have to cling tight to each other and say screw all those people! Anybody could make a hell of a good case against your getting married. The arguments are so obvious that nobody has to make them. But you're two wonderful people who happened to fall in love… and happen to have a pigmentation problem.”

Due to the era in which the movie was made, the acting feels stiff and it's full of stereotypes that some might find offensive. But all in all, I think it's a sweet film that demonstrates how each and every one of us can be hypocritical and narrow-minded without even realizing it, and sometimes we just need someone to challenge us to think through the issue with fresh eyes. 

Although I thought Joanna seemed a little too naïve and impulsive, I admired her whole-hearted dedication to John despite the adversities she knew would come as a result. She was impressed with his intelligence, kindness, and character, and they had plenty of chemistry between them. From her rather innocent perspective, what was there to reconsider? 

From John's point of view, he had been single for years since the death of his wife. One day he met a woman with whom he felt a connection, the type of connection that's worth turning your life upside and risking everything for. You can't force that kind of thing, and you can't control with whom it happens either. He knew what love felt like, and he knew what being content alone felt like. When he met Joanna, he knew that what they shared was special.

​If you haven't seen it before, I recommend giving it a chance. I'd be shocked if it didn't make you smile.

Another movie along the same lines, which I love for a variety of reasons, is "Corrina, Corrina," starring Whoopi Goldberg and Ray Liotta, made in 1994. So now you have two more titles to add to your list of romance movies to watch in celebration of Valentine's Day. And a word to the wise, don't eat those candy hearts. They taste like chalk. 

Just as time is always moving forward for me and you, so also is time a fluid and continuous experience for the characters in my novels. To date, I’ve written ten novels and successfully created an alternate universe in which all of these people live and interact. When you finish the pages of THROUGH EVERY VALLEY, or ON GROUNDS OF HONOR, Vivian & Rob Hudson and Clara & Jeremiah Turner don’t just cease to exist. Their lives continue, flowing from one novel to the next and one series to the next. All of these characters live together in the RIDGELY RAILS LEGACY.

In my latest series, THE TIME RETURNS, I have turned the expected on its head and time begins to flow backward as well as moving forward. In the first book of this series, WHEN THE FIRST QUAIL CALLS, it is 1967 when Natalie Winslow discovers the diary her grandmother had written during the 1860’s. Woven into the main storyline are the pages of Charity’s diary, revealing family secrets which had been buried for over a century.

And as she reads it, new questions are posed regarding the time leading up to it. What was Charity’s mother-in-law and husband’s story? What happened in the previous generation which shaped Charity and Silas? And how did their choices set the trajectory for the life Natalie would one day live?

In my current work in progress, the second novel in this series, WHEN THE SUN COMES BACK, time will move forward for Natalie while also moving backward for the reader yet again into the life and times of Eliza Winslow. This narrative will delve into the mysterious death of her husband and take a closer look at her son Silas’ relationships with three different women.

The past and the present are always interconnected. It is a matter of whether or not we are aware of how our brief moment in time has been shaped by the lives and choices of those who have gone before us. Likewise, let us also remember that our life’s decisions will have an impact on those who follow after us.

My latest novel, WHEN THE FIRST QUAIL CALLS, follows the stories of two women, separated by a hundred years, battling the same issues of civil rights and racial equality. The primary storyline is set in the 1960’s, while the secondary storyline, as revealed through an old diary, occurs during the Civil War era. Although their stories are vastly different, both their lives are dramatically affected by the prohibition of biracial marriage.​

It is mind-boggling to realize that as late as 1967 anti-miscegenation laws were still in place, making it illegal for a white person to marry a “colored” person in many states, including Maryland. As a Border State and a Slave State, Maryland was always caught between the lifestyles and traditions of the North and the South. Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore, with their economy rooted in agriculture, were naturally dependent on slave labor and therefore identified more closely with the South. Even as laws changed and years passed, the mindset of racial equality was slow to develop.

In my historical romance novel, Natalie Winslow, a white woman living on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1967, falls in love with a black man whose family was once held as slaves by her own. Although there is a friendly rapport between these two families, no one was prepared for them to enter into a romantic relationship.

At the time that Natalie and Tony begin dating, a marriage between them would not even be legal in their home state. That changed, however, in June of 1967, thanks to the Supreme Court’s verdict on Loving vs. the State of Virginia.
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The plaintiffs in the case were Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and a black woman whose marriage was deemed illegal according to Virginia state law. They had married in Washington, D.C. in 1958, where interracial marriage was legal, and returned to Virginia to live. They were arrested, taken to trial, and given the choice between serving one year in jail or leaving the state with their three children for twenty-five years.

The Lovings moved to Washington, D.C. but decided to take up legal action in 1963 with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union. The couple filed a motion asking the judge to vacate their conviction and set aside their sentences. When he refused, they took the case to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, which also upheld the original ruling. Following another appeal, the case made its way to the United States Supreme Court in April.

On June 12, 1967, in a unanimous decision, the justices found that Virginia’s interracial marriage law violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Not only did this ruling overturn the criminal conviction of the Lovings in 1958, it overrode the anti-miscegenation laws of sixteen states, including Virginia and Maryland.
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“Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the state,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote.

The contents of the trunk were in surprisingly good condition for all the years they had been stored in the attic. Natalie curiously leaned down to sift through them. A hat box, blue striped with a bouquet of pink roses, rested on top of the other items. Inside she found two black and white photographs.

The first was of a woman with four children, a toddler sitting in her lap and three young girls standing around her. As typical of the period when the pictures were taken, the woman and girls looked stiff and unsmiling in their layers of clothing, with their hair pulled back on top and falling in ringlet curls around their faces. The baby, too young to take anything seriously, wore a slobbery grin.

The other photo was of a Confederate soldier. His eyes stared into the camera with steely resolve, his lips pressed firmly together beneath a thick mustache. Natalie turned it over, hoping to find a romantic message scrawled on the back of it, but it was blank.

Beneath these were a matching silver brush and hand mirror, and a delicate gold watch, with a pin on the back so that it could be fastened to a woman’s dress and worn as a brooch. There was another piece of jewelry, which at first confused Natalie with its odd appearance. Upon closer inspection, she identified it as a thin braid of hair wound into a spiral, then sealed within glass or resin and placed into a ring setting.

Fascinated, Natalie replaced the items and closed the box, eager to see what else there was to discover. Next, she retrieved a thick, oversized Bible with an embossed leather cover and within, a genealogy written in looped and slanted penmanship. She also found a prayer book and a novel titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Beneath these was a lovely old wedding gown and a folded piece of lace, yellowed with time. Carefully wrapped within it was a framed picture of a bride and groom: her great-great-grandparents, Silas and Charity Winslow.

She returned the photo to its nest within the lace and dug around to see if anything else hid beneath the folds of the wedding gown. Her fingers closed around another book, and she pulled it out to reveal a thin, leather-bound diary. Curiously, she opened the first page and began to read.

March 3, 1860
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Mama says there’s only two people one can be honest with: one’s self and God. She gave me this diary and said that it was the appropriate place for me to record my truest thoughts and feelings, although I don’t see what good that does. It cannot argue on my behalf nor change my circumstances. She says it will make me feel less lonely, that it will be a friend who always listens without judgement.

She knows that I do not wish to be married so soon. Mama insists that Father has his reasons, and I must trust them, but I feel...
Natalie’s attention was pulled away from the diary by the sound of Rosie’s barking below the window, announcing Tony’s arrival. With a sigh, she closed the diary, tucking it under her arm to carry downstairs and read when she had a chance. She was curious why her great-great-grandmother hadn’t wanted to marry Silas, and why Charity's father had forced her.