Outskirts Press, INC.

Yvonne Hilton is a history buff and avid consumer of current events that will become tomorrow’s history. The 1991 excavations of graves at the site of what would finally be recognized as the African Burial Ground along with her South Carolina roots sowed the seeds for this novel. As the characters and their stories began to unfold in her mind, she felt an urgency to recreate the day-to-day lives of enslaved people in the 1700s. Since her childhood summers had been spent with people who still spoke Gullah, it was as if her ancestors were demanding that she include their voices as well. She began her research into urban and rural slavery in New York with information from Dr. Sherrill Wilson, an urban anthropologist. The material on Long Island Native Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries came from the Museum of the American Indian in Manhattan, as well as the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in Connecticut, which yielded copies of the now-extinct Unkechaug vocabulary. Yvonne Hilton is the author of two novels. She is a retired educator and lives in Brooklyn.