This week I’m hosting Merrillee Whren with Hometown Dad, Kay Marshall Strom with The Triumph of Grace, and Naomi Musch with The Green Veil (an ebook). If you want to enter the drawings, please leave a comment on one of the post during the week with your email address. I will not enter you without an email address (my way to contact you if you win). If you don’t want to leave an email address, another way you can enter is to email me at margaretdaley@gmail.com. The drawings end Sunday (February 13th) evening.
Heroine Interview from The Triumph of Grace by Kay Marshall Strom:
1. Grace, tell me the most interesting thing about you.
I am nobody and I belong nowhere. The bad part of it is that I’m like a blind person wandering around in the dark. The good part is that I am free to lay my own path. African or English? Slave or slaver? My choice. Of course, I must then live with the consequences of my choice.
2. What do you do for fun?
Read. Funny, isn’t it? I’m now living as a plantation slave, where reading is an offense with the penalty of death. But I can’t help myself. I want to know things, and the way to know is to read. Those closest to me warned me about reading, but I didn’t listen. A crime punishable by death, yet in the end it brought me life.
3. What do you put off doing because you dread it?
Thinking about all the people I’ve lost in my life. I want to remember them, but I know it will cause me such pain. How do I dare? Someday I must remember.
4. What are you afraid of most in life?
Failing. There are many things I’m not good at doing. That’s what my mother always told me, and I’m sure she’s right. She was good at everything.
5. What do you want out of life?
My husband was pulled away from me, bound in chains, and forced into the hold of a slave ship bound for the Americas. An evil man took me to London. What do I want out of life? To find my husband. To be with him, even if it means I must live as a slave. But most of all, I want the two of us to be able to live together in freedom.
6. What is the most important thing to you?
Freedom. To live without a whip at my back or chains on my wrists or a master holding my life in his hands. Freedom. That’s the most important.
7. Do you read? If so, what is your favorite type of book to read?
Books about faraway places that my father brought back to Africa from his voyages around the world. Ever since I was a small child, those were the books I read. But the most important book I ever read was the Holy Bible. Because of that book, everything has changed. Everything forever.
8. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I would be beautiful like my mother. I would be good like Mama Muco. I would be brave like my Cabeto. I would have the faith of John Hull. That’s four things, but oh my, oh my! Wouldn’t I be something then?
9. Do you have a pet? If so, what is it and why that pet?
I did. A gazelle named Bongo. It had been attacked by a wild animal, but I rescued it and nursed it back to health. But my mother hated anything weak and worthless, so she roasted it for dinner.
10. If you could travel back in time, where would you go and why?
I would never travel back, only forward. I would travel to a time when no one kept other people as slaves. Do you suppose such a time will ever come?