Behind the Research: The Catalyst for Long Lost Midwife

For the record, I didn’t wake up one day and decide to write a historical novel about

racial tension in 1934 St. Louis. For ten years, I moderated a MeetUp writers group.

Around 2017, a number of us decided we wanted to write a YA blockbuster novel. Mine

involved a young girl who, in the late 1940s, lived in a rural Minnesota town. Her parents

had moved there from St. Louis, MO.

The girl’s mother always intrigued me. Around 2019, I started backstory writing

exercises for the mother. Although I lost sight of the YA novel, I became more and more

intrigued by the mother. I envisioned her as being wealthy as she grew up in St. Louis,

surrounded by Black servants.

When I began research on Black servants of the late 20s and early 30s, I discovered

the dearth of meaningful employment for Black women then. For such a high

percentage of them, it came down to: domestic servant. I went on Pinterest and other

sites and started looking at scores of old black and white photos of Black women

holding white babies. Very few of those Black women looked happy. Their unhappy

countenances really haunted me.

Then 2020 came. I’m a Minneapolis, MN resident. COVID was freaky, but the George

Floyd incident made it freakier. It became the catalyst that pushed me further into writing

and researching Long Lost Midwife. The Philando Castile incident tore the Twin Cities

apart in 2016. But George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police, recorded

on video, had global repercussions.

It forced me to confront my own racism, my own ignorance of historical racism.

Could I have set Long Lost Midwife in Minneapolis? Yes. Like St. Louis at that time,

Minneapolis also exercised real estate covenants based on race. However, I’d already

put the YA girl’s mother in St. Louis. Also, I ultimately chose St. Louis because of its

history and location. It’s closer to The South and symbolically, it acts as America’s

gateway.

The real research began in 2020. I don’t want to spoil it, but there’s a Black character in

the book who I stumbled upon while reading accounts of 1930s St. Louis crimes. It

made me wake up and understand that veins of vibrancy in Black lives still occurred in

an America despite the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court ruling of Plessy vs. Ferguson.

In writing every sentence, I had to remind myself that Martin Luther King, Jr. was but

five years old in 1934. Five years later he would sing in a Black children’s choir for the

Atlanta, GA premiere of Gone With the Wind. For that movie, Hattie McDaniel would

become the first African American to win an Academy Award. However, she was

segregated on Awards night, forced to sit in the back of the hall. If you found the history behind the 1930s compelling, I invite you to step into the story itself. Discover the secrets, the struggle, and the resilience within the pages of Long Lost Midwife. Pick up your copy today at your preferred retailer: AMAZON | GOODREADS | BARNES AND NOBLE