To begin my research for The Price of A Child, I first read stories from William Still’s 1872 book, The Underground Railroad. Jane Johnson’s story was clearly laid out by Still. Reading that started what felt like a video tape in my head. I saw all of the characters on deck of the Camden and Amboy ferry at Dock Street: Jane Johnson and her children, her owner, Colonel Wheeler, William Still and his Vigilance Committee Co-Chair Passmore Williamson. At the Library Company of Philadelphia I read a collection of legal papers. Those papers carefully recorded Passmore Williamson’s imprisonment for his participation in Jane’s escape. But the only record of Jane Johnson’s voice were the legal papers filed on her behalf, and the recording of her testimony at the courthouse. Because she was the person who escaped and the woman whose baby had been held back in Virginia and likely sold, I wanted her to have her story. I wanted that story to be full, fleshed-out, and popular. I did not want something cold and scholarly. I wanted her story to be as easy to read as Gone with the Wind. That novel had filled my young imagination with toxic images of slavery and freedom. For a large part of our people, I feel that the book poisoned our intellectual water on those topics.

There were many places in Philadelphia were I went to find research materials, including the Library Company, the Pennsylvania Historical Society, the Free Library’s periodical collection, the University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt Library, and Charles Blockson’s collection at Temple University. Newspapers told me facts like who had checked in to Bloodgood’s hotel, how many people died each week in 1855 and from what kinds of sicknesses. Philadelphia directories gave me the names of stagecoach, railroad car and steamer companies. I found maps of graveyards in Philadelphia, including those marked “colored.” I read articles in Mother Bethel A.M.E.’s newpaper, The Christian Recorder. I also learned from books like Herb Apthecker’s Five-Volume History of African Americans. That work documented letters, petitions, articles, and resolutions. Ph.D. theses that told me how many pecks of corn enslaved people in Virginia consumed per person per year. Erotic books gave me language for their fantasies. Old tintype photos and prints showed me their faces and landscapes. Domestic guides for young brides told me how mid-century women cleaned their carpets. I also fasted to understand hunger and picked farm crops to understand the pain and soreness of stooping over rows of plants. I know that a day of picking raspberries in the rain at Linvilla Orchards is not the same as a lifetime of work in cotton fields, and a week of fasting is different than true hunger. But these activities gave me just enough details to help me imagine my way in to the lives of my characters. I walked the city, going into as many old construction sites as possible, and spent a day digging an alley. This helped me to see their houses, yards, alleys, and outhouses. Sometimes, it really did begin to feel as if there were ghosts in the houses that wanted their stories told and their lives illuminated in all their compelling complexity.

From the research came the stories that ran over and around the main stories. The research also told me about the texture of these people’s lives. Also from the research came my clear understanding that the injury of slavery was to family—the broken families of the enslaved, and those who held the corrupting power to own fellow humans and call them less than human. The research filled me with rage and grief. I learned how much of our current political, economic, intellectual and emotional life issued from the savagery and heroism of that time. I wanted to walk readers through it in all its grimness and glory.