Inspired by the materials she handled and read, as well as by her Quaker upbringing, Lovejoy decided to write a novel in the voice of an abused 12-year-old white girl who joins forces with a runaway slave, a black girl her own age. "When quite young, I'd heard grownups talking about blacks, using the "N" word. It upset me deeply because my grandmother Abigail had taught me to be respectful of the differences between people. Later, in Los Angeles, I encountered racism again. I simply did not understand it, except that I knew I was a heck of a lot luckier, just because of my skin color. In writing this book, I wanted to show a kid's eye view of the differences. I wanted to open children's minds and hearts to the fabric of our history. To learn how hatred can be transmitted like a virus but 'cured' with knowledge and love."
To convey the flavor of long-ago Virginia, author Lovejoy allowed her characters to speak in the everyday language and cadence of their time and place. The narrator, an unschooled girl whose knowledge of the natural world is profound, the runaway slaves she joins, and the white country folk they interact with or avoid, speak the 19th-century English of the rural south. The Quaker activists who operate the Underground Railroad network use the Friends' gentle "thee and thou" speech patterns. This plainspoken musicality makes each sentence in Running Out of Night glow with the authenticity of a newly-minted copper penny.
As a child, the author absorbed the Quaker speech spoken around her; the letters she later transcribed helped her master its patterns. While visiting family members in Virginia, Lovejoy also substitute-taught for a period and soaked up the local patois. As she admits, "Listening is one of my passions. I spent time with locals, quizzing the postmaster, talking with the doctor, making notes on colorful phrases and local superstitions."
The locale and era of this book are critical to the story. It takes place in 1858 in the homeland of Lovejoy's Quaker forebears who settled the rich Loudoun valley in northern Virginia, bordered by the Potomac River and barely 45 miles from Washington, D.C.
By 1832, the loose network of abolitionists who'd helped runaway slaves escape to the north grew into a more highly organized "Underground Railroad." The abolitionists also created a political entity called the "Free Soil Party," which barred slavery in new states. But southern slaveowners and segregationists fought back; and in 1850, they got the Fugitive Slave Act passed. This heinous law allowed slave owners to pursue and claim runaway slaves in any state, north or south, and slapped stiff fines, even imprisonment on those who helped slaves flee.
Thus escape to Canada (which lies nearly 700 miles from Virginia, northernmost of the southern states) became the primary goal. Fleeing slaves now had a much longer, rougher, riskier challenge, as did the compassionate "conductors" who guided them from one safe house to another along the "railroad."
In 1852, enraged by the Fugitive Slave Act, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, a melodramatic novel that shook the already polarized nation to the core. It became one of the most influential books ever written in America. In 1859, near the Virginia-West Virginia border, white abolitionist John Brown led 21 men to seize an arsenal at Harpers Ferry, the first step in an armed slave revolt. It failed utterly but divided North and South even further over the slavery question.
This tumultuous decade, the prologue to America's bloody Civil War, is where author Lovejoy brings the actions of her characters to life. Below, prefaced with brief introductions, are three excerpts from her book, Running Out of Night.
The story's white narrator is a motherless girl of 12 who is literally nameless until Zenobia, a runaway slave her own age, explodes into her life and dubs her "Lark." As the two girls escape together, Lark develops a growing awareness of the difference between her "family slave" existence (as bad as it was) and the crueler bondage of the enslaved black runaways she meets.
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