Lesley McDowell
I tend to find inspiration for my historical fiction in real people, like Isabella Baxter Booth, or Madeleine Smith, two women I’ve written about before. This time, I was inspired by the figure of Col William MacDowall. He subverts the notion that Scots weren’t involved directly in slavery until the late 18th or early 19th century, having gone to work as an overseer on a plantation in 1690, at the age of seventeen.
Often, it’s a single sentence that attracts me. In this instance, it was a letter by a niece who wrote of Col MacDowall that he had told his wife, who had objected to his personal servant from the Caribbean, that he would sooner be rid of her, than of him. I wondered about that close relationship; MacDowall was thought to have educated a child he had by an enslaved woman on his planation, alongside his white son.
I dug around more and found that I really wanted to write about the children of Scottish plantation owners and enslaved women. We know very little about them, unless their fathers gave them their surname, and even less about their mothers. It’s estimated that at one time as many as 70–80 such children were living in Scotland. What did they know about their heritage? What happened to them, and the children they had in turn?
I’m not a historian, so this for me was perfect for novelising — historical novelists need the ‘gaps’ in the history to give room for invention. This history is full of gaps, and the grand Scottish houses that kept the secrets of the slavery profits that built them provide more literal ‘spaces’ for that imagining. My story begins with such a family in 1721, moves through to 1861 with their descendants, and finally to a third section set in the present day.
