A Message in Plain Sight

One of the things that was the most fun for me to write about in The Little Giant of Aberdeen County was Tabitha Dyerson’s fantastical quilt. Sprawling (like Truly), ornate, containing the secrets of both life and death, it became a book within my book.

I’m attracted to the idea of a workaday object like a quilt bearing an extraordinary message. Certainly, it’s not a new concept. Some historians theorize that slaves in the American South used quilt designs as coded directions for the Underground Railroad, and I have to say this idea makes sense to me.

Tabitha’s quilt is the life’s work of a woman silenced. In fact, in the course of writing the novel, I was sorry to have to let her go in the first fifty pages. I appreciated her crafty besting of the supercilious Robert Morgan, her patience, her ladylike determination. If it hadn’t been the nineteenth century, I’m certain she never would have married the first Robert Morgan, but then I wouldn’t have had much of a story.

I have to confess that I found a great deal of satisfaction in letting Truly be the one to pick apart the quilt, and I think Tabitha would have been pleased, as well, for in doing so Truly not only decodes Tabitha’s message, but also gains her own voice—and what a voice that turns out to be!

I like to think that reading, especially fiction, really can matter in the larger scope of “the real world,” where the lowliest of items and the unlikeliest of characters might be hiding the most thrilling of stories. A good book shouldn’t stay in your hand. It should go straight into your heart and open it. It should change you a little. And so I hope The Little Giant of Aberdeen County inspires you to look around your own world with fresh eyes and see the hidden gifts that might be stashed right under your very nose. Happy reading!