Author Interview & Giveaway: Kathi Appelt, ANGEL THIEVES

I really believe that setting informs story. While I don’t necessarily think of setting as a character, I do see it as sub-text. Like a character, a good setting comes with its own background, its own sensibilities and traits. Texas is enormous and culturally, ethnically, geographically and topographically diverse. It’s wide open.

I would love to say that there was a single source of inspiration for this story, but that would be a bald-faced lie. However, if I had to zero in on one reason, maybe it would be that a few years ago, my mother became seriously ill, and even though I can’t really say why, the knowing that I was losing her inspired me to try to find out more about who we were, about why we came to Houston in the first place, about who my ancestors were and where they came from. What were they doing in Houston? Why, of all the cities, in all the world, did they manage to choose Houston?

It was actually a surprise to me to learn that my family on my father’s side arrived there so soon, in the late 1830s, just after Texas won its independence from Mexico. They were among the earliest of the European settlers to make their home in what was then called Germantown, and is now called The Heights.

Yes. In my research, I quickly came to realize that one of the primary reasons—maybe the primary reason that Texas fought for its independence was because Mexico had made slavery illegal. Those early Texans didn’t want that. They wanted to keep their slaves. All those fields of cotton, all those cattle, were labor intensive. In many ways, the Texas Revolution was a kind of mini-Civil War, or at least a precursor to the larger war that followed not that many years later. In the case of Texas, the slave-holders won. Independence in Texas didn’t mean independence for everyone. As a seventh generation Texan, I felt compelled to say this, to show this. It wasn’t something that I ever learned in my Texas history classes. All those heroes of the Alamo?  All slave holders. This seemed to me to be a major omission. Then again, the victors always get to write the history.

When it comes to a place like Houston, there’s a lot to say. It’s the fourth-largest city in the country, and one of the most diverse. Its history is both long and short. As a settled city, it’s not nearly as old as New Orleans or Boston, or even Galveston. But it’s not like there wasn’t a history of it before the Allen Brothers staked their claim on the confluence of the Buffalo and White Oak Bayous. Indigenous peoples had settled along those swampy banks for centuries before the Texans moved in, including the Caddo, the Karankawas, and others. As well, there’s the natural history of it, including a time when ocelots, passenger pigeons, black bears, and even bison, were abundant.

Interestingly, when I began this novel, no one was aware of the children being separated from their parents along the Border. Who could have believed that all these years after the Civil War, our government would be tearing children away from their mothers again? In my book, Achsah is running for this exact reason, to avoid losing her baby girls. And ironically, she’s running toward that same river—The Rio Grande—the one that has, over the past few centuries at least, always represented the line between slavery and freedom. She’s running south, however. Not north. 

Good question. But I think the next story is going to have a camel.