Antisemitism—to state the obvious—did not go away after the Revolution. It remains a frightening force today. However, the United States was the first Western country to grant Jews full national citizenship and legal equality.
Article Six of the Constitution clearly states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” This meant that unlike in England, no one could be required to affirm their belief in specific religious principles (for example, disavowing the Pope or taking an oath “on my faith as a Christian”) before serving in the military, civil service, or government. In the 1788 parade in Philadelphia to celebrate the Constitution’s ratification, a rabbi marched with other city clergy, and the banquet afterwards provided a kosher table—unprecedented in Europe at the time!
(The “no religious test” clause only applied at the federal level; several states did exclude Jews, atheists, and/or Catholics from state office in their new constitutions.)
So, part of what Rachel and Nathan hoped and fought for was realized.
One day, may it all be. May no one be left in the wilderness. May justice and integrity and kindness be first in Americans’ hearts. May we fight to make it happen, and win.
As we say every Passover: Next year, may we all be free.
Also by Rose Lerner
Lively St. Lemeston series
Sweet Disorder
True Pretenses
Listen to the Moon
A Taste of Honey (an erotic novella)
Not in any series
In for a Penny
A Lily Among Thorns
All or Nothing (a novella)
End Notes: Courtney Milan
Acknowledgments
My gratitude must first go to my Raptors—Bree Bridges, Alisha Rai, Alyssa Cole, and Rebekah Weatherspoon—who were in the (WhatsAppChat)room where it happened when we had the initial idea for this anthology. (I won’t tell you how it happened. It started out of spite. The best things usually do.) Their encouragement and help and gut-checks, from the first moment to the last, made this a better story.
Second, my thanks to Rose Lerner and Alyssa Cole, who immediately were carried away by this idea, came up with the premise for it, and delivered utter magic. You are the best partners in crime that I could possibly wish for, and in the event that I ever find myself in need of committing felonies, I will consult you first.
As always, my thanks to Lindsey Faber, Kim Runciman, and Anne Victory, for helping me deliver this story as well as I can, to my dog for his patience, my husband for…well, for nothing, which tells you that he never reads the acknowledgments, and to my vast and wonderful array of friends who are so numerous that I can’t possibly list them all.
My eternal gratitude to Lin-Manuel Miranda for envisioning an America that calmly accepted me as a part of this country, while simultaneously earworming me forever.
Finally, I want to acknowledge my gratitude to you, my readers, who have been so incredibly patient with me and my slow writing. I am never as fast as other authors in the best of years, and to characterize this last year as “proceeding at a snail’s pace” would be to belittle snails.
Thank you for your patience, your words of encouragement, and your kindness.
Historical Note
This story touches—briefly—on the history of racism and slavery in the North, a history that is sometimes surprising to Americans who learned of slavery as a thing that existed south of the Mason-Dixon line. For those who are wondering, yes, there were enslaved people in Rhode Island at the start of the Revolutionary War, and yes, Rhode Island, after not having enough soldiers enlist, decided to open their rolls to black men—and on February 14, 1778, the Rhode Island Assembly voted that “every slave so enlisting shall, upon his passing muster before Colonel Christopher Greene, be immediately discharged from the service of his master or mistress, and be absolutely free.”
This law stood in place for four months before slave owners insisted on its removal, but by that time, many enslaved men had already took steps to secure their freedom. The Rhode Island First Regiment—which was later collapsed with the Second into just the Rhode Island Regiment—came to be known as the Black Regiment because of the large number of African American soldiers who fought in it.
As for what happened afterward to John’s family in Newport, this was also an incredibly common practice. In theory, “warning out” was a practice in the New England states which was used to coerce outsiders into leaving before they could become a drain on the town’s resources—usually because the town deemed them unable to care for themselves. In practice, communities warned out those whom they deemed undesirable for many reasons. African-Americans were disproportionately warned out as compared to their peers.
For those interested in learning more, I highly recommend Christy Mikel Clark-Pujara's dissertation, "Slavery, emancipation and Black freedom in Rhode Island, 1652-1842," which you can find at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4956&context=etd
And for those wondering how likely it was for a community of African Americans to find an island in Maine and settle there…the answer is, very likely! So likely that it’s already happened. At one point, Malaga Island in Maine was settled by a mixed-race community. The inhabitants were incredibly poor, and as often happened to poor, mixed-race communities, they were eventually forced to leave. But the inevitable consequence of kicking out everyone that doesn’t look like you is that those people go and find their own place.
And if you want to know what happens next to our intrepid band, well… there’s always next book.
I had the idea for this novella early in 2016—what we might call a younger, more hopeful, more innocent time. At that point, my thought for what would happen in this book was something along the lines of:
1. Meet at Battle of Yorktown! Fight! Abscond!
2. …?
3. …?!
4. …!!
5. HAPPY ENDING
I had some ideas, but had other projects that needed my attention first, and so I set this to the side.
I turned back to it in December of 2016. Now, it turns out that December of 2016 was a very different time than March of 2016, mostly because sometime between March of 2016 and December of 2016, November 8th happened. And…then, November 8th kept happening.
Those of you who know a little bit about my personal history know that from 2006 to 2008, I served as a law clerk—first to Alex Kozinski on the Ninth Circuit and then to Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. I care about this country—its legal history, its founding documents. I care about the evolution of this country in small and dorky details, like the incorporation of the Bill of Rights against the states, or the modern Commerce Clause jurisprudence, or footnote four in Carolene Products. Most importantly, I care about the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, amendments that came many decades after the founding of this nation, and which finally began to deliver on the most fundamental promises that were made in the Declaration of Independence—that all men people were created equal, and should be treated equally under the law.
It has been hard to watch the ideals (if not history) of this country come under attack—birthright citizenship, equality under the law without regard to race or religion.
This history is very personal to me. When my great-great-grandfather first came to this country, he did not bring his wife for a variety of reasons. One of them was that it was difficult for Chinese women to immigrate under the law. For two generations, my forebears lived in this country, returning to China only for brief visits to marry, visit spouses who would not come with them, and say hello to children whom they might never see again. My mother’s mother is my first maternal ancestor to bear her children on US soil.
When my parents married, their marriage—between a Chinese woman and a white man—was illegal in seven states.
If I had happened to fall in love with
a woman instead of a man, up until two years ago, I would not have been able to marry.
Progress has been good to me and mine. Regression, knowing where we have come from, is a little frightening. I found it hard on a very personal level to write a story about the founding of this nation when it felt as if I might be witnessing its end.
But there is a kind of comfort to be had in the awfulness of history—a comfort that times have been dark before and better ideals have prevailed. American ideals have always been locked in a struggle with the darkest moments of her history, but those ideals have won, and won, and won again.
It took eighty years after its ratification for the Constitution to reflect equality, and eighty years beyond that for the country to begin to acknowledge the changing Constitution. As this third set of eighty years comes to a close, I am more determined than ever to hold on to those ideals.
They have, after all, survived all this time.
Also by Courtney Milan
The Worth Saga
Once Upon a Marquess
Her Every Wish
The Pursuit Of…
After the Wedding
The Devil Comes Courting
The Return of the Scoundrel
The Kissing Hour
A Tale of Two Viscounts
The Once and Future Earl
The Cyclone Series
Trade Me
Hold Me
Find Me
What Lies Between Me and You
Keep Me
Show Me
The Brothers Sinister Series
The Governess Affair
The Duchess War
A Kiss for Midwinter
The Heiress Effect
The Countess Conspiracy
The Suffragette Scandal
Talk Sweetly to Me
The Turner Series
Unveiled
Unlocked
Unclaimed
Unraveled
Not in any series
A Right Honorable Gentleman
What Happened at Midnight
The Lady Always Wins
The Carhart Series
This Wicked Gift
Proof by Seduction
Trial by Desire
End Notes: Alyssa Cole
Historical Note
The initial draft of That Could Be Enough was the first thing I wrote after the Election of 2016 (this is how I imagine it will appear in future history textbooks). I was demoralized. I was sad and angry, but also numb. I felt like I had been hopeful, and that hope had been crushed underfoot.
I realized I couldn’t write explicitly about America. My novella Be Not Afraid, which features Andromeda’s grandparents Elijah and Kate Sutton, is about choosing to believe in the future of America. My two most recent releases had been about heroes and heroines who cared so much for this country, even when it didn’t love them back, and worked hard to make it a better place. To be quite honest, I felt almost as if I had betrayed those characters. So I started writing this: a story about ordinary people living their lives against the backdrop of a country that was still finding its way. A story with a heroine who felt so much, and so deeply, that she thought the only solution was to not allow herself to feel at all—to not allow herself to care.
In writing this story I remembered that, above all, the story of America is one of a great multitude of individuals with so many things stacked against them who…lived. And loved. And thrived. No matter the time period, and no matter the obstacles placed before them. People from marginalized groups have always made their way by finding their place within their communities and holding tightly to the things most dear to them. They fight, in small ways and in large. They hope, though common sense may tell them not to, and sometimes America is worthy of that hope.
Mercy and Andromeda are queer, and they live together and are accepted by their community. Yes, I know you likely just read the story, so you’re aware of this, but I wanted to make it clear that this is not anachronism in the name of happily ever after: queer people have always existed, and though society has generally excelled at making their lives difficult and dangerous, there were people who lived as openly as they could and were accepted within their communities.
Andromeda is a Black woman who owns her own business, makes loans to other Black women for which she receives interest, and has a strong entrepreneurial spirit. Again: this is not anachronism for the sake of happily ever after. Free Black women then, as now, started their own businesses out of both necessity and ingenuity. In a society in which they couldn’t count on many mechanisms of support, they created their own and uplifted each other while doing so.
Some of the resources that were most helpful to this story, and touch on the aforementioned subjects, are as follows:
Hodges, Graham Russell Gao. 1999. Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863. University of North Carolina Press.
Clever, Rachel Hope. 2014. Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Oxford University Press.
Harris, Leslie M. 2003. In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863. The University of Chicago Press.
Also by Alyssa Cole
Loyal League
An Extraordinary Union
A Hope Divided
Reluctant Royals
A Princess in Theory
Off the Grid
Radio Silence
Signal Boost
Mixed Signals
Let us Dream
Let it Shine
Be Not Afraid
Agnes Moor’s Wild Knight
Eagle’s Heart
Hamilton's Battalion: A Trio of Romances Page 34