Q&A with Ashton Lattimore

From my Q&A with Ashton Lattimore, author of All We Were Promised:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I think the title All We Were Promised clues readers into the sense of expectation that each of the main characters carries throughout the story. The book centers on three very different young Black women in pre-Civil War Philadelphia: a formerly enslaved housemaid, a wealthy socialite and budding abolitionist, and a young girl who’s currently enslaved and hoping to escape. Though their circumstances are very different, each of them has absolutely been promised something, whether by their family members, friends, society at large, or even the law. For the housemaid, Charlotte, her white-passing father brought her to Philadelphia on the promise of freedom and a better life, only to shunt her into a role as his domestic servant. Meanwhile Nell, the wealthy abolitionist, was born into a free family and has—until this point—led a life that’s comfortable and uncomplicated, but as she becomes more involved in the abolitionist movement she discovers that her social class doesn’t protect her from the city’s racial strife. Lastly there’s Evie, who was left behind on the plantation when Charlotte and her father fled. Evie expected at least loyalty from her dear friend, and she arrives in Philadelphia ready to demand what she feels she’s owed.

My original working title of the book was The Free City, which gets at the same idea on a larger societal and legal scale. The story is set in Philadelphia, the cradle of liberty, but it’s also 1837, and we see the stark reality of who actually had access to its promised freedoms and who did not, regardless of the city’s professed virtues or the state’s actual emancipation laws. As a title, All We Were Promised captures that same sense of irony, in...[read on]

Visit Ashton Lattimore's website.

Q&A with Ashton Lattimore.

--Marshal Zeringue