A Philadelphia-based antebellum novel for readers who have had enough of stories that strip enslaved women of their agency

When Prism’s outgoing editor in chief Ashton Lattimore learned of the violent anti-Black mob who burned down Pennsylvania Hall in 1838 — after it had been open for just three days — she was intrigued.

“It was crazy,” Lattimore said as we walked down Sixth Street. We stopped in front of WHYY near the historical marker that denoted where the short-lived abolitionist convention center and monument to free speech once stood.

Lattimore planned to place the protagonists — a free Black woman, a woman who escaped slavery, and an enslaved woman — in her debut novel, All We Were Promised (Ballantine Books, April 2024), in 1850s Philadelphia, closer to the beginning of the Civil War. But the story of Pennsylvania Hall was too interesting for her to ignore, especially given Philadelphia’s reputation as a safe haven for the formerly enslaved.

“Philadelphia was this in-between place that straddled the politics between North and South,” Lattimore said. “This grand opening and grand closing was too much of a story not to include. It really tells you something of the time period and what was really going on in Philadelphia.”

Lattimore’s well-researched and lyrical prose is a page-turning story of what life must have been like for Black women who lived in and around Old City and Society Hill from 1837 through 1838. Nell, the upper-middle-class daughter of a publisher, was born a free woman and spends her time in literary circles, lunching and conspiring with the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Charlotte ran away from a plantation in Maryland with her white-passing father and settled at Fourth and Pine, where she worked as her father’s maid to keep the family’s ruse. Evie, an old friend of Charlotte’s, arrives in Philadelphia with her enslaver.

The women’s lives converge at outdoor markets amid aromas of spice cake and pepper pot soup where they plan Evie’s escape. They are inspired by the speeches and actions of real free Black abolitionists: Robert Purvis, Hetty Reckless, and Sarah Mapps Douglass echoing in the background.

“There isn’t one way to be a Black woman in the 19th century,” said the 37-year-old Bryn Mawr mother of two. “We see young, enslaved girls all of the time [in books and pop culture]; I wanted to undo the flattening of Black women in the 19th century and antebellum America that has happened across the historical record and fiction.”

» READ MORE: How did a white woman come to write the newest definitive text on Philadelphia’s Black history?

All We Were Promised answers the call of readers who are tired of being spoon-fed slave narratives that paint Black people as illiterate victims without agency. Lattimore is among the growing number of novelists — including Sadeqa Johnson (Yellow Wife) and Phillip B. Williams (Ours) — who cast the enslaved as heroes in their emancipation stories. These authors’ prose is emotional, factual, and points to the ways enslavers benefitted from centuries of free labor and also highlights that while abolitionists weren’t proslavery, they weren’t necessarily pro-Black.

A Harvard-educated attorney and Columbia Journalism School graduate, Lattimore was inspired by the Les Misérables show tune “Who Am I?” about a fugitive convict agonizing over his decision to assume a new identity in a new city to hide his past.

What if she centered a novel on a white-passing fugitive slave who escaped to Philadelphia and his brown-skinned daughter? She wrote the first draft of Promised in November 2018 during National Novel Writing Month, while she was working at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. But after the first draft, she decided James — a skilled woodworker trying to build a white clientele — was taking her places she didn’t want to go. While “Nell — who was just Charlotte’s out-and-about-friend — was starting to speak to me. Logically, it followed that I give Evie a voice, too.”

Lattimore wrote the bulk of Promised during the pandemic while guiding stories about social justice at Prism — especially Republicans’ attempt to roll back voting rights and reproductive rights. The sense of righteousness started bleeding into her own work. “At the heart of my book is the power of protest and the power of organization,” Lattimore said.

She walked through the streets of Old City and Society Hill as part of her research. Lattimore sat in Washington Square and counted the blocks between Charlotte’s home, situated between Fourth and Pine, and Nell’s, in the then-ritzy part of town, at Ninth and Lombard. She learned the difference between Locust Ward — what is now Society Hill — and Cedar Ward, which a few decades later would be the Black enclave known as the Seventh Ward. Lattimore relied heavily on the work of Black scholars including W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Philadelphia Negro and Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s Never Caught: The Story of Ona Judge.

She visited the President’s House and immersed herself in the 1780 Gradual Abolition Act, which abolished slavery and said that Black people who lived in Pennsylvania could no longer be enslaved after six months. Enslavers whose business kept them in Pennsylvania longer than six months sent their slaves away, and when they returned, the clock started ticking again. This was the predicament Evie faced.

At its core, All We Were Promised is a historical novel examining the 19th century through dual lenses: Philadelphia was home to abolitionists as well as the site of violent race riots. Black people were poor and enslaved, but many were also upper middle class and free. And while many free African Americans were willing to shelter and protect fugitives, there were others who were just concerned with their own upward mobility.

“Mixed motives don’t diminish the impact of the work,” said Lattimore, who will write full-time after she steps down from Prism and is already at work on her second novel about a Black family in Martha’s Vineyard in the 1920s. “It just makes for a fuller story.”