13
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In a lot of ways, Bree’s story is my story. When my own mother died, I learned that I had just become the third consecutive generation of daughters who lost their mothers at a young age. That we know of. This realization was sharp and quick and impossible—and the exact moment when Bree and Legendborn began to take shape.
Death is rife with odd ironies; growing up, I had, on occasion, seen my mother’s wound, but not understood its nature. It took losing her to recognize that wound as grief, and, of course, the event that helped me better understand her is the exact event that took her away. I wanted to compare notes, but that’s not how my story works. Instead, I wrote my own explanation.
In order to create the magic and legacy that answer Bree’s questions, I took hold of the pattern of loss in my matrilineal line, then wove that pattern into the otherworldly qualities of the women in my family. Bree’s story is, at its core, a story about someone who wants to understand the role of death in her life. It’s about Black motherhood and Black daughterhood. But it’s also a story of someone who wants very much to understand and honor her mother and ancestors.
GRIEF AND TRAUMA
Legendborn addresses several types of trauma. Bree’s grief-related trauma is directly drawn from my own experiences. In the book, she suffers from acute traumatic grief, PTSD, and early symptoms of Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder (PCBD), reflecting my current nonprofessional understanding of those conditions; PCBD is a relatively recent addition to the DSM-5 amid evolving research. In my case, it took a year after my mother’s death to seek the support of a bereavement specialist and ten years before I began focused grief treatment with a trauma professional. In the interim, I’d lost my biological father and the father who raised me. Part of why I wrote Legendborn is because I hope to raise awareness of these sometimes comorbid conditions, particularly when they occur due to loss of a parent and/or when they occur in young people. Many people live with these disorders, undiagnosed, and suffer in silence due to how our society treats grief and death. Many people turn away from this type of suffering, even those who are suffering themselves. If that’s you, just know you’re not alone and that trauma is treatable.
Legendborn also addresses: intergenerational trauma experienced by descendants of enslaved people, the ways in which trauma can manifest between parents and children, and the legacies of racial trauma, oppression, and resilience.
ROOTCRAFT
In addition to drawing on my own life to create the fictional magic system of rootcraft, I took inspiration from African American history and spiritual traditions. In particular, I focused on rootwork, also known as hoodoo or conjure. Rootwork was developed by enslaved Africans and their descendants under American chattel slavery, and it can be traced from its historic origins to varied practices in present-day African American communities. Rootwork is not a centralized tradition, and practitioners from different families, regions, and times have their own gospel on what it looks like. But there are common aspects, many of which can be found in other traditions and religions, including those with roots in West Africa. “Rootcraft” in Legendborn borrows four of these common elements: ancestor reverence and communion, the ritual use of organic materials, naturopathic medicine and healing, and themes of protection.
Rootwork is a historic and living folk tradition and spiritual practice, but it is not the practice in my book. While the rootcraft magic Bree explores in the book is fictional, I chose to use the term “root” in Legendborn for four reasons:
To set this type of ancestral, organic magic apart from the magic of the Order.
Because of the power of this word in my community; imagery using roots exists across Black music, pop culture, and film.
Because, for me and many other Black people in the South, it feels as if the very soil that helped grow this country is soaked with the acknowledged and unacknowledged blood, sweat, and tears of enslaved Africans and their descendants. And, in truth, it is.
To hint at the solution to Bree’s turmoil in the book, which is to recognize the living nature of love in her life, alongside death, and to literally go underground to find the truth of her origin.
UNC-CHAPEL HILL HISTORY
When I talk about Legendborn, I often talk about King Arthur and when I first fell in love with Arthurian legends. (Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence, in 1995, by the way.) I also say that it’s about the ways grief and history walk beside us. UNC-Chapel Hill is many things: my alma mater twice over, a beloved epicenter for some of my favorite memories, the oldest public university in the country to admit and graduate students, a site of local and national history, a school casually abundant with secret societies, and, undeniably, a campus and community still reckoning with its deep connections to slavery.
Legendborn is a contemporary fantasy work of fiction whose setting is a real place with real history. I made up the Order of the Round Table and Early College. The cemetery is real, but I added mausoleums. I took some liberties with Battle Park and campus geography. The Unsung Founders Memorial exists, but I moved its location. There is no Carr statue, but the Confederate monument known as Silent Sam stood for over a hundred years on Carolina’s campus and was the subject of decades of debate and protest until it was taken down by activists in 2018.
Some of the most painful stories in the book are facts: the unmarked, disrespected, and segregated graves; the open brutality of the real Julian Carr against an unnamed woman; that Black students live and learn on a campus built by enslaved people held in bondage by celebrated men who would have wanted to enslave us, too. These facts and monuments have mirrors in other spaces and at other schools, and I hope light continues to be shined on them.
KING ARTHUR
If one must find Arthur’s beginning, I would turn to Wales. Still, I could never list all of my sources for Arthurian lore and legend. Like Nick says, fifteen hundred years is a long time! Arthuriana is absorptive and has always invited invention and reinvention. Arthur exists in a network of narratives; there is no single story, no sacred text, no definitive version, no single voice. Instead there are many versions of many legends, reimaginings, and retellings. Consider Legendborn a contribution to the collection.
To me, Arthur represents the seat of the canon of Western legend. Arthuriana is an opportunity for us to reorient ourselves to the stories we preserve… and rediscover who gets to be legendary.