Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen by Sarah Bird

When she met Bird over drinks, it sealed things. She would have been amazing to learn about when I was a kid.' 'I felt simultaneously elated and also sad - elated that her story was here in front of me and that I was learning about her, sad that I hadn't learned about her when I was a kid. As she read, Patterson, who is African-American, thought about other figures in black history that had been lost to time. Martin's Press, and Bird's editor, who says she was hooked from that first line. That worked for Monique Patterson, editorial director at St. 'You get a rip-snortin' yarn, Cathy! You deserve it!' So they were unable to do what the educated whites who went West did, which was to mythologize themselves.'īird wanted her character to have a chance to enter that mythology. 'They had been forbidden by law from learning to read or write. 'All those former slaves who went out West were mostly illiterate,' she says. Don't think so.' And chose a better life.' These are the career paths that were open at that time.

She had the wonderful options of going back into slavery as a sharecropper's wife. 'The South at that point was a smoldering graveyard. But Bird was enthralled with the audacity of what Williams attempted. She ended up running a boarding house in Trinidad, Colo., and died sometime around 1893.Īdditional details proved scarce. After her gender was discovered, she was honorably discharged in 1868. After the war, in 1866, she enlisted in the infantry under the name of 'William Cathey.' She eventually was based in southern New Mexico. Philip Sheridan as he fought in the Shenandoah Valley. With help from Black, she gathered what little was known about the real Cathy (sometimes Cathay) Williams' real life: She was born into slavery in Missouri, was claimed as 'contraband' by the Union army and served as cook and laundress during the Civil War, where she was with Gen.

Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen by Sarah Bird