Ashton Lattimore

Ashton Lattimore is an award-winning journalist and a former lawyer. She is the editor-in-chief at Prism, a nonprofit news outlet by and for communities of color, and her nonfiction writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, Slate, CNN, and Essence. Lattimore is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and Columbia Journalism School. She grew up in New Jersey, and now lives in suburban Philadelphia with her husband and their two sons. All We Were Promised is her first novel.

My Q&A with Lattimore:

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 a less direct way.

What's in a name?

The original idea for this novel was inspired by Les Miserables, so several of the character names reflect that. In its earliest shape, All We Were Promised was the story of a father who was on the run from a dangerous past, and how his daughter grappled with the limitations he placed on her life. As I created the character names, escaped convict “Jean Valjean” became fugitive slave “James Vaughn,” and his daughter “Cosette” became “Charlotte.” As the story grew in scope and came to incorporate more characters, a few more names were similarly inspired, while others were just reflections of what I thought sounded appropriate to the time period and the characters’ backgrounds.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

Honestly, not in the slightest. I’ve always been a history nerd, particularly U.S. history and Black history, and I’ve always gravitated toward writing stories that center upon the experiences and growth of young women. In addition, I’ve been a Broadway enthusiast since I was about 9 years old. Given all that, learning that I’d grown up to write a historical fiction novel about three young Black women in 1830s Philadelphia that was also loosely inspired by Les Miserables would probably be the least surprising thing my teenage self ever heard.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Definitely beginnings. At the start of All We Were Promised, I hoped to catch each character at the moment just before their life changed. For some of them, that was more obvious—with Evie, who’s arrived in Philadelphia but is still enslaved, when she sees Charlotte in the marketplace, it’s like a sudden lightning bolt of possibility for her. But for a character like Charlotte, whose life has gone through so many transformations in just a few years, discovering her “beginning” was less straightforward: is it the moment she first meets her sophisticated new friend, Nell? Or is it when she decides to start sneaking out of the house, against her father’s wishes, to join a literary club and rub shoulders with abolitionists? For me, discovering those precise moments of transformation that mark a beginning felt more complicated than deciding where each character would land at the end of her journey.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

There’s quite a lot of me in Charlotte, in the sense that she’s being pulled in many different directions all at once: She’s trying to break into high society and the abolitionist world, free her enslaved friend, and pursue her passions as a seamstress, all while keeping secrets from just about everyone she knows. I have fewer secrets, but the sense of trying to juggle a lot of different versions of yourself is very familiar—it’s a lot like how I felt working on this book and juggling my day job and two young children!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

History is the biggest influence, and of course musical theater. I’ve also been very influenced by TV, particularly when writing All We Were Promised. Two of my favorite TV shows are Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and much of the last third of the book is pretty directly inspired by two episodes of those shows—“Homecoming” from Season 3 of Buffy, and “Not Fade Away” from Angel, which was the series finale. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that helping an enslaved person is very risky business, and as a result, the young women in the story end up in pretty grave danger. Similarly, “Homecoming” finds Buffy and rich-girl queen bee Cordelia in serious peril, and while All We Were Promised doesn’t feature any vampires or monsters, there’s something really inspiring in that episode about how two wildly different young women worked together in an extreme situation. As for “Not Fade Away,” thematically, the message of that episode was that the fight against evil is never fully won, but you have to just keep fighting. Given the state of the world Charlotte, Nell, and Evie lived in as Black women in the 1830s, and the state of the abolitionist movement at that time, that message—to just keep doing the work, even against seemingly insurmountable odds—really resonated, and it directly inspired the last line of the book.

Visit Ashton Lattimore's website.

--Marshal Zeringue