Looking back, I now see my high school history classes as one big maneuver to avoid the ugly facts from our nation’s past. Was my generation shielded from harsh realities that later generations of students would hear about with the misguided but honest motive of protecting the young? I suspect that it was due to something worse and intentionally dishonest; suppressing uncomfortable facts was simply the policy of the time. Education for the young put forward nice-sounding myths about our country’s virtues and achievements over its blind spots, failures, and atrocities.
When my heroine Aleta is forced to time-travel back to the week before Pearl Harbor, she learns first-hand of the compulsory internment of Japanese American citizens: “Aleta frantically scoured her memory for what she’d learned in her high school history class [in about 1960], but she could not recall a word in her textbook about this human catastrophe.”
When I started writing The Last Shade Tree, I had no idea that I’d be tackling the horrors of recent history. But as the books began to stack up on my desk and my research intensified, I grew more and more aware that too many dreadful episodes had been swept under the rug. So I came up with the time-travel concept so that my heroine and hero would experience personally some of the atrocities that had been kept from us or glossed over.
I believe facing this history is especially urgent today as our world lurches again toward exclusiveness, racial hatred, totalitarianism, and, worst of all, nuclear war. Some of the book’s episodes are better known than others, such as the Japanese internment after Pearl Harbor and the Cherokee Trail of Tears. But are they known well enough? And what about Drancy, the Indian boarding schools discontinued only late in the last century, or the Roma in Nazi camps? Add in the right-wing historical revisionists, and I just can’t shake feeling that we as a nation are in big trouble.