by Little White Publishing
(2011) Little White Publishing has announced the release of the debut novel by award-winning Sarnia-born writer Bruce Kemp. Set in the last half of the 19th century, Letters From A Fugitive’s Son is an historical epic told through the journals of Frederick Douglass MacDonald and his correspondence with General William Tecumseh Sherman and Mary Todd Lincoln. The son of a fugitive slave who escaped to Canada via the Underground Railroad, Frederick becomes enmeshed in the anti-slavery movement, befriending Mary Ann Shadd, Martin Delany and John Brown before abandoning his comfortable home and safe job as a reporter for the Chatham Planet to join the Union Army and fight in the American Civil War. His unique qualifications lead him first to South Carolina where he is trained in intelligence gathering by Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, then on to the headquarters of General Sherman who sends him on missions deep behind enemy lines. The General and the son of the former slave form a unique bond and years after the war Frederick produces more than just letters when Sherman asks him to write to Mary Lincoln and relate his experiences as a colored soldier. Through the ramblings of his deranged wife, Frederick discovers secrets of the war that he could never have imagined. Letters From A Fugitive’s Son is a truly North American story featuring locations like Buxton, Chatham and London in Southern Ontario, Civil War battlefields in South Carolina, Florida and Georgia as well as Washington DC. Bruce Kemp developed the story while on a travel assignment about the African Canadian Trail for a national magazine. It took another four-and-a-half years to complete the book. “I grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, just down the road from Dresden where Uncle Tom’s Cabin is located,” says Kemp. “I didn’t know much about black history in the area—which is really a rich part of the Canadian quilt. When I began to discover it for myself, I realized that this was a story that needed to be told.”
Bruce Kemp’s life reads like a novel. Journalist, photographer, editor, teacher and wanderer, his stories about meandering in countries ranging from Australia to Yugoslavia have appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. Bruce has covered America’s Cup yacht racing and Canadian royal tours. Together with his wife, Laurie Carter, Bruce produced the photo book Gifts of the Okanagan. His writing and photography have garnered numerous national and international awards. The late Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers wrote a song about one of Bruce’s adventures for his last album, From Fresh Water. Keenly interested in history, Bruce has long been fascinated by the American Civil War and the Underground Railroad, which led many fugitive slaves to settle near his hometown in southwestern Ontario. Bruce now lives in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley.