The Downstairs Girl

by Stacey Lee

“I look forward to that.”

  “Roast chicken?”

  “No. You being back.”

  Dear Miss Sweetie,

  Ever since that China girl ran that race, my daughter wants to race horses, too. I thought it was just a phase, but she and her friends have started their own “Fillies Only” riding club. I even caught her sewing a pair of riding breeches. How do I convince her that the China girl just had a lucky strike?

  Sincerely,

  Wits’ End

  Dear Wits’ End,

  A great man once told me that Luck rides a workhorse named Joy. Let your daughter ride.

  Sincerely,

  Miss Sweetie

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  WERE YOU SURPRISED to learn that planters shipped Chinese people to the South to replace the field slaves during Reconstruction? I was. Plantation owners envisioned an improved system of coerced labor, as Chinese workers were lauded as “fine specimens, bright and intelligent” (New Orleans Times, June 3, 1870). They were dismayed, however, when the Chinese behaved no differently from formerly enslaved blacks. The new workers were unwilling to withstand the terrible conditions and ran away to the cities, and sometimes vanished from the South altogether.

  After passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882—a federal law that prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers until 1943—the Chinese already in the United States could no longer bring their families from China. Isolated and living in the margins of a country that only saw in black and white, they eventually found livelihoods outside the plantations.

  I envisioned the “uncles” in this story arriving this way after the Civil War, and later sojourning through the major cities of the South in search of work. Many of them intermingled with local populations, yet these diverse histories were not captured by U.S. Census records. That a Chinese laborer like Shang might’ve found love in the arms of someone above his class wasn’t hard for me to imagine. Sometimes, as Miss Sweetie notes, love just stumbles into you, out of the blue.

  One of the things I love about writing historical fiction is how much the research process affects the creative process. The Downstairs Girl takes place during the period in America known as the “Gilded Age,” coined by Mark Twain to describe an era of high profits and merrymaking that belied serious social problems. The more I explored these social problems, the more the character of Noemi took shape. The year 1890 marked the beginning of Jim Crow laws, like those segregating the streetcars. (Though, note that the law segregating Atlanta’s streetcars was actually passed in 1891, one year after the events in this story.) Before that, with federal troops to safeguard their new civil liberties, including enfranchisement for black men, African Americans had experienced relative freedom of movement in the late 1860s and early 1870s, with some African American men even winning elections to state governments and Congress. But by the late 1870s, as white Southerners turned to violence to protest this new interracial democracy, public support for Reconstruction began to wane. White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan began to gain a foothold. In a final blow to Reconstruction, Republican candidate for president Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to return the South to “home rule” in exchange for Democrats certifying his contested election in a deal known as the Compromise of 1876. After that, civil rights for African Americans would gradually be stripped away until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

  Black women suffered greatly with the failure of Reconstruction, victims of both racism and sexism. Suffrage leaders who had worked toward the idea of universal suffrage antebellum began turning their backs on their black sisters to court the support of white Southern suffragists, whose interest in restoring white supremacy eclipsed their interest in enfranchising women. White Southern women’s overt racism was used to justify the discriminatory policies of national suffrage organizations, and black women were expected to understand that it was for the greater good. Nevertheless, African American women played an active role in the suffrage movement leading up to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, though they themselves wouldn’t be fully enfranchised until the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  APPRECIATION IS A gift that, when given, can set the whole world aglow. I would like to light a few candles here.

  Thank you to Kristin Nelson, my agent, and the folks at Nelson Literary Agency for being my tireless advocates. I’m lucky to have you on my side! Thank you to Angie Hodapp for your incredible insight and feedback. Thank you as well to my team at G. P. Putnam’s Sons and Penguin Random House, in particular, my editor, Stephanie Pitts, for her deep and thoughtful notes and dedication to my book (and for thinking up the title!); Lily Yengle, my publicist; Anne Heausler, my copyeditor; and Samira Iravani and Theresa Evangelista, who designed the gorgeous cover.

  I have always been intrigued by the Southern United States, and thanks to this book, I was able to visit there and immerse myself in the history of the region and its impact on the development of our nation. Thank you to all of the institutions whose experts, docents, and volunteers guided me in my journey to understand the South, including the Atlanta History Center, in particular David Roane, who shared his fascinating family history with me; Piedmont Park Conservancy, especially Ginny, who took me on a private tour of the park and refused my tips; Spelman College; the APEX Museum; Atlanta Preservation Center; the Center for Civil and Human Rights Museum; and the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History. Thank you to Wayne Merritt of the JKL Museum of Telephony. Thank you to the librarians at both Stanford University and my local Santa Clara City Library for helping me uncover obscure documents in my research for this book. Many thanks to Herb Boyd for his contributions to the study of African American history, and for his sage advice.

  I am also eternally grateful to my community of writers for their support, including Abigail Hing Wen, Jeanne Schriel, Mónica Bustamante Wagner, Parker Peevyhouse, Kelly Loy Gilbert, Sabaa Tahir, Ilene W. Gregorio, Evelyn Skye, Anna Shinoda, Amie Kaufman, Eric Elfman, Ida Olson, and especially to my fellow mermaid, Stephanie Garber.

  Thank you to Ariele Wildwind, Susan Repo, Angela Hum, Karen Ng, Bijal Vakil, Ana Inglis, Kristen Good, Adlai Coronel, and Yuki Romero, for your love and support. Thank you to Melissa Lee, for lending your beautiful name.

  A final thank-you to the top-shelf hats in my life, my vibrant and eternally curious parents, Evelyn and Carl Leong, and in-laws, Dolores and Wai Lee; my big-hearted sisters, Laura Ly and Alyssa Cheng; my supportive husband, Jonathan; my whip-smart daughter, Avalon; and my giver of warm hugs, Bennett. To all of you, I am your biggest fan.

  STEVEN COTTON PHOTOGRAPHY

  Stacey Lee is the critically acclaimed author of the novels Under a Painted Sky and Outrun the Moon, the winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction. She is a fourth-generation Chinese American and a founding member of We Need Diverse Books. Born in Southern California, she graduated from UCLA and then got her law degree at UC Davis King Hall. She lives with her family outside San Francisco.

  You can visit Stacey at

  staceyhlee.com

  Follow her on Twitter and Instagram

  @staceyleeauthor

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