Forbidden (22 page)
Authors: Beverly Jenkins
When Rhine Fontaine first made his appearance in my fifth Avon novel,
Through the Storm,
in 1998, questions from the readers began almost immediately. Did he really pass? What happened to him? Did he and Sable ever cross paths again? Then came the requests that he have his own story. As the years passed the clamoring became so intense that I lovingly dubbed those readers my Rhine Whiners.
âº
Rhine has always been in the back of my mind, but his story never solidified until recently when I ran across an article about an ongoing archaeological dig in Virginia City, Nevada. To the surprise of the archaeologists, among the 4,000 items found at one particular site was a hot sauce bottle and a brass trombone mouthpiece. Because of the hot sauce bottle they wondered if the site was somehow tied to African Americans. It was. What they'd located was the Boston Saloon, an upscale tavern owned and operated from 1866-1875 by William A.G. Brown, an African-ÂAmerican. Further digging unearthed ornate liqueur glasses and crystal stemmed goblets, clay pipes, a bottle of Gordon's dry gin imported from London, mineral water from Germany, and the bones of expensive cuts of meat, like leg of lamb. In 1866, the Virginia City newspaper, the
Territorial Express
, described the Boston Saloon as “the popular resort for many of the colored population.” Kelly Dixon, an archaeologist who started the dig in 2000 and serves as administrator of the Comstock Archaeology Center says, “. . . the mere existence of an African American saloon . . . alters our sense of the so called Wild West.”
As I read more about the dig's findings and about William Brown from various other sources, I knew I wanted to write about this unique place and that Rhine would be the owner. As for Eddy, I found an account of a man having seen a Black woman marching across the desert with a cook stove on her head. I was unable to find any other information about her but the description was so intriguing I decided to give her a story, and thus Eddy was born. I do hope you enjoyed
Forbidden
, and that it was worth the almost ten-Âyear wait. I also hope you enjoyed the quick peek at Sable and Raimond LeVeq, something else my readers asked for upon learning I was finally doing Rhine's story.
In writing
Forbidden
I also unearthed a trove of information about Virginia City and the Comstock Lode. Most interesting to me was that there was so much money coming out of the Comstock mines that in its prime Virginia City was the richest city in the U.S. and that its wealth helped finance the Union side of the Civil War.
Here are a few of the sources I used to bring
Forbidden
to life.
Newspaper Articles:
Scott Sonner. “Old Hot Sauce Bottle Offers Peek into Virginia City Past.”
Arizona Daily Sun
. June 27, 2002.
Scott Sonner. “Archaeologists at Nevada mining town find riches at black saloon.”
Lubbock-ÂAvalanche Journal
. December 26, 2003.
Books:
Dixon, Kelly J.
Boomtown Saloons: Archaeology and History in Virginia City
. University of Nevada Press. 2005.
Fisher, Abby.
What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking
. Women's Cooperative Printing Office 1881. Reissued by Applewood Book. Bedford MA. 1995. (My source for Eddy's recipesâÂparticularly the marmalade.)
James, Ronald M. and Raymond, C. Elizabeth.
Comstock Women: The Making of a Mining Community
. University of Nevada Press. 1998.
Rusco, Elmer R.
Good Time Coming? Black Nevadans in the Nineteenth Century
. Greenwood Press. Westport CT. 1975.
Smith, Grant H.
The History of the Comstock Lode
. University of Nevada Press. 1998.
In closing, I'd like to thank my editor, Erika Tsang, for her valuable insight and support. Her insistence that I dig deeper always makes me write a better book. Kudos to the great folks at Avon Art for another slamming cover and to everyone at Avon/Harper for twenty years of love. Many thanks to my agent Nancy Yost and her crew at NYLA. We've been together since 1995 and our relationship is still fresh and fun. And last but not least, to my dear dear readers. As I always say: when I count my blessings I count you twice.
See you next time,
B
B
EVERLY JENKINS has received numerous awards, including five Waldenbooks/Borders Group Best Sellers Awards, two Career Achievement Awards from
Romantic Times
Magazine, and a Golden Pen Award from the Black Writer's Guild. Ms. Jenkins was named one of the Top Fifty Favorite African-American writers of the 20th century by AABLC, the nation's largest on-line African-American book club. She was recently nominated for the NAACP Image Award in Literature.
To read more about Beverly, visit her at
www.beverlyjenkins.net
.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at
hc.com
.
I
NDIGO
V
IVID
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
FORBIDDEN
. Copyright © 2016 by Beverly Jenkins. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Chapter opener illustration copyright © by Nikiparonak/Shutterstock, Inc.
EPub Edition February 2016 ISBN: 9780062389015
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062389008
First Avon Books mass market printing: February 2016
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
