In developing characters for my novel, Meghan’s Choice, I tried to populate my fictional town of New Boston, Kansas, with as many different kinds of characters as possible to challenge Meghan Gallagher’s sensibilities.
I wanted an ex-slave who would still sort of talk like a Negro from the south, but I wanted him to be intelligent and considerate. When I was first thinking of his name, I thought of a black girl I knew in high school, her last name was Jackson. I thought about who an ancestor of hers could be. So I called him Jackson.
