Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Sometimes I learn things about American

history that I just think, like, shouldn't I have learned about this in school? Maybe unsurprisingly,

most of these things deal with our country's treatment of black people. I'm talking about

events like the Tulsa Massacre or places like the Great Dismal Swamp,

which was apparently a part of the country that was a place of refuge for fugitive slaves ahead of the Civil War.

The swamp is at the center of today's book, Free Water.

And it's a young adult fiction book, and here and now Celeste Headley asked author Amina Lukman Dawson

why she chose that route instead of writing just a

straight-up history book. And her answer really reaffirmed for me the importance of writing fiction

for kids. In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life. Distant wars,

murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.

On our new show, Sources and Methods, NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories

of real people helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.

Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Music NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever heard of the Great Dismal Swamp?

At one point, it covered a 1,500-mile stretch from Virginia to North Carolina.

Indigenous people used it as a hunting ground and a place to take refuge from European colonists.

Later on, fugitive slaves would find freedom and refuge there

in what were called maroon colonies.

My grandfather, the composer William Grant Still, wrote a piece about the swamp.

I'm going to... And a novel for young adults imagines what life might have been like inside a maroon colony.

It's called Freewater. The author is Amina Luchman Dawson, and she joined me via Skype in February to talk about the book.

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