Publication Date: April 2, 2024
A housemaid with a dangerous family secret conspires with a wealthy young abolitionist to help an enslaved girl escape, in volatile pre-Civil War Philadelphia.
Philadelphia, 1837. After Charlotte escaped from the crumbling White Oaks plantation down South, she’d expected freedom to feel different from her former life as an enslaved housemaid. After all, Philadelphia is supposed to be the birthplace of American liberty. Instead, she’s locked away playing servant to her white-passing father, as they both attempt to hide their identities from slavecatchers who would destroy their new lives.
Longing to break away, Charlotte befriends Nell, a budding abolitionist from one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest Black families. Just as Charlotte starts to envision a future, a familiar face from her past reappears: Evie, her friend from White Oaks, has been brought to the city by the plantation mistress, and she’s desperate to escape. But as Charlotte and Nell conspire to rescue her, in a city engulfed by race riots and attacks on abolitionists, they soon discover that fighting for Evie’s freedom may cost them their own.
Even within the confines of Philadelphia, built on the concept of brotherly love, the early 19th century proved to be a dangerous place for abolitionists.
All We Were Promised takes some inspiration from Les Misérables, featuring a father and daughter who have created a new life for themselves while hiding the secret they are escaped slaves. Author Ashton Lattimore uses the abolitionist movement to highlight a community wrestling with equality.
Charlotte finds herself living a different life of servitude where she plays housemaid to her white-passing father. Through her eyes, readers see a passionate yearning for freedom on her own terms.
Through her friendship with Nell, a wealthy young black socialite, Charlotte gets a front-row seat as resentment builds throughout the community with pockets of racial and social tension boiling over. However, Charlotte faces danger in an attempt to help her friend, Evie, escape from slavery.
All We Were Promised showcases the experiences of three young women within a black community and their fight for freedom.
Ashton Lattimore is an award-winning journalist and a former lawyer. She is the editor-in-chief at Prism, a nonprofit news outlet by and for communities of color, and her nonfiction writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, Slate, CNN, and Essence. Lattimore is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and Columbia Journalism School. She grew up in New Jersey, and now lives in suburban Philadelphia with her husband and their two sons. All We Were Promised is her first novel.
