Author Poll: Yvonne Hilton wants your help with her cover in a Survey Poll

Yvonne Hilton is self-publishing a book with Outskirts Press, and wants your help deciding her upcoming book cover.

Book Summary:

Peter has run away twice. This time the overseer on the large estate farm in colonial New York decides to use his cat-o-nine-tails on the slave to teach a more thorough lesson. His 12 year old apprentice, Martin Tucker is horrified, but grows to learn the useful application of whipping for the most serious offenses, like running. After all, he is the only white person on the place.
Sally is a 14 year old black girl newly arrived on the farm. Tucker, now thirty, chooses her to become his mistress. Sally is still a virgin when Tucker becomes her first sexual encounter. She however, already loves another slave, 16 year old Lemuel, with whom she’d grown up and who was purchased along with her.
Over the next few years, Tucker impregnates Sally with five babies in quick succession but none of them can belong to either him or her, since she is the property of the absentee owner of the farm and he is just an employee.
However, unbeknownst to the overseer, Sally eventually figures out a way to meet her lover Lemuel. And she manages to give birth to Polly, Lemuel’s child. The first five children resemble Tucker in coloring. Polly, on the other hand is dark-skinned, like her mother and father.

A dangerous situation has been created – how to hide the existence of this child from Tucker.

About the Author:

I was an assistant principal/supervisor of English. In my 32 years of teaching, my profession kept me constantly analyzing and dissecting literature, looking for the points of connection that made works come to life for high school students. Yet, for me, as a reader, it was always history, the events going on behind the narrative in a piece that held the real fascination. In 1972, I began to write short stories about fictional characters living during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. I began researching urban and rural slavery in New York with information from Dr. Sherrill Wilson, an urban anthropologist and learned about the actual day-to-day experiences of enslaved people during the 1700s. When this novel began to unfold in my mind, the lives of the people, as revealed by the excavations of the graves at the African Burial Ground motivated many of the events in the story.

Please take a look at the two possible covers below and then vote on the choice you recommend.

Click on the thumbnail below to enlarge each cover.

Cover A

Cover B

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