Dorothea Hubble Bonneau
The True Story That Inspired Once in a Blood Moon
John Fowler, the “white slave”: family memory that sparked a novel
Family stories tell of John Fowler, a white youth held in bondage in the early American South. However unusual this sounds today, his story reflects a world where power did not always map neatly onto color, and where law, debt, guardianship, and private violence could consign a person, especially a minor, to forced labor. Dorothea grew up hearing fragments of this history and carried them like embers. When she later began researching the Lowcountry and the era around 1807, she found that Fowler’s experience, while startling, sits amid a web of realities that are often left out of simplified versions of the past: the legal category of “free people of color,” the precariousness of manumission, the practice of binding-out children, and even cases of free Black slaveholders operating within local law.
The memory of John Fowler became a creative catalyst rather than a transcript. In Once in a Blood Moon, Dorothea explores what enduring captivity or sudden dispossession can do to a young person’s sense of self. The novel’s heroine, Alexandra, is not Fowler; she is a gifted violinist confronted by loss and terror. Yet the emotional questions raised by his story animate Alexandra’s journey: Who has a say over your body and labor? What happens when law makes injustice look legitimate? Where can a young person find agency?
For Dorothea, telling the story meant honoring complexity. Instead of a flat tale about villains and victims, she places readers in a society where identity, appearance, property, and power interact in tangled ways. John Fowler’s ordeal opened a door onto that world. The novel walks through it.
Rice, tides, and Gullah Geechee knowledge: how West Africa shaped the Lowcountry
The South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry was built on tidal rivers and wetlands, and on knowledge carried across the Atlantic by West Africans. In the 1700s and early 1800s, rice was a dominant export. Planting and harvesting it at scale required more than brute labor; it demanded technical expertise: selecting flood-tolerant seed, designing fields, moving and trapping water, and processing grain efficiently. People from the “Rice Coast” of West Africa brought this know-how with them. Their skills gave planters wealth and shaped the region’s landscape, economy, and daily rhythms.
That expertise survived not just in fields and dikes but in language, foodways, craft, and music. Today we call this cultural continuity Gullah Geechee. The community’s distinct language and traditions were forged in island and riverside settlements where African practices could persist despite constant pressures. Once in a Blood Moon leans into that setting: the taste of salt air, the hiss of marsh grass, the timing of work by the turning of the tide. The novel treats the environment as a character: the coast itself pushes the plot forward, dictating when a crossing is possible, when danger approaches, and when a secret can be kept.
Bringing this history onto the page helps readers see the Lowcountry anew. The novel’s research foregrounds the intelligence embedded in the region’s landscapes and the people who engineered them. When Alexandra listens to the water or hears a work rhythm in the bowing of her violin, she is listening to a history that is still alive.
Law, status, and the “in-between”: free people of color and contested identities
Early-nineteenth-century society in the Lowcountry sorted people into legal categories that were anything but simple. “Free” or “enslaved,” “white” or “Black,” “mulatto” or “quadroon”—these labels carried life-or-death consequences, but they did not always align with the lived complexity of families and communities. Freedom papers could be challenged; guardians could claim control over minors; patrols could detain travelers on suspicion alone. At the same time, archival records show that some free people of color owned property, ran businesses, petitioned courts and, yes, in controversial instances, held enslaved persons under local law. None of this erases the brutality of slavery; rather, it reveals the layered terrain in which people navigated survival.
This contested terrain is central to Once in a Blood Moon. Alexandra’s path crosses households and institutions where appearance and reputation determine access to safety, training, and mobility. Characters bargain with law, kinship, and custom; some “pass” to escape violence or to claim opportunity; others refuse the bargain at a cost. By acknowledging messy realities, rather than sanding them down, the novel invites readers to talk about agency, complicity, and resistance with more precision and empathy.
Dorothea’s goal is not to lecture but to humanize. The “in-between” spaces of the period, the gray zones where a single document or rumor could upend a life, provide dramatic stakes while staying grounded in research. This is the social world that frames Alexandra’s choices and the reader’s questions.
Music, memory, and making a life: from Saint-Georges to Alexandra
Why give a historical heroine the violin? Because music in this era was a passport, a calling card, and a refuge. Across the Atlantic world, musicians of African descent built careers against fierce headwinds; Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, is one shining example. Training required patrons and time; performance offered visibility and risk. In Once in a Blood Moon, Alexandra’s musicianship is more than talent. It’s a way to think, to persist, and to communicate when words are dangerous. Her ear for rhythm echoes the task systems of rice work; her discipline mirrors the precision of tidal farming; her performances create fragile zones of safety and connection.
Music also links the novel’s research threads. Oral history preserves family memory; work songs carry technique across generations; a fiddle tune can turn a room in your favor. The book treats performance as action: a place where a young woman builds identity in public, claims dignity, and risks backlash. Readers witness how art can be practical, as necessary as a map or a key.
Dorothea’s own research and love of music infuse these scenes. By placing a violin in the hands of a character moving through the Lowcountry’s layered society, the novel asks a quietly radical question: What if art is not an escape from history but one of the ways people survive it?