The latest installment of Cassidy and Julia is here, and I’m so excited to share it with you all. When I started writing the original Don’t Call Me Hero, back in 2014, I was trying to catch lightning in a bottle—to produce a novel whose characters resonated similar to how readers became invested with Winter Jacket and Elle & Hunter. I had no idea it would evolve into a seven book (and more to come!) series, but I’m so happy that Cassidy and Julia continue to inspire and excite.

The Cold Case in Buried Promises provided me with an opportunity to speak on a historical example that’s long been a passion of mine: racial housing covenants, urban ‘renewal’, and the legacy of redlining. There’s a fallacy in the North—that racism didn’t and doesn’t exist here. We like to tell a whitewashed version of history when it comes to race in the North. That we were the “good guys” in the Civil War. That slavery didn’t exist here. That Jim Crow segregation was unique to the South. We see those images of drinking fountains with signs that read “Whites Only” or hear about segregated busses and think that nothing like that happened in the North. That’s the history I remember learning when I was little, and it’s a history I work hard to correct now as an adult.

When my wife and I bought our first home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 2009, I was so exited to discover a bag full of original documents from when the home was constructed in 1941. I loved looking at the 1941 blueprints and seeing how the house had or hadn’t changed over time or seeing the handwriting of the original homeowners on a sales receipt for a shipment of coal. But as I was looking over the original purchase agreement, my stomach dropped when I saw the stipulation “That neither said lots or portions thereof or interest therein shall ever be leased, sold, devised, conveyed to or inherited or be otherwise acquired by or become property of any person other than of the Caucasian Race." My home—the first house I’d ever bought—in the city that I loved, had been part of a racial housing covenant that kept people of color from moving to specific housing developments. Like Professor Cunningham, I knew academically that racial covenants had existed, but it wasn’t until I held those primary sources in my hands that it really hit me.

I would encourage everyone who is interested in learning more to view this PBS documentary, Jim Crow of the North. It’s a powerful (and free) film about the systemic ways Black families were shut out of homeownership and generational wealth because of racial covenants in places like Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and countless cities across the so-called progressive North.

Milwaukee has the dubious honor of being the most racially segregated city in the country. It’s a legacy of redlining—the 1930s government-initiated project of “scoring” various neighborhoods to determine which sections of major U.S. cities would be a safe bet for mortgages and investment capital. The impact of those decisions still reverberates today in school funding, health outcomes, and generational wealth gaps. These are not abstract issues. They are lived realities for millions of Americans.

As always, I wrote this book with the hope that readers would learn something along with enjoy a compelling love story. Julia Desjardin keeps folks coming back for more, but I also hope that after reading Buried Promises that you come away thinking a little differently about what justice looks like, especially when it comes decades too late. If the story sticks with you, or makes you uncomfortable in the right ways, I hope you’ll dig deeper. Ask questions. Look around your own neighborhood. We can’t change what we don’t understand.

To find out if your own neighborhood was “graded” green, blue, yellow, or red, check out this digital history project: Mapping Inequality. I also recommend this book: Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.

Thanks, as always, for reading—and for staying with Cassidy and Julia through their ups and downs, late-night pie stops, and moral dilemmas. Their story continues, and I’m so grateful you’re along for the ride.

prost,

Eliza