Moses is different from my other books in that it’s my first book that deals with spiritual issues. Moses chronicles Harriet Tubman’s faith journey through her first escape and through the soul-searching that she had to do as she tried to decide whether she was going to answer God’s call to be a conductor on the Underground Railroad.
The story unfolds through a poem and the poem is written in three voices — God’s voice, the narrator’s voice and Harriet’s voice. And much like my first poem about the four seasons that I wrote in first grade and like my first published poem, I’m Made of Jazz, the inclination to structure the narrative in three voices kind of came out of the blue.
When the book was published and I read it, it was almost like another hand was at work, almost like I couldn’t believe that I had written it. Something magical, mystical was going on when I wrote that book. The book didn’t come easy. I worked on it off and on for seven years. But from the point that I decided that the narrative was going to unfold through three voices, something very mystical was going on.