McMullan found the seed for her novel in a shoebox left her by her paternal grandmother, who died in 1998. It contained a typed manuscript titled The Life and Times of Frank Russell, her grandmother's great-uncle's memories, which he dictated in the 1940s, when he was in his 90s.

Just before her death, McMullan's grandmother, Thelma Boozer McMullan, directed her to the closet "to tell me there was a manuscript in there," she said. "You listen to your dying grandmother." The manuscript turned out to be a detailed sketch of Russell's life in Smith County, Miss., before and after the Civil War.

Russell was a teenager when his father left to fight in the Civil War. Dictated seven decades later, the entry about his father's departure still resonated hurt and lingering resentment. "He said, 'My father left me behind with all the women and children.' In that one line, you could tell he was really angry at being left behind," McMullan said.

Her ancestor's anger sparked McMullan to imagine how someone like him might have responded to the changes going on in Mississippi then, she said.
She wanted to tell the story in first person, from the perspective of a 10-year-old boy left behind by his father and brother, but she didn't think of it initially as a book for young adults, she said.

McMullan's literary agent persuaded her to target young-adult publishers, but when she was writing the book, "I knew I couldn't think of it that way," she said. "You don't write with labels on; you just write the best book you can."
McMullan thought of two people, both named James, when she wrote How I Found the Strong, she said. She dedicated the book to her father, James McMullan, and her son, James O'Connor, now 7.

Her father grew up in Mississippi steeped in Southern myth, legend and family stories, but moved his own family to the Chicago area when Margaret McMullan was 10.

"I really kind of wrote it for my son, too, who, at the time, was interested in being a big, strong boy," she said. Her story's narrator is Frank "Shanks" Russell, a skinny 10-year-old left behind with his mother and the family's lone slave, Buck, when his father and brother go off to fight.

In their absence, Buck becomes a kind of father and brother figure to the boy, bringing Shanks to think for the first time, perhaps, about the notion of slavery and the righteousness of the Confederate cause.

Shanks is a fictional character, McMullan said, but in a sense, he's a compilation of four generations of her own family. "He's Frank Russell, me, my father and my son."

Her own Mississippi ancestors couldn't afford and didn't own slaves. Even so, McMullan believes she drew on family memories, without realizing it at the time, to create the quiet power of Buck. Looking back on it now, McMullan thinks she based the character of Buck on a woman, an African-American housekeeper who worked for her grandparents.

As a child, McMullan spent lots of time with the housekeeper, Annie Mae Moore. "I tried chewing tobacco with her," she remembered.
Moore shared her own stories of the past with the young McMullan, offering a distinctly different perspective from her white grandparents' tales. But when she was working, Moore was "really quiet. She kept everything in, but you could feel it," said McMullan.

Moore died about 10 years ago, she said. "I think a lot of her ended up in Buck."

How I Found the Strong, published by Houghton Mifflin, came out last week. Already, the 136-page hardback has gotten good reviews from several publications, in addition to being named Evansville's first youth selection for the One Book/One Community program.

The program will promote her book, along with this year's adult selection, Evansville author Mike Whicker's Invitation to Valhalla, throughout the summer and through the fall. The youth program will culminate Nov. 18, when McMullan will speak at 7 p.m. in the new Central Library.
McMullan is gratified to be the Evansville One Book/One Community program's first youth author, she said. "It makes me feel young."

In the meantime, she's already begun scheduling promotional appearances for the book. Saturday, McMullan will sign books at Barnes & Noble. May 15, she'll do the same at Borders Books.

Reprinted from April 29, 2004, Evansville Courier & Press