Lake County writer examines Irish enslavement in historical novel

“It was one of those things that you read, and then you stop reading, and go, ‘What?’ and read it again,” Plummer says.

It briefly mentioned a part of Irish history Plummer had never heard before.

Irish people, mostly women and children, were kidnapped and sold into slavery by the tens of thousands by the British during Oliver Cromwell’s reign of terror.

They were shipped off to Caribbean islands to work the sugar plantations of the British, the women raped and bred like cattle, children flogged to death as a warning to other slaves imported from Africa as to the fate that awaited if they misbehaved.

Plummer went searching for more information on a subject she says “so few people know about.”

“The more I found, the hotter my Irish-American blood boiled,” she says.

Then the longtime Lake County journalist turned what she learned into a novel.

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“Spirited Away: A Novel of the Stolen Irish” is a fictionalized account of a 13-year-old Irish girl’s struggle to survive as a slave in Barbados.

“I feel it’s important to tell the story,” Plummer says. “I find it outrageous that so few people know about it.”

It’s the first novel for Plummer, who previously authored the nonfiction “Passing It On: Voices from the Flathead Indian Reservation,” published by Salish Kootenai College Press.

This time, she went the self-published route, using Amazon’s CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, and was surprised at how easy it was.

“I kept thinking it would cost me a lot, but it didn’t,” Plummer says.

Her upfront cost: $25.

“And that was an option, for something they call ‘expanded distribution,’ which seemed like a good idea,” Plummer says.

CreateSpace has other options that can up the cost, Plummer says

“It could have been more expensive, but I did almost all the steps myself,” she says. “I designed the cover, and I used a free photo from their library. I’ve been really impressed with their program.”

The book, which retails for $11.95, is printed in trade-paperback form “on demand” as orders come in through Amazon. Its website currently offers the trade paperback for $11.46 plus shipping and handling, and readers can order the Kindle edition for $2.99.

Plummer says she receives 35 percent of the trade paperback price from Amazon, and 70 percent of the Kindle orders.

She did order and pay for many copies of the book herself. She donated one to the library in Polson, and has talked several western Montana bookstores and retail outlets into carrying the novel.

“I’m selling books, basically, out of the trunk of my car,” Plummer says, “but I thought it was important to have a physical presence in town and the area.”

“Spirited Away” can be purchased at Fact & Fiction in Missoula; Super 1, Treasure State Mercantile and Dawn’s Flowers and Gifts in Polson; and the Book Shelf in Kalispell, among others.

While “Spirited Away” has been four years of research, writing and editing, followed now by her own marketing campaign, Plummer says in many ways it beats the “often tortured” path of trying to find a literary agent and traditional publisher.

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The fictional 13-year-old sold into slavery in the novel? Her name is Frederica O’Brennan, and she and her 11-year-old sister Aileen are lured from a beach near Galway in 1653 by a stranger who seeks their help.

Soon, the girls are on a slave ship bound for the West Indies, where the sisters are split and sold to slave owners on different islands.

With the exception of Cromwell, who many historians believe was guilty of genocide in Ireland, all the characters in “Spirited Away” are fictional. But Plummer used her first-generation Irish-American grandmother’s maiden name, Brennan, and added an O’ in front for her primary character.

Cromwell is a controversial historical figure in England, where some herald him as a hero, and detested in Ireland.

Understanding Cromwell’s role in the massacre of tens of thousands of Irish Catholics, and the kidnapping and enslavement of tens of thousands more, “Can help people understand the Irish’s bitterness toward England,” Plummer says.

In her acknowledgments, she credits one of the few books written about the Irish slave trade, “To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland” by Sean O’Callaghan, for helping her understand the world where a young teenage Irish girl sold into slavery would have found herself in the 1650s.

Female Irish slaves were raped by their owners and bred to male African slaves to produce offspring who would grow into “big, strong, mulatto slaves,” Plummer says.

“A lot of the Irish slaves died from yellow fever,” she says. “They were not used to the tropics. They were dehydrated, sunburned, whipped, beaten and flogged to death. They sometimes served as draft animals – beasts of burden, in a sense.”

Cheaper than African slaves, their owners saw them as “disposable labor,” Plummer says.

Around this seldom spoken of history she has built a story of one young girl, and is currently working on a sequel to “Spirited Away.”

“If you read it, you’ll know where the sequel is,” she says.

Plummer dedicated the book “to all the people and organizations combating modern-day human trafficking.”

Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com.