Zamani (25 page)

Notes
& Acknowledgements

A
huge thanks goes out to Luna Hacker (you can find her on
Etsy
) for the box and
beautiful beaded Saint Brigid’s medal that I used on the cover. Coincidentally,
she’s in New York, which I find fun given that Olivia spent time there before
heading back to New Orleans. Luna’s work is beautiful and the box and beadwork
have a permanent spot on my desk.

As
always, I have some wonderful advance reader folks to thank, including my
sisters Deborah Maldonado and Renee Rodgers, as well as my longtime friend and
fellow writer Rebecca Taverner-Coleman.
 
I also worked with
Nicole Frail
who provided some great guidance on the beta-draft.
 
Please do check out her website if
you’re interested in incredible rates for editing and manuscript reviews.

I
realize that there are some inconsistencies with spelling in the two quotations
at the start.
 
Those inconsistencies
are due to the different spellings of “sasa” and “sasha” in the original
sources. Likewise, what beta readers saw as errors with the quotations from
Dracula
are as Van Helsing’s character
wrote them.

The morgue is not placed in a specific
location. In 2012, various temporary locations were being used for morgue
services, as the location on Martin Luther King Boulevard suffered a fire in
2011.
 
The period where Alex is
found in the morgue falls between that fire and the beginning of construction
on a new coroner’s complex in 2013.
 
See this
note
from Construction Masters: “
The Coroner’s Office & morgue were on the
1st & 2nd floors of the Orleans Parish Criminal District Courthouse and
sustained extensive damage from flooding. The Coroner has operated out of
numerous temporary locations ever since, including one on Martin Luther King
Boulevard that was fire destroyed in 2011.”

The train
route from New York to New Orleans that Olivia takes was Richmond &
Danville’s “Piedmont Air Line”.
 
You
can read about it on page 117 of
King’s
Handbook
of New York City: An Outline History and Description of the American Metropolis
,
  
by Moses King, first published in
1882, the year after Marie Laveau’s reported death.

Other rail lines did exist.
 
The Pontchartrain Railroad, also known as
The Smoky Mary, for instance, was the subject of a 2012 song by the same name
by Harry Connick, Jr. (see the video
here
if you’re on a tablet or other enabled device).
 
You can read more about the line
here
. The use of the rail line
to attend Voodoo rituals is also mentioned in Martha Ward’s 2004
Voodoo
Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau
(University of Mississippi
Press).

Finally, my use of the spelling of “voodoo” in
the book versus “Voudou” is to distinguish entertaining fiction from the
religion.