For the first-time novelist you've got to get up at 5:30 in the morning and write until 7 make breakfast and go to work. Or come home and work for an hour. Everybody has an hour in their day somewhere.
But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.
