Inspired by a 19th-century Chesapeake Bay legend, Casey Cep and Kathryn Schulz, two journalists who are staff writers at the New Yorker, have written an 80-page picture book about felines in peril. Black Cat Island: An Almost Entirely True Story, illustrated by Caldecott Honor artist Aaron Becker (Little, Brown, Apr. 2027), marks the Maryland-based couple’s debut as children’s book authors, though Cep has previously written two nonfiction books for adults and Schulz has written a memoir, also for adults.
Black Cat Island is the tale of a black barn cat named Millicent that was born in 1845 and is an ancestor, the co-authors claim, of their own cats, Tux and Velvet. A greedy man, whom Millicent calls Mr. Hiss, and whom the authors compare to Cruella de Vil of The One Hundred and One Dalmations fame, catnaps Millicent and transports her to an island overrun with black and tuxedo cats; he is the island’s sole human resident. Having learned that black fur is all the rage in high society circles, Mr. Hiss decides to spend his time and resources collecting black and tuxedo cats. After fattening them up with fresh fish and letting them reproduce, he intends to sell them off to furriers once their winter coats have grown in.
As summer turns into fall and the days get colder, Millicent and her friend, Tiny, strategize on how to escape the fate that they suspect awaits them and the other 3,124 cats (at final count) on the island—until nature provides an escape route.
Describing the book as “quirky” because of its unusual format and page count, Andrea Spooner, senior executive editor at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, said that it’s a “beautifully crafted good old-fashioned yarn,” with the bonus that it features cats. “They’re alluring,” she said, and the co-authors “do a good job of making what is a pretty dark premise extremely palatable for a young audience.” She appreciated the way in which the authors “build the tension of this threat. There’s a countdown to this dark moment that is never really explicitly stated on the page.”
In an epilogue, the co-authors note that Mr. Hiss is based on Charles Carroll V, a Marylander who was the grandson of one of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence: “In 1846, hoping to profit from a growing international demand for black fur, Colonel Carroll, as he was known, established a cat farm on Poplar Island, a small island in the Chesapeake Bay. He really did pay 25 cents per black cat, he really did arrange for local watermen to bring the cats food, and the bay really did freeze over around the time of these events.” According to local lore, the winter of 1846 was the coldest in the history of the state of Maryland, and the cats escaped by simply walking two miles on the frozen bay from the island to the mainland.
Cep grew up on a farm across the road from where the co-authors live together on the Eastern Shore. “The story about Black Cat Island was one of the first stories that Casey told me, to explain this really special place she’s from,” Schulz said. “It was a real gift to us as writers, because it was such an amazing story: it just needed someone to come along and write it.”
The pair initially contemplated writing about it for the New Yorker in the format of a “Postcard from the Eastern Shore,” Schulz said. “It seemed like there could be a charming version for grownups.” But they have two young daughters and are immersed in reading and re-reading children’s literature to their children. “It was obvious to us that the reason we hadn’t written it yet as a ‘Postcard’ was because its ideal form was as a children’s story,” Schulz said. “There’s this great tradition of animals in children’s literature, of the animal epic—such as The Incredible Journey [by Sheila Burnford, 1961]—which has these brave animals going off on some grand expedition; it seemed clear to us that this was the right way to tell it.”
As for Aaron Becker’s classic pencil-and-ink and watercolor illustrations, the co-authors praised how perfectly the elegiac art complemented the text. Noting that Becker and his family visited Cep and Schulz for a weekend to check out nearby barns, as well as shorelines, Cep said that she “took him into Easton, which is the county seat, and it became the model for those gorgeous cityscapes he created. He has such an eye for historical detail; he obsessed over the appropriate size and shape of hay bales. We took him to a great local bookstore, and he bought books about the 19th-century Eastern Shore. He wanted to learn all that he could, and you see it on every page.”
Cep and Schulz also did extensive research, Cep noted, which included reading newspapers from 1845–1846 published “as far away as Baltimore that featured advertisements placed by Carroll [about] wanting to buy black cats.” Cep said that the two even reviewed litigation after the cats disappeared from the island over “the fisherman tasked with feeding the cats and keeping them alive.” She said it included details about the role of others hired by Carroll to assist him in procuring and caring for the cats.
When asked if the black cats of 1846 might have starved or frozen to death, Cep acknowledged that she “is an optimist in all things” and assumes that the cats must have survived because, to this day, “there are a lot of wild black cats in the area. The lore is that these are the descendants of the cats that escaped, and that they’ve proliferated.”
Noting that the two have both worked for more than a decade at a publication renowned for its commitment to accuracy, Schulz added, “It’s hard to shed your nonfiction skin when you’re a writer who has apprenticed yourself to the New Yorker’s fact-checking enterprise. Except for those talking cats, we steered as close as we could to the true story.”
