This novel was based on the verse and guide to 1650s Maryland by slave-poet George Alsop, and the 1650s journal of Dutch slave-master Augustine Herman, searching for runaways from New Holland in English Maryland. There are extensive historical appendices.

Secondary sources are cited in the work.

The two protagonists are youths based on the author and his longtime host in Portland, a poet himself, who composes blues songs with his guitar as he stands over his son singing of how lazy he is until the young fellow finally hauls himself out of bed to go to school. These are the fictional characters that accompany Alsop in his exile to The Plantations, as the names of those who did were not thought fit by their Whore Mother Britannia or her Bastard Son America to record.