Elk County author PJ Piccirillo will discuss his research into African American pioneer history in northcentral Pennsylvania. Piccirillo spent four years preparing his historical novel The Indigo Scarf. This acclaimed and award-winning book is set in and around present-day Cameron, Clinton, and Lycoming counties during the early 19th century. The book has sparked conversation not only about the slave experience in rural northern Appalachia, but the struggles of generations of African Americans after emancipation, and the travails of pioneer life, specifically Allegheny pioneer life.

Based on the true story of two escaped slaves who fled their owners with white women into the wilderness of the Allegheny Plateau, The Indigo Scarf interprets how slavery persisted in the north during the nineteenth century. Meticulously researched, the work is informed by Pennsylvania historians, scholars in early American slave laws and northern black codes, experts in post-colonial folkways, and by descendants who live to this day in the fugitive Pennsylvania settlement their forbears established. The Indigo Scarf relates the covert workings of sympathetic Quakers, the ruthlessness of a slave catcher, and the irony of a Revolutionary War veteran forced to face his daughter’s love for the slave Jedediah James. The novel treats the deeper theme of the spirit-breaking impact slavery has had across generations since abolition.

Woven between scenes spanning a forbidden, historically based slave marriage on a plantation in Virginia’s tidewater region to a tragic liquor operation on the Susquehanna’s un-peopled and feral West Branch during the frontier decades after Pennsylvania’s last Indian purchase, the narrator’s own sub-tale culminates in her realization of how a pioneer-woman ancestor had destined her to break the generational chain of bondage.

During the session, Piccirillo will share suppressed regional history he uncovered and how his research connected figures and events from two centuries ago, as well as how the book has been received by the African American community.

PJ Piccirillo, who holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine, is an author, editor, and adjunct (Butler County Community College). He is a regular presenter in the humanities, having worked for 19 years as a Pennsylvania Literary Resident Artist for the PA Council on the Arts, and as a literary scholar for the PA Humanities Council. Piccirillo is founder of the WCoNA Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia® and The Northern Appalachia Review, for which he is editor-in-chief.

PJ’s books will also be on sale at this event! Attendees can purchase a signed copy of any of PJ’s three published works.

Learn more about PJ here!

Buy PJ’s books here!