In 1848, 15-year-old Willow is a slave, euphemistically referred to as a 'servant'. 17-year-old Cato is a free Black man. Worlds of difference separate them. Willow lives with her father and Rev Jeff, whom she loves and who is a fair master, but he believes that African slaves need less than Whites. Willow strives to please these older men, but she also fancies marrying a man whom she loves, not simply someone who her father chose for her.
This is the result of too much reading, of the likes of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and other such stories that simply put dreams into Willow's impressionable head and make her long for things that she does not need, according to the Rev.
Willow gets into trouble for reading anything other than the Bible... and she is also not supposed to know how to write. Therefore, she hides her diary in the woods. Cato has been living in the woods lately, and he stumbles across the diary.
Willow voraciously acquires new words from her reading but also from the speech of white people. She reiterates the words in her mind in order to recall them, and she discerns possible meanings of the words from the context in which they were read or spoken.
Willow by Tonya Hegamin, 2014
It would have been neat for me to have lived in a time and place where most people had horses for the purpose of transportation.
Willow loves riding her horse Mayapple.