Northern Arcadia is meant to be evocative of Colonial North America, but not identical. The human colonists are not uniformly or even predominantly white, and tension between the races is largely unknown. Humans are too busy trying to survive vicious winters, soil that doesn’t support traditional crops, and raids by ululating, bloodthirsty frog-men to quibble over the color of another human’s skin.

Like I say, Northern Arcadia is not identical to North America.

But when it came time to design the second native race of Northern Arcadia – the ape people, also known as the Ghu, Ghu-ba, Goobs, and Goobers – I began to worry about racism and misleading parallels. Significant numbers of the Ghu have been captured by other Ghu tribesmen, sold into slavery, and set to work on human plantations. Reviewing an early draft of the manuscript, I worried about casual readers misinterpreting the significance of these details, and mistakenly seeing the Ghu-ba as stand-ins for the African people kidnaped and brought to North America.

I considered excising the Ghu altogether. I drafted a version that replaced the ape-people on the plantations with convict labor and elephants in harness, but the pachyderms felt out of place, and the economics of shipping conscript labor overseas seemed implausible. Some rudimentary research turned up partial antecedents – convicts shipped overseas to be imprisoned, local convicts being used for labor – but not both at the same time.

A thought struck me. Maybe I had this issue the wrong way around? Maybe I didn’t need to make efforts to make the Ghu seem less human. Maybe I needed to invest more effort – more humanity – into the secondary characters in Witch of the Colonies who happen to have dark-colored skin. That seems like the more rewarding – if more difficult – path.

These things are always obvious after I’ve taken the time to figure them out.