Or, as many readers put it: Was Mary Anne a real person? The answer is . . . yes and no.

Some time ago I watched a video titled “The Blue Bellies Are in Austin.” The video, which was produced by the Austin History Center Association, features African American actors reading from several Travis County slave narratives. One of the reenacted testimonies was of a woman named Mary Anne Patterson.

Ms. Patterson had lived as a slave on a sizable plantation east of Austin. In the video, the actor mentioned several landmarks that I recognized, such as Rogers Hill.

Listening to the actor speak as Mary Anne opened my eyes to the fact that my home, which sits on rolling land near the Colorado River, must have been ideal for raising cotton. That meant plantations, which in turn meant a sizable population of enslaved people.

So many lives . . . and surely so many stories. Mary Anne had given me the research thread that would form the basis of Let My Soul Fly. As I dug through interviews of former Texas slaves, I thought often of Mary Anne’s testimony.

Over time, as the contours of the fictional story became clearer to me, I needed an appropriate name for the lead character. For some time I had used “Mary Anne” as a sort of placeholder. One day I realized that “Mary Anne” had become my Mary Anne — a brave girl capable of enduring the challenges presented in Let My Soul Fly. And so Mary Anne was born.

I still wonder sometimes about Ms. Patterson, particularly what her life was like after freedom. At some point, she and her husband purchased 36 acres of their own near Rogers Hill. According to her testimony, she got by late in life by renting that land. The rest is a mystery to me.