There are a lot of constraints on what we write in 1632 because it’s based on the real world. One of those is demographics for the up-timers, in particular. Grantville is based on the real town of Mannington, WV in 2000. The demographics match. Virginia DeMarce spent a lot of time and energy creating something we call The Grid that has all the up-timers and their basic information (birth year, marital status, names, race, children, job, education) matches the 2000 census for Mannington. These things cannot be changed.
In the end, though, I think it makes the town richer for those constraints. The entire story-arc I created for Irene Flannery came about because an artifact from exporting showed she had a child, but the rest of the grid clearly showed she hadn’t, which led to an entire chain of thoughts that resulted in Mrs. Flannery’s Flowers.
– Bethanne Kim (Publisher, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine)
Baens Bar
Question: Were James and Sharon Nichols really the only black people within the Ring of Fire when it happened? Multiple posters mentioned they had initially found it hard to believe.
BarFly Research: Saving some research for some folks.. From the 2000 Census report for Mannington…
3 Black or African American
9 American Indian/Alaska Native
4 Asian
0 Native Hawaiian/Other Pac Islnder
0 Some other race
15 Two or more races
7 Hispanic or Latino (of any race)
08 July 2011 00:23
I lived in that area back in the late 70s and when I did the research on-site in 1999 one of the things I double-checked was to see if the racial demographics had changed much.
They hadn’t. There is only one town in that area that has a black community and it’s a very small one. That’s in Grant Town, a few miles from Mannington. In fact, the “community” is pretty much one street, Paw Paw Street. Most of the black population of West Virginia — which is small to begin with — lives in the southern part of the state, and most blacks who live in northern WV live in the larger towns like Morgantown, Fairmont and Clarksburg, not the more rural communities.
I don’t believe that we’ve ever specified the exact number of black people who came through the Ring of Fire. There are a minimum of three, that I can think of — James and Sharon Nichols, and the heroine of Loren Jones’ story “Power to the People” in the first Ring of Fire anthology (Nissa Pritchard). My own vague sense has been “half a dozen, maybe up to ten” but that’s all it is — a vague sense that I’ve never tried to pin down.
