Black History Month

So it can be so cliche to say things like stories matter, stories bring us together. The human experience is what ignites us and unites us, but it’s really true that stories matter and that they do bring us together. And I have been blown away and sweetly surprised by the amount of young people who reach out to me or who in the signing line or at an author visit say things to me about relating to my characters when they are opposite of the main character. I’m mostly right about dark skin, Black girls as my main characters. And I have had so many people of all walks of life come to me and say that they identify and relate to those characters. 

And one that stands out to me and that I remember so deeply is a young boy in New Zealand who’s white stood up and he’s in the seventh grade and he is standing in front of there were about 800 young people in this auditorium. So he’s being very brave to ask this question and to say this in front of his peers. He says to me, I just finished reading, Watch Us Rise. And I love that that book is about girls standing up for theirselves and finding their voice. I have a sister and my best friend is a girl, and I want to know if you can give me advice on how to be a better feminist. And I was like, what? You were in the seventh grade and you’re asking, how can you be a better feminist? So of course, I told him, the fact that you’re asking that question means you are absolutely on the right track that you’re aware, that you want to know that you’re thinking about these things. I was so moved by him. I’ve been moved by the quiet student who oftentimes identifies with a side character or with a character who is the unlikely hero or the person who gets the crush or becomes popular. 

And a lot of my books poets are popular, and it’s not about the sports and the basketball stars. So I’ll get a lot of young people who come up to me and whisper that they appreciate that the artist is the one who’s the cool kid, and that they identify a lot with those characters. And it always makes me feel good because I think sometimes when I’m writing, there’s the pressure of, well, this is ya, so you’re supposed to include a dating relationship and this and that, and friendship, drama and all the things. And sometimes I lean into that. But other times with piecing me together, I chose not to give Jade a romantic interest. And I felt like that might be a risk. I wasn’t sure how teenagers were going to respond to that. And overwhelmingly, they appreciate that Jade could just focus on herself and loving herself and loving her friends, and that it wasn’t about the romantic love. And so I love that kind of push and pull of what are the tropes of YA? What are we supposed to do? What makes a story YA? And then how can I mess with that a little bit and offer something else for young people who are reading? 

I don’t think any of our bookshelves are complete yet. I think that we’re in a moment where we are inviting a lot of voices to publishing, that were not invited before, that were specifically excluded before. And so one of the delights is to see historical fiction opening up, to see Native fiction and Latinx fiction and Black American history reflected in our books in more expansive, deeper ways then we’ve seen in the past.

Our historical cannon has tended to be a little bit about the Revolutionary War, a little bit about the Civil War, maybe a little bit about World War Two and then some Civil Rights thrown in without a lot of exploration of sort of the individual lives and experiences of people who were not white, who were not heroic in the grand way we think of heroes, right? People who changed the world and might have a biography written about them.

It’s just as powerful to read about a young person who stood up for what they believed in in a really difficult time. And so I think we’re seeing a lot more of those kinds of narratives. We’re seeing a lot more narratives that celebrate regular people who stood up for something important. And often those people were non-white, often those people, you know, were marginalized in one way or another.

And so we’re seeing more stories about marginalized people; people who are part of historically marginalized communities being able to tell their story. And for me that just expands our bookshelves enormously.

Books are entirely about empathy. They are a way of diving into someone else’s mind and heart, whether it’s the mind and heart of the author or the mind and heart of the characters or both. And I think that the more you experience the world through someone else’s perspective, the more you see that there are, you know, these beautiful diverse perspectives in our world and that they inform us and they enlighten and us and they educate us. 

And I think that the more we read and the more widely we read, the more diverse authors we read, the more we understand the world. And to me that’s a really powerful aspect of literature that it can create empathy in us in a way that’s really safe where we’re not always able to go out in the world and meet people who are having wildly different experiences than we are, especially if those experiences have to do with racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia or ableism. Right?

Like we don’t necessarily want to experience those things in real life or want our children to experience those things in real life. But they’re so much a part of our world and so much the underpinning of so many structures in our society that reading about them and understanding them and seeing them on page is a safe way to experience some of the scary and dangerous and difficult things about the world around us.

I’m often speaking in schools that are in wealthy communities that can afford to bring authors, so there’s a limitation to the audience that I’m able to present to regularly. I don’t get to present to, you know, schools in low-income communities as often as I would like to or schools in Black communities as often as I would like to.

So I’m often speaking to an audience that is very different from the characters in my books. And so, you know, they often are experiencing the things that I write about, like contemporary struggles around civil rights, contemporary struggles around police brutality and social justice and equality and things like that feel like something they study in history class in relation to the Civil Rights movement not something that’s part of their world right now.

And so I find that young people respond in a lot of different ways to the work. They are excited about the story. I often am hearing questions about my characters much more often than I’m hearing questions about how we change the world at large. Right? The power of fiction is that you’re drawn into who these people are, you’re drawn into their experience. You’re drawn into the world that they operate in.

So in something like How it Went Down where there’s all these different perspectives, you know, it’s a way of seeing the world through all of these different eyes. And there are a lot of readers who find that really exciting. But, you know, for me as the author it’s just as exciting to hear them rush up and say, well, what happens to so and so after the book is over, you know, that they care about the characters and they’re excited about the story.

Patricia: When I started writing a number of years ago, there were very few books for, by and about the African-American experience for children in picture books, beginning readers, novels, fiction or non-fiction: Virginia Hamilton, who was my mentor and… quite helpful; Jim Haskins, who had almost single-handedly documented the stories of African-American musicians; and Walter Dean Myers, whose juvenile novels brought young boys to reading.

So there were some African-American writers out there, but they alone could not represent all the stories that should be told — needed to be told. So when we entered the scene, what we tried to do was to fill a niche.

And our niche was that time period between 1800 and 1900 — that’s pre-Civil War, Civil War, post-Civil War, up through and until the Harlem Renaissance. And we just carved that out as our niche and we worked very, very hard to try to tell that story. And I hope that what we’ve done is to make our history a little bit clearer — something that doesn’t make the children feel ashamed or hurt.

It is not designed to point a finger or to make some child in a classroom feel responsible for all that happened back then, but we can’t shovel it under the rug and say that those things did not happen — they did. But let’s tell it by telling an even-handed, well-researched, well-documented story and that’s what we tried to do in Days of Jubilee, Rebels Against Slavery, and Goin’ Someplace Special. And even the whale men, White Hands, Black…I mean, Black Hands, White Sails.

Well I think what we need to do, the librarians, we all need to work together. The writers, the librarians, the teachers. I will say to people, for example when I present on George Washington Carver, he’s relevant beyond Black History Month because he wasn’t just Black enslaved person who became a scientist. He was an environmentalist so I’ll say to people so do we only need him in February, are we only concerned with the environment?

I think what we need to do is present Black people not as just Black people but their gift, present their gift. Like King, in the book, when the book on King came out and people said is it still relevant because after all I guess if I could afford it, I could fly first class and I would say have we achieved the beloved community?  So when I’m working on a book like King, I’m going beyond Civil Rights leader. Yes, he was that, yes that’s important.

But, he was a humanitarian and therefore he’s relevant because we have not achieved the beloved community and people know little about agape. Love, as I say in the book, I believe I define it as it’s that harder, higher kind of love that has nothing to do with liking a person. Agape says see past the person’s sins to the soul God loves. I think, so it’s up to librarians and teachers and also to not just bring in Black authors during February. And to not just teach on Black achievers during February.

We need diverse books because we need books in which children can find themselves, see reflections of themselves. I wrote a piece maybe 1990 it was published which I called “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” And I think that’s really why we — children need to see themselves reflected.

But books can also be windows. And so you can look through and see other worlds and see how they match up or don’t match up to your own. But the sliding glass door allows you to enter that world as well. And so that’s the reason that the diversity needs to go both ways. I mean it’s not just children who have been underrepresented and marginalized who need these books.

It’s also the children who always find their mirrors in the books and, therefore, get an exaggerated sense of their own self-worth and a false sense of what the world is like because it’s becoming more and more colorful and diverse as time goes on. So, I think that’s why.

I decided to illustrate Langston Hughes’ poems because it was a poem I was very interested in for years. And the fact that it’s the first photographic book to win the Coretta Scott King award made me all the more proud, not just for myself but because of all of the photographers that will come later. One of things I mentioned in my speech is about how I learned of the award and I had to think about it for a minute, because I said “well, I only have one book and it was a photographic book and they wouldn’t give it to that.”

So, it really shocked me that, you know, they gave the award the way they did. In talking to many of the people who voted for it or saw it, many of my illustrator friends said “Oh man, you knocked it out of the park on that one. So you shouldn’t be surprised.” So I was very humbled in that regard. The poem itself, it’s only 33 words in total, and a children’s picture book is 32 pages usually, so that’s basically a word per page.

So that’s the first challenge was figuring how to divide it out over 32 pages. Once I figured that out then I started seeing the phrases and then the phrases dictated how I was gonna shoot it. So that made it easy and I think in this day and age of so much white noise and so much going and so much technology and so many things bombarding you at one time, I think it’s good to just take a breath and just kind of step back and be able to look at something that really wastes no words. And allows you know the imagery to shine through it’s just simple language. So I wanted the photographs to shine through in a very simple way.

The people in the book are just my people, regular people. My kids are in there. I work out at a gym and a number of the people work out at the gym with me. The older people that are in there work out in the gym. And they have a vitality to them that I wanted to show. And it was important to me to show you know newborn skin as well wrinkled skin. Because I wanted to show the range, in between the two, I wanted to show the wisdom that’s acquired. I wanted to show the innocence in a newborn smile. I wanted to show skin dark as night. I wanted to show skin bright as honey. You know, I wanted to show the range that is in my people

That old photograph at the end of My People is my father. Mr. Charles R. Smith, Sr., the original. My father unfortunately passed back in 1999, and this was one of my favorite pictures of him because he looks so good. But he was in the Navy, it was his first or second year in the Navy, he was very proud to serve. You know, his friends and everything, so it was my editor who actually said “do you have any old photographs of any old family members that you might want to put in?” And at the time, I didn’t really have any old like quote unquote old photographs. I had regular pictures of older family members and such. But that was one of the few old photographs I had and I always loved looking at it, so I says “Let’s put dad in there. Let’s immortalize him.”

I always felt that it was important to share African-American history because I enjoy it. I find it very interesting and I think that we don’t really get a lot of it in our schooling. I think one of the great ways for me to learn and share is by painting it.

One of the things that I really enjoy about it is that when it comes to the artwork that I do, I’m telling human stories, and they’re essentially human truths. I think that once we’re able to see that — whether it’s represented in artwork that shows African-Americans or other ethnic groups — as long as that essential human truth is there, we’re going to understand it. So that’s what I’m hoping comes across.

Everyone understands these different human emotions that we have. And when you can see it in a piece of artwork, you relate to it. You emotionally respond to it. And that’s what’s going to draw you to it, and that’s where I aim. That’s my aim when I’m creating artwork.

I’m working with African folktales and these come from an oral tradition. I’m working from documents of stories which were taken down by linguists, anthropologists, missionaries, who wanted to get written alphabets of these hundreds of tribal languages, which were not written languages. Yet story was a very vital part of the life and day. Now those linguists and anthropologists wanted to get written alphabets, to create a dictionary of those languages. They generally would ask for stories. But the stories, when told by the informant, was very often summarized. It was like a précis of the motif. They did very valuable work in documenting the story motifs but very rarely was it told in a way that when it entered the book, you felt the richness of the oral tradition.

I work from these documents. I work from the Shawnberg Library in Harlem in New York City, 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. It’s a research library. People have come from all over the world to use those resources. Today with the Internet and all of that they don’t have to leave anywhere, they can tap into those resources from home. They have the works that are long out of print from the 1800’s and early 1900’s, and these are the sources that I work from. I go to the Shawnberg Library, I copy out these documents of stories when there are stories that interest me. Then I become the storyteller. What can I do with stories that were in the oral tradition and it’s going to be in a book?

How can I bring something of the feeling of the oral tradition into my writing? Ah, through poetry. I use the devices of poetry in my prose. In reading any of my stories you’re going to hear the rhyme, the rhythm, the syncopation; you’ll find onomatopoeia, the playing with sounds, all of the devices of poetry work closely in my prose.

What often a prose writer will avoid because they would want you to read more fluently, more directly, I am seizing upon and using in the way I write my stories. I would like my reader to feel while reading the story even silently, that he or she can hear the storyteller, you see. By using those devices of poetry, I open that up quite directly.

Show Way begins when Soonie’s great-grandma was seven, and she was stolen from Virginia and sent to a plantation in South Carolina without her mom or pop.

I knew about my grandmother Soonie, and I knew about her grandmother, although I didn’t know her name. When my grandmother was getting sick, my family would never tell me stories. They would talk to each other, well you remember when Soonie blah, blah, blah, or Soonie was so mean.

I caught snippets all my life, and I knew this family history sort of, but when my grandmother was getting older and had no great-grandchildren and I had been saying I was going to have a baby forever and I hadn’t yet. She was getting older and she didn’t think she would get any great-grandbabies, she said if you ever do have one, make sure you tell her about Soonie and how those blankets were made, and make sure Aunt Lucinda gives you one of the quilts and I had none of this information. I told her that one day when I had a baby I would like to give it one of the names of my family.

Just tell me everybody’s names — she had 12 brothers and sisters. She started telling me the names which were like Birdie and I’m thinking, my child is not going to be named any of these names. But she told me more and more stories.

She died four months before I got pregnant with Toshi. I knew I wanted to tell the story of the maternal line of the family, so I started writing Show Way and I ended up going back to South Carolina to talk to my aunt who died soon after and to talk to my cousins, to piece together the history of the Underground Railroad and what part the Scotts played in it. That’s how I got to the story and I also wanted to write about how I’m not here accidentally, I’m not sitting here and talking about my writing.

I get tons of letters from young readers. Many of them relate to the characters and say, ‘I have a similar problem or circumstance.’ They think they relate because the characters are like them. But really I think they’re relating because of the environment. They recognize the environment. They’re drawn to the books because they hear a language they are familiar with. They hear names and circumstances that are familiar things, so the book becomes a friendly place to be. And they write to me and say, ‘Oh we love your books. I’m just like that person. This person reminds me of my cousin.’ That makes me feel good.

You know, I grew up, you know, in terms of my — in terms of the sort of accessibility of the prose and the poetry that I try to write, I remember reading Langston Hughes and Nikki Giovanni and Hakeem and all these amazing poets and learning so much from them; being informed but also being inspired in so many ways by their words.

And that inspiration came from the feeling that their words gave me, but it also came from a place of I was able to understand what they were saying. I was able to get it and relate it to my own life. I’ve tried to write like that. I’ve tried to make my poems and my prose, which are very personal, I’ve tried to make it your business, and I believe that’s so important, especially when we talk about getting young people engaged with reading.

I went through a phase in middle school where I did not like reading. In fact, I loathed it because I was being forced to do it. And I think that books are like amusement parks, and sometimes we have to let the kids choose the rides. And I wasn’t being given that opportunity to ride, to find my groove. And I think I try to write from that vantage point.

I try to write from a vantage point of making sure the work is accessible, commercial, literary. I don’t want to be put in one box, but I need to do all these things that I’ve grown up learning how to do, and I guess inevitably it’s my style, it’s my swag, it’s sort of how I dance on the page, and it works for me. And I think that is the key that I learned from Nikki is that it has to work for you first and you stand a much better chance of it working for the rest of us.