I wanted to be a writer since I was seven, but I didn’t grow up in family where there were writers, I’m trying to write things, I want to grow up and be homeless. My family said you’re never going to make any money, are you crazy, this isn’t what we do, you need to get a job.
Okay that’s a nice hobby, what are you going to do to make some money and eventually get out of house? I wouldn’t tell the truth, I would say, I’m going to be a teacher, I’m going to be a lawyer, I’m going to be a hairdresser, whatever. But I knew I was going to be a writer.
I wrote all the time and I had teachers who encourage it. I had teachers who saw that brilliance is passionately recognized, that if someone has something they’re really passionate at, that’s their brilliance, and how do we grow that or help them to grow that?
I wrote all the time, I copied writers. I remember finding a collection of poems, American Negro poetry anthology and I read it through, I memorized all these poems. I started to write like Vaughn McKay and Arthur Lloyd and Langston Hughes, of course.
I just knew that I wanted to be a writer, and when my family realized I was serious, I would walk into the room, they would get quiet because they’re thinking, she’s going to write all about us and she’s writing and I’m thinking, you guys are not that interesting.
I couldn’t say that, I would get in trouble. I wanted to write about my community because I wanted to put the world I knew on the page. I had never read books about Brooklyn, I had never read books about people going from Brooklyn to South Carolina and back again until I read Zeely by Virginia Hamilton.
That was one of the first books that I thought, wow, not only is this person writing about stuff that I know but it’s a black woman writing about it. Black women do write books and it was a moment that turned me around, just like the moment with John Steptoe and reading Stevie.
I started discovering other writers like James Baldwin and Alex Walker and reading all these stories that were so populated with people who were familiar to me, really just made the fire to write burn even hotter.
I wrote all the time and the first novel was Last Summer with Maizon which is about two girls growing up in Brooklyn and one gets accepted to a predominantly white boarding school and what that means to leave your community and come back to your community.
What does it mean to the people who you’ve left? Then as I got braver as a writer, I started moving out of my community and feel in the first book, The Notebooks of Melon and Son was the first time I wrote from the point of view of a guy. I’d written all these books from the point of view of girls and I said, I know can do that.
Let me try this other thing and it took forever, it took about two and a half years and I just struggled and I couldn’t get his voice on the page. I asked my brothers and they didn’t remember what it was like to be that age. I watched guys on the playground and that wasn’t what I was going for.
I just did this thing where I said, if I had a son what would he do right? What would I want to be like? If I had a best friend that was a boy, what would he be like? If three boys were in a room, what would they talk about and just ask myself all these questions and finally started forming this kid.
The more I wrote him, the more I liked him and the more I tried to make them real. From there, I went on to write I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This, which was the first time I wrote from the point of view of a poor white girl, and then If You Come Softly and Miracle Boys with all guys in it, trying to write a book that didn’t have any girls in it.
