In Last Stop on Market Street, thematically I had been trying to cover this territory in a young adult book and it just wasn’t working. And then I was alerted to an image on a young illustrator’s blog. It was a grandmother and her grandson on the bus.
And I remember the minute I saw that, my agent sent it to me, who ultimately became the agent for Christian Robinson, and it was his blog. And when I saw that image I was like, “Oh, my gosh, the book I had been trying to write as a young adult needs to be a picture book.” And so, then I started to think about this grandmother figure.
And for me, I had a grandmother who was the center figure in our family, my Grandmother Nettie. And so I thought of her and I thought of me because I spent a lot of time with her when I was a kid. I even lived with her for a while. And so I thought of her presence in my life and so I sort of wrote the story with that in mind. And it was kind of an “own voice” thing, where I had taken public transportation much of my young life.
But then when I was still in the process of revising the book, I was introduced to Christian Robinson for the first time, who I knew was going to illustrate it, and he was with his grandmother. And I remember I got to talk to them for about fifteen or twenty minutes. And I just saw the grace and dignity that she had.
You know, she had raised Christian in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles with a few of his cousins. And I realized at the end of that interaction that I actually had to take myself out of the book and I had to lean toward his experience. It had to be that way. And you know, there’s no “find and replace” for race, on your keyboard. So it means you basically have to rewrite the entire book with this new vision in mind.
So I’ll actually say, the book was in a way inspired by multiple grandmothers. It started with my own grandmother. It sort of leaned toward Christian’s grandmother ultimately. But I also got to pull in my daughter’s two grandmothers. My own mom and my wife’s mother. And they both sort of fed the story too. So it’s interesting, I think. There’s a power in the relationship between a grandchild and a grandparent that had to be part of that story.
Originally in Last Stop on Market Street, one of the themes was that CJ wasn’t raised by his parents. It wasn’t a traditional family and that was stated directly in the story. But then I realized that I needed to be cleaner and more efficient in the story. So I took all of that out except for one tiny detail that most people don’t really see as kind of residue of this theme.
When CJ closes his eyes on the bus, he imagines a family of hawks. And so that’s the one illusion to the traditional family. And it’s just a passing thought because he’s a young boy growing up in America, influenced by the media that surrounds him. So in all the commercials, he’s probably seeing traditional families. In all of the books he’s read, he’s probably mostly seeing traditional families. So there is that residue. But obviously you see that that relationship between CJ and his grandmother is what raises him.
