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.
