Black History and Culture Books

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 think one of the most profound and powerful writing prompt for a young person is to just ask them, what do you see and how does that make you feel? Those are powerful questions to actually allow time for reflection. Just what do you see? What is happening in your neighborhood, what’s happening in your home, what do you notice about this world? And then asking how does that make you feel? And you could even push it further and what do you want to do about it? Or what do you want to do about those feelings? As young people share their findings, I think you realize I’m not the only one who sees this. I’m not the only one who feels this. And I am learning how to articulate and put into words this feeling that sometimes feels overwhelming. And I think that that’s important to help young people find the tools to name what is happening in their world, and then to realize that is not just happening to them. 

And that is not just something that’s happening now, but most of what’s happening now has already happened and that people survived that. So we allow young people to tell their stories and then connect them to other stories that have been told. It’s a strengthening that happens that if those folks could survive, if our ancestors and former activists and poets and musicians could survive it all and put their stories down, then they have left an inheritance for us. And so I think that that can be powerful for a young person to first just name what’s happening, articulate their truth, and then connect with someone else living or not living in their classroom, in their neighborhood or not. I say to young people, often, you might not have someone up close and personal that you feel can be a mentor to you that you feel like you could look up to. 

I hope you do. I hope that there’s someone in your family, someone in your school, someone in your local community. But if there’s not, there are so many activists and artists who’ve come before you who loved you and were praying for you, and they didn’t even know your name. They were seeing the future and thinking about what the future was going to be, and they were trying to leave the world a better place for me, for you. And I want to connect them to James Baldwin and Toni Morrison and [Lucille] Clifton and all these folks who came and used their voices and used their art to speak up, to speak out, to put on record. I think that that’s important. And I also think that in asking young people to name what they see, sometimes that question can maybe lean into things you want to change about your community. What are the negative things that are happening? How are you going to make change young people? But I also think it’s worth asking, what do you see that brings you joy? What do you see that makes you smile? Because again, it’s important that there’s both yes and yes, there’s a lot to change, and yes, there’s things we want more of. So what do you want more of? What is already working that we can talk about, write about, sing about, and praise. 

When I go to the page to start a story, I’m always thinking about how can I make this character nuanced and layered, and how can she surprise the reader? So if she starts off one way, I’m always thinking about turning the moment at some point in the story where if she’s such a goody, goody girl, we see her mess up or we see her have to kind of falter and figure something out. And vice versa, if she’s kind of a mess in the beginning, we see moments where she is strong and is figuring out who she is. So I just think that that’s good writing because it’s also who we really are as humans. So when I’m writing, I’m trying to just reflect reality on the page. And reality is we are messy and complicated, and sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we really, really don’t. 

And we’re full of questions and we think we know the answer. We think we know what we want. And sometimes that changes. So I’m always asking my character, what do you want? And what’s in the way of what you want? Who loves you? Who do you love back? Who do you miss? When is the last time you cried? And by asking my character these questions, I get to know her and I get to create obstacles for her that get in the way of what she wants, or we realize maybe you don’t really want what you thought you wanted and that’s the journey. So I think that is why my characters feel real and feel like friends or people that, because I am trying to just replicate the amazing, brilliant, complicated, messy women and girls that I know in real life, and I think those are the best stories where I can actually relate to what’s happening on the page. 

Yes, I want to write characters that young people can aspire to, but I think that there’s a danger in writing the perfect character and someone who always gets it right and never makes a mistake. And I also think there’s a danger in writing the character that is so flawed that there’s never a moment where we really see their humanity and see them as a person who can change. So I want a young person to read a book and feel if they are the person who maybe is really flawed and having a lot of challenges, that there is a chance for them to be better and do better. And when they see that that character has that moment, I think that speaks to them. And for the characters who are the people who are perfectionists and always aiming and striving to do things just right, I want them to see that there’s grace for mistakes and that there is forgiveness and that you can get up and try again. So I’m trying to create nuanced, layered characters because I think that we are nuanced people. 

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.

We talk a lot now as authors about the experience of not seeing ourselves in books when we were young. And I don’t know if it’s anything that I was aware of or really thought about as a child. I mean, I found plenty of things to read, plenty of things to be excited about. But I do remember the first time I encountered Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, by Mildred D. Taylor, and you know just turning that rickety paperback rack around in my seventh grade classroom and seeing that book cover and grabbing it and taking it home and reading it and so I definitely have that really powerful memory of a specific image of a young Black girl on the cover of a book.

And, you know, I still think about that reading experience today.

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.

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 don’t think that children are stupid, and I don’t think that I need to hold back from what I’m trying to say, and so what I do is tell the story. And I’m a big fan of the story. I don’t think I have to talk down to children. I don’t believe in that, and I don’t think that I have to have a hidden meaning there. I think that my job is to tell the story as clearly as I can, and so writing for children is the same as not writing for children, which is why some of my adult poems that I would’ve considered adult poems have become children’s books without changing a word.

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.

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 think there’s always gonna be a gap for young people looking for images of themselves in the literature, and I think, partly, it’s because everything’s changing so quickly. I think at the same time, the essence of childhood doesn’t change.

What young people want are stories that deal with issues of them trying to figure out who they are in the world. They feel isolated, they feel like they’re the only ones like that, that their crazy family is the only crazy family like that, and that their longings are the only longings like that.

I think they’re going to they find their way. I was talking about this yesterday, young people are hungry, and their brains are huge, and they are going to find their way the way we found our way. And I think there’s going to be the literature that helps.

I think there’s always a need for more stories. I get constant emails about why there isn’t more literature targeted at gay/lesbian/transgender youth? Why isn’t there more literature targeted at biracial families?

More literature that’s targeted at single-parent families and parents. Of course, with all the foreclosures, what does it mean to suddenly lose your home and that whole issue of displacement which we weren’t dealing with so much in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s as we are dealing with now.

How does the shaky ground keep them steady and how do they move with it? I think that there’s always going to be a hunger. They’re always going to have a hunger because that’s what adolescence is, and there’s always going to be a certain sorrow to their existence because they need to live in that world.

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.

Besides the books being about African-Americans, they are about urban issues. And you’ll find that when you go through books for young people, you don’t find that many books take place in cities. It’s a very strange thing. You find books that take place in suburbia over and over again, but you find very few books that take place in cities. And even on television, you find city living only on cop shows. Everything else is only within the apartment. But in my books there are fences, brick buildings, and fire hydrants. So many kids are attracted to that urban experience.

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.

1992 and 1993, I would go to the bookstores in the children’s books section, and I never really saw books that looked like me. And this sort of set me on the quest of wanting to illustrate and tell stories and do stories that sort of sounded and felt like me, where I would paint people of color, mainly, and sort of tell our stories. And there’re so many wonderful and diverse ways to do that, and I just think that that’ll be wonderful as an artist, to sort of use your artwork to sort of do something like that.