It all started in China. Yes, you read that right. The origins of my book about Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony has everything to do with China.

Let me explain.

In 1988, I was asked to write a few monologues for theater pieces on American History that would be performed in a series of theaters in China. Later, after the scripts were complete, I invited several friends to join me in auditioning for the cast. I had no aspirations to join the cast myself, but my friends, who were all performing artists, certainly did. As for me, I simply thought the audition process would be a lark and I looked forward to spending a fun day with a few friends. And it was fun. And funny. As it turned out, the joke was on me. None of my friends made the final cut for the cast, but I did! As a result, I ended up going to China later that year. But, back to this story.

The historical figures I chose to develop monologues about for the show were Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony.

I was working in library acquisitions at USC at the time and was able to take advantage of the seemingly endless collection of books to be found in the Doheny Library Stacks. I dove into my research with gusto, and was excited to learn that my chosen subjects were contemporaries, and that their lives frequently intersected. I found that bit of information fascinating, and wondered just how deeply interconnected they were. In any event, I had no time to satisfy my curiosity, and so I limited my research to the biographical information I needed to know about each in order to write my short monologues. However, I did have occasion to mull over certain questions that occurred to me: I wondered what it would be like if Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony had a conversation. What would they talk about? What would it sound like?

After a time, I tucked those questions away and, eventually, forgot all about them.

In the intervening years, I wrote a book about aviator Bessie Coleman, the first African American licensed pilot. This is a biography written in verse, and told from multiple perspectives. While the information about Coleman was factual, the format I created to tell her story was a work of fiction. Talkin’ About Bessie has enjoyed considerable success, winning the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration and an Author Honor for the text.

Not surprisingly, the editor began asking me to consider writing another book about a historical figure. I told him thanks, but no thanks. Every year or so, he’d raise the subject again.

Finally, in 2008, he asked if I would consider writing a book about Harriet Tubman. I laughed, thinking to myself that everyone and his mother has written a book about Harriet Tubman. Why would I write yet another? And so, again, I found myself saying thanks, but no thanks.

Two weeks later, however, the idea I’d had way back in 1988 resurfaced. What about creating a conversation between Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony? That would be a new and unique treatment of Harriet’s story. Would my editor be interested in that idea? The answer, of course, was yes. And so, with that, I got busy.

I began gathering research materials in Cincinnati, Ohio, with a visit to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the most extensive collection of memorabilia from that period. I spent several days hunched over rare suffragette meeting notes by Susan B. Anthony, slave narratives, and other valuable literature relevant to the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, and the suffrage movement.

Later, I traveled to Ripley, Ohio, to search out some of the original homes that served as stations of the Underground Railroad, including the John P. Parker House. After a week of research, I headed back to California to begin the long process of poring over thousands of pages of biographies, histories, and other reference work on my subjects, and the historical period against which their stories played out. Bit by bit, the manuscript came together. And now, finally, this story has gone out into the world!

I hope Chasing Freedom brings this time in history alive for my readers, and that they realize we are all part of one another’s story.

Talkin’ About Bessie, my biography of aviator, Elizabeth Coleman, was an exercise in extreme patience and perseverance. If you’ve read Part I of this blog post, you already know how taxing this project was from the start! The entire saga was a bit too long for one blog post, though, so I decided to break it up. Here, then, is Part II.

Signing on E.B. Lewis as the illustrator for Talkin’ About Bessie should have been the end of the long saga of bringing this book to market. It wasn’t.

As mentioned in Part I, after Bessie’s original editor moved on to another publishing house, a round-robin of editors temporarily filled the spot over the course of a few years. With all that coming and going, some important details of book production fell through the cracks. For example, no one was sharing early sketches with me. That was proven to be a huge mistake. When I saw the F&Gs, I realized that one character, who was supposed to be African-American, had instead been portrayed as a white person. More egregious than that, however, was the fact that a female character had been portrayed as a man. This was a biography, after all, and that character represented an actual, not a fictional, person. A change in gender goes far beyond the bounds of poetic license! To say I was aghast when I realized this error is to understate the fact.

Both paintings had to be redone. The good news, I suppose, is that I caught the errors in time!

Whew! That was close. Yes. But that’s not the end of the story.

You’ll never find this painting in Talkin’ About Bessie. Why? It was supposed to be a woman! Her first name was Willie, and that was the confusion! The final book features a portrait of a woman.

As I flipped through the F&Gs a few more times, looking for additional mistakes or omissions, I realized the bibliography was nowhere to be found. But surely I was wrong, I thought. Perhaps it had simply fallen out of this particular copy of the F&G. So, I checked a second copy. Nope. No bibliography there, either. Frantic, I called the editor.

“Where is the bibliography?” I asked.

“Bibliography?” she repeated, as if I were speaking another language. “Was there a bibliography?”

I ground my teeth and did a slow burn.

“Yes. I. Gave. You. A. Bibliography.”

“Oh!” she said. “Wait a minute. I think I do remember seeing one. Let me go back and find it.”

“You do that,” I said.

I won’t tell you what I was thinking in that moment. I try not to use that kind of language.

Eventually, the bibliography was found. However, since space allocation had already been set, the challenge of the art director was to find some space in which to include it. In the end, the bibliography was reduced to the smallest possible font, and the whole was shoe-horned into the book.

While all this was going on, I begged the publisher not to release the F&Gs to reviewers until the bibliography could be added. I was told not to worry. You know where this is going.

The first reviews were released, and critics noted that no bibliography was available. The publisher tried to keep my head from exploding by assuring me that an errata sheet would go out to reviewers to let them know a bibliography was, in fact, in existence. I could not be mollified.

By the time the finished book hit store shelves, I remember thinking, “This damn book better win something, after all this!”

Total time invested? Six years. Payoff? Coretta Scott King Honor for text, Coretta Scott King Award for illustration, and many, many fans. I hope you’ll become one, if you haven’t already.

I’ll close with a favorite poem from the book, “School Teacher.”

When it came to knowledge, Bessie was a miser,
hoarding facts and figures like gold coins she was
saving up to spend on something special. 

I’d watch her sometimes,
poring over her lessons,
lips pursed in concentration.
Often, when the subject turned to math,
she’d glance up at me and, I’d swear,
she’d get a sort of greedy look in her eyes.
But maybe it was just my imagination. 

I did not imagine her persistence, though.
Come rain or shine, if work allowed,
Bessie would attend the hot-in-summer,
cold-in-winter, one-room Colored schoolhouse
where I taught in Waxahachie.
Not even the four-mile walk it took to get there
discouraged her from making her way to class. 

Still, bright as she was, I worried that her fine mind
 would soon be sacrificed to a life spent picking cotton
 or working in the mills, like so many others had before. 

But, after each harvest, she’d return to class,
determined as ever to snatch up and pocket
 every tidbit of knowledge I could offer.
“Teacher,” she’d say, “one day, I’m going
 to amount to something.” 

                        Bless God! I need not have
                        fretted in the least.

In 1991, I left my job as an editor for Disney Publications to work on my own books, full time. One of the first books I wrote after my exit was a story of friendship titled Meet Danitra Brown.

When I sat down to write this book, I was very clear about the small stories I wanted to tell, many of them drawn from my own childhood. I was equally clear about my characters, namely the spunky, self-possessed Danitra Brown, and the smart and sensitive Zuri Jackson. You would think, then, that the book would have been a snap to write, yes? But it wasn’t. I poured over the manuscript for weeks, writing and rewriting chapters that didn’t seem to be going anywhere, and I couldn’t figure out why. Finally, I grabbed a highlighter and went though the manuscript, marking those passages that were working, in the hopes that the exercise would give me a clue.  And it did.

I carefully reviewed my work-in-progress and noted that each and every one of the passages that were working read like poetry. Ding, ding, ding! This story wanted to be told as a collection of poems! I’m a little slow, but I’m no dummy. I obliged! I’ve been telling stories in suites of poetry ever since.

Strangely, I never stopped to ask myself if one could, or should,  write a story in poetry. Was that even a thing? I didn’t know, but I wrote one anyway. Years later, of course, I realized there was, in fact, a very long tradition of storytelling through poetry. I, however, had never read The Iliad or The Odyssey. Instead, I’d stumbled upon the idea of the form—as simplistic as mine may be—out of necessity. I had a story to tell, and my story refused to be told in any other way.

Meet Danitra Brown, which won a Coretta Scott King Honor Award for Illustration, has been a popular title for poetry lovers, and a staple in poetry units, for more than a decade. It was followed by Danitra Brown Leaves Town and Danitra Brown Class Clown.

Fans of the books hold Danitra Brown close to their hearts, and I especially love how real she’s become to young readers. I’ve explained to countless students, over the years, that Danitra is a fictional, composite character. They all nod their heads as if they understand, and then they turn right around and ask, “So, when was the last time you saw Danitra?”

One of my favorite stories to share, in that regard, comes from a young woman who wrote to tell me how special Danitra was in her life.

As a young girl, she’d suffered the loss of her mother. Her grandmother, who took her in, gave her a copy of Meet Danitra Brown. The young girl was convinced this book had been written specifically for her, as the names of the characters in the book and its sequels, matched the names of her own relatives.

The girl grew up, of course, and began to realize her mistake. Nevertheless, she continued to treasure her connection to this character. She thanked me for writing the book, told me how it helped her through a difficult time in her life, and singed the letter “Sincerely, Danitra Brown.”

Well kids, turns out the joke was on me. There really is a Danitra Brown! Love it.

Meet the model for Zuri, my friend Debra Jackson! And yes, we’re still BFFs.

The story of the art is interesting, as well. The book, illustrated by Floyd Cooper, features characters loosely based on myself and my childhood best friend, Debra. When her mother saw the F&G’s, she said, “Oh!  I see you sent the illustrators photos of the two of you.” In fact, I hadn’t! Yet, somehow, through an alchemy I don’t quite understand, Floyd had chosen models to represent the characters who closely resembled me and my friend at the ages of those characters. Spooky, huh? That’s happened to me with several different books, and several different illustrators. Weird, but wonderful!

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite poems from Meet Danitra Brown. This is titled “Sweet Blackberry.”

Danitra says my skin’s like double chocolate fudge
’cause I’m so dark.
The kids at school say it another way.
“You so black, girl,” they say,
“at night, people might thin
you ain’t nothin’ but a piece o’ sky.”

I never cry, but inside there’s a hurting place.
I make sure no one sees it on my face.
Then mama tells me, “Next time, honey, you just say
The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.”

Now that’s just what I do.
I sure wish I had told them that before.
Those kids don’t bother teasin’ me no more.