A SONG FOR GWENDOLYN BROOKS: A Review and Picture Book Giveaway

Congratulations to Danielle H. who for a second week in a row won a book from my blog. The Wizard's Daughter is on its way to her!

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Back in November I promised you a review of another book by Alice Faye Duncan. Several blog posts later and in anticipation of National Poetry Month in April, I'm making good on that promise. 

Before today you may not have heard of Gwendolyn Brooks. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950 making her the first African American to win a Pulitzer.  Fittingly, Ms. Duncan chose to celebrate Ms. Brooks work by writing her biography in verse and interspersing it with Brooks' own poetry.

The year is 1925. 

Gwendolyn Brooks is eight years old. 

Gray bursts of smoke hide the yellow sun. 

Can flowers grow without sunlight? 

Gwendolyn leans on the front yard gate. 

Gwendolyn is unsure.

As a young girl, Gwendolyn translates her observations and thoughts into poetry.

Her parents encourage her writing but a teacher accuses her of plagiarizing her poems. Her teacher retracts her charge, but Gwendolyn is angry and pens a poem which ends up being prophetic:

FORGIVE AND FORGET

If others neglect you,  

Forget, do not sigh. 

For, after all, they'll select you 

In times by and by. 

If their taunts cut and hurt you, 

They are sure to regret 

And if in time, they desert you 

Be sure to forgive and forget.  (Gwendolyn Brooks, 1928)

Her parents recognize her talent and give her time to develop her talent; her poems are published in The Chicago Defender. 

Gwendolyn writes, revises, studies, and wins prizes for her poetry. She marries Henry, has a son they name Junior, and writes.

SING a song for Gwendolyn Brooks 

She whittles her sonnets with perfect grace. 

Like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Frost.

Gwen paints poems with paintbrush words 

And Gwen takes home a Pulitzer Prize.

  

GIVEAWAY AND EXTRAS

This book would be an excellent curriculum resource. Educators, feel free to use this lesson plan.

You'll find some of Gwendolyn's poems here. 

I'm giving away a copy of A SONG FOR GWENDOLYN BROOKS (a part of Sterling Children's Books "People who Shaped Our World" series) in conjunction with the March issue of Talking Story on WOW Women in History. Leave one comment here and I'll enter your name once. Leave a comment through Talking Story and you'll earn a second chance to win. Giveaway ends April 1. Please leave your email address if you are new to my blog. 

Juba! A Novel- A Review and ARC Giveaway

Congratulations to Linda Andersen and Monica M., a new Twitter follower, who each won a copy of OF BETTER BLOOD on last week's blog.

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Writing historical fiction is hard. You read shelves full of books, study documents, interview experts, ponder maps, photographs, and data. You work really hard to insert authentic details (what color dress would she have worn to the dance? What did he eat for lunch? What bus would she have taken to work?) and then plunge forward to create as authentic a character as possible.

But when you're writing a story about a young man who lived over a hundred and fifty years ago to whom you want to pay tribute, but yet there is little "real" data, your task becomes even more difficult. You have a few bones to build your story around-- perhaps a death certificate and a few photographs. If you're lucky, maybe you'll find a few newspaper articles you can dig up to authenticate your story.

Such was Walter Dean Myers challenge when he wrote Juba! (Harper Collins, 2015)

This book for middle grade or young adult readers, is based on the true story of a talented young black dancer considered to be the inventor of tap dancing. While performing in New York City, he was noticed by Charles Dickens who wrote about him in American Notes:

"Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut; snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man's fingers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs - all sorts of legs and no legs - what is this to him?"  "And in what walk of life, or dance of life, does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink, with the chuckle of a million of counterfeit Jim Crows, in one inimitable sound!"

Engraving from American Notes by Charles Dickens (1842) showing 

Master Juba being observed by Dickens and an associate.

www.masterjuba.com

Walter Dean Myers, in his last book before his death, told the story of William Henry Lane (Juba's real name) using just a few resources: Dickens' writings, a smattering of newspaper articles and images, and Juba's death certificate. Here are a few of my favorite quotes.

Initially Juba seeks dance instruction from an Irish teacher named Margaret. (This particular passage reminded me of a comment my current dance partner--my husband's 85-year-old uncle--made. "When you see old people dancing, they're imagining themselves as teenagers.")

"If you weren't so thickheaded, you'd know they [the audience] were watching you because they want to enjoy themselves, not marvel at you. You ever go to an Irish dance and see the young people swinging themselves around and kicking up their heels and the old people watching them? The old people are thinking back on a time when they were young and they could do the same thing the young people are doing. But you have to give them something they can do, if only on the floor between their ears, if you get my drift." (p. 44)

The reader hears Juba's despondency and realism in the following line. He has just auditioned as a dancer and thinks he won't get the job. 

"My dancing didn't mean a thing. The only thing they see in a black man is a clown or a slave. "(p. 55)

www.masterjuba.com

Juba finally gets a few gigs as a dancer but when Mr. Charles Dickens comes to New York and watches him, he dances as he never has before. This quote begins with Mr. Dickens speaking.

"...There's a freedom about the way you move that makes me wish I could dance. Have you ever had a difficult time in your life?" 

"At times, everything seems hard," I said. "I'm not sure what tomorrow is going to be like. I'm just hoping it's something good." 

"I imagined--and I know I'm talking too much--that you must have had some difficult times along the way. I think that's the mystery of greatness and of people who achieve wonderful things," Mr. Dickens said. "That somewhere in their lives they have felt the cold winds of despair, but have kept their hearts warm themselves." (p. 104)

In order to make a small living Juba is forced to make compromises.

Jack [his "fair minded" white landlord] knew how black people were treated in New York. We were second-class people every day and third-class performers when we tried to exercise our talents outside of the black community. What he did was to needle me so I wouldn't give up all together, and in a way, I appreciated it. In a way, I didn't, though, because sometimes he made me feel that when I accepted a job with a minstrel band or put on blackface I was betraying my people. To me, putting on blackface was the strangest thing in the world. I was born black, and yet the promoters wanted me to dress up like some kind of strange image of a black person that really wasn't a true Negro. It was as if a lot of white people had a place in their heads for black people and you had to fit in that place in a certain manner or they didn't want you. They wanted black performers to talk bad, say stupid things, and be like pets. Jack said a lot of white people were afraid of real black people. (pp. 123-4)

Even after Juba was well received by Londoners who had read accounts of him by Charles Dickens, he still encounters this same prejudice from fellow performers.  

Huff [another performer] walked across the room and put his nose an inch from Gil's. "What I see with my own two eyes is that I'm not going to make no kind of steady living working for a nigger. And that's what I'm doing over here, working behind Boz's Juba or whatever it is he's calling himself. In America you make a living working with white men, and for white men. And I aim to go back to America, back to Mableton, Georgia and make a living. And if I want any coloreds around me, I'll buy a few!" (p. 157)

Possibly depicting Juba performing in England
www.masterjuba.com

 Walter Dean Myers did an excellent job of bringing this forgotten, yet important, performer to life. Juba's life was full of sorrow, yet it also held love and accomplishment. I hope whoever wins my gently read ARC, will pass it along to a young person who can be encouraged by an inspirational story of a man who, despite many obstacles, followed his dreams.

To enter this giveaway, please leave me a comment by noon on Thursday, February 25. If you are new to my blog, please leave your contact information also. For extra chances to win this ARC, post on Facebook or Twitter and let me know what you have done.  

Julius Lester on Multiple POV, Backstories, and Finding the Right Publisher

After reading Guardian, which I blogged about last week, I was curious about some of the choices Mr. Lester made while writing this thought-provoking book. I contacted him through Facebook and he graciously allowed me to post his answers here.

Carol: How did you decide to write this in the omniscient point-of-view? Or maybe it’s the narrator’s POV—I’m not sure. All I know is that it works incredibly well. As I struggle to write a book from two POV I wonder about the process you went through in writing this story. How did you determine that you would write it in such a way that you showed the thoughts, motivations, and fears of all the characters? You must have created intricate backstories for each, yet you convey them all in such simple sentences.

Julius Lester: 

Point of view. That's always the question, isn't it? But you're right. In this instance it is the narrator's point of view. If I'd told it from the point of view of just one character, what the reader would have thought about the other characters would have been from the point of view of the one character. I wanted to be fair to all the characters. I wanted the reader to experience each character as she or he saw themselves. I didn't want to take sides against any of my characters. And that was how I conceived the book from the outset. While the characters were presented from their points-of-view, their actions lead the reader to decide if they're good or evil. But I, as narrator/author, do not present them as good or evil.

Interesting that you mention doing back stories for the characters. I didn't. I worked out a chronology of how old they were and when, since the novel moves back and forth in time, and I may have made some notes about their physical appearances, but I tend to carry the back stories in my head, which is not something I recommend. It would be to my benefit to write down the back stories, but that takes time I'd rather spend working directly on the novel.

I'm pleased that you like the novel. Many years ago I wrote a piece for the Sunday Times Book Review in which I mentioned that I wished a white writer would write about a lynching from the point of view of the lynchers. None ever did, so I did. I may have mentioned this in the Afterword. Of course, the lynching in the novel is tame compared to many actual lynchings that took place. I could have made the novel unreadable if I had stayed just with the facts. It's ironic that people would find it revolting to read what black people actually suffered. Seems to me that the least we could do is read about it. But the book would not have been published. 

For your information, I gave Guardian to a black editor first. She wouldn't even present it to the publishing editorial board because she knew they'd turn it down. What disappointed me was that she wouldn't even fight for it. But, interestingly, the next editor who read it and accepted it was of Asian descent.  

For more information about Mr. Lester, see this interview. My review of Incognegro portrays another view of lynching. The art exhibit Without Sanctuary is a chilling exhibition of postcards about lynching in the United States. 

Guardian's "Author's Note" includes statistics on lynching (plus an interesting note about the etymology of the word); how that threat lived in Mr. Lester's consciousness as a young boy; how he was impacted by Emmett Till's brutal murder; and the history of how he came to write and publish Guardian (Harper Collins, 2008).  

Here is a line from a letter Mr. Lester wrote to George Woods, the children's book editor in the New York Times Book Review in 1970: "White writers are so dishonest. Seldom have they written what they could have and should have, which is the white side of racism. I'd like to see a children's novel about a little white boy who goes with his father to a lynching." (p. 125)

Lester goes on to say, "While the subject matter is a lynching, on a deeper level, this is a novel about identity. Whom and what we identify ourselves with determines our characters, determines who we are, and what we do. Whose opinion matters to you the most? When you know that, when you know whom it is you most care about pleasing, you know who are. We make choices every day that shape the content of our characters." (p. 127)

Mr. Lester's most recent
Facebook profile picture.
Besides being a prolific writer, Mr. Lester
is also a photographer and musician.