About this episode
In this episode, Derrick tells the story of how music inspired him to write, how his idols taught him to never compromise his voice as a black man, and why he considers himself a freedom fighter.
"I'm putting every single ounce of who I am into every single book that I write, so y'all know to expect the blackest books you have ever read from yours truly.” - Derrick Barnes
Derrick Barnes’ introduction to vulnerable storytelling was through the jazz and R&B records he found in his family’s collection. For young Derrick, reading the liner notes in albums was just as important as any other kind of reading. Eventually, artists like Prince, Rakim, and John Coltrane taught him about the power in simply and truly being yourself. Inspired, young Derrick began writing his own poetry and short stories, which served as the beginning of a long and fruitful writing career. A career that includes being the first black creative copywriter for Hallmark cards.
In his work as an author, Derrick embodies the authenticity of his idols, being uncompromising in his goal to tell an array of black stories, for black kids. Although already an established writer, Derrick’s breakthrough picture book, "Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut" brought him national attention and accolades such as the Ezra Jack Keats Book Award, a Newbery Honor, and the Coretta Scott King Award. More recently he earned a National Book Award honor for the graphic novel “Victory Stand! Raising My Fist for Justice.”
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Connect with Jordan and The Reading Culture @thereadingculturepod and subscribe to our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter.
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In Derrick’s reading challenge, Resistance and Resilience, he invited us to read powerful stories of resilience from America’s black history.
You can find her list and all past reading challenges at thereadingculturepod.com.
Today's Beanstack Featured Librarian is Connie Sharp, a Librarian Training and Development Specialist at Metro Nashville Public Schools. She told us about how her district utilizes Beanstack with community partnerships to encourage students to read.
Contents
- Chapter 1 - Jazz, Hip Hop, R&B (1:59)
- Chapter 2 - Literacy and Lyrics (6:31)
- Chapter 3 - A Hallmark Story (9:11)
- Chapter 4 - The Fresh Cut (12:52)
- Chapter 5 - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (19:22)
- Chapter 6 - Freedom Fighter (25:00)
- Chapter 7 - The Blackest Books (28:56)
- Chapter 8 - The Legacy of Derrick Barnes (31:29)
- Chapter 9 - Resistance and Resilience (35:31)
- Chapter 10 - Beanstack Featured Librarian (37:29)
Author Reading Challenge
Download the free reading challenge worksheet, or view the challenge materials on our helpdesk.
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Links:
- Derrick Barnes
- Caleb McLaughlin Reads "Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut" | Bookmarks | Netflix Jr
- Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist For Justice - National Book Foundation
- The Reading Culture
- The Reading Culture Newsletter Signup
- The Reading Culture on Instagram (for giveaways and bonus content)
- Beanstack resources to build your community’s reading culture
View Transcript
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Derrick Barnes:
I am putting every single ounce of who I am into every single book that I write so y'all know what to expect. The blackest books you have ever read from yours truly.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Derrick Barnes isn't just writing about black kids. He's writing directly to them as sincerely as he possibly can. But to be sincere means to be vulnerable, which is a skill he learned from some of his favorite writers of all time, Musicians.
Derrick Barnes:
Writers that we love the most are the ones that are able to be the most vulnerable and able to make us feel things. I think listening to a lot of R&B music early on when I was a kid allowed me to tap into that, my writing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Derrick is the award-winning author of beloved picture books, Crown, An Ode to The Fresh Cut and the King of Kindergarten. He's won the Ezra Jack Keats book Award, the Newbery Honor, the Coretta Scott King Award among so many others. More recently, he earned a national book award honor for the graphic novel Victory Stand, Raising My Fist for Justice. The man has earned some flowers and surely there are more to come.
In this episode, Derrick shares about how music inspired him to write, about how his idols taught him never to compromise his voice as a black man, and his theory about the quality of music and its connection to our classrooms. He also kind of wraps for us, which is fun.
My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey and this is the Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and illustrators about the ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more. Make sure to check us out on Instagram for giveaways at the Reading Culture pod and subscribe to our newsletter at the reading culturepod.com/newsletter. All right, onto the show.
Let's start when you were younger, where you grew up and what your early life was like.
Derrick Barnes:
Well, my family is from the Delta of Mississippi and they were part of that great migration of black people moving north and moving west just to find jobs and escape the terror of racism and white supremacy. And my folks stopped in Kansas City, Missouri, so that's my place of birth. I always describe myself as a Midwest southern boy. I spent a lot of summers in Mississippi. I'm all Midwest boy, Kansas City, pickup trucks, jeans, boots, football, snowball fights.
I grew up in a single parent household. My mother, she just has a high school education. She was a CNA pretty much my whole childhood. She was a nurse, worked in nursing homes, raised me and my brother Anthony, who's my hero. I fell in love with words very young. I guess when I was in preschool I was reading on elementary school level, got me tested. I was in a gifted program pretty much my whole early education career all the way up until high school. I just fell in love with words and started my writing, my illustrious writing career in the fifth grade. That was a very pivotal year for me.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What happened in fifth grade?
Derrick Barnes:
Well, two things happened. I was diagnosed with type one diabetes.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, I didn't know that.
Derrick Barnes:
That was rough having to cut out all the sweets in my diet and-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
God, when you were in fifth grade.
Derrick Barnes:
Fifth grade having to take four insulin shots a day. Looking back, it has really taught me discipline and structure and I exercise daily. I married a vegan, so I eat pretty clean. It just keeps me sharp, I think.
The second thing that happened was I fell in love with hip hop music. My brother, even though we were in the Midwest, he had a lot of East coast buddies from New York and Philadelphia, so they would always give him mixed tapes. So I always heard stuff before everybody else did, like the new LL Cool J, new Eric B and Rakim, Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince and I just fell in love with hip hop music. And being from Kansas City, which is one of birth places of jazz music, my mother took us to a lot of live shows, R&B, jazz, blues.
I remember I used to copy lyrics from liner notes from albums. You can see the albums up on my wall back there. I used to copy a lot of Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack. I wanted to be like these modern day poets. My fifth grade teacher, Ms. Shelby, recognized how much I love hip hop music and how hip hop is just a child of poetry. So she introduced us to all the writers from the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larson and County Cullen and Langston Hughes, I fell in love with his work. He's one of my homeboys. He's from Missouri, from my home state. So in the fifth grade I studied everything that he wrote.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So you listened to Stevie, you listened to Roberta Flack and then hip hop you were listening to-
Derrick Barnes:
I said Roberta Flack is the first woman I fell in love with. We would get up on Saturday mornings and clean and my mother would have her albums on and she just sounds like an angel to me.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What's your jam for her? If you're going to play something, what are you going to?
Derrick Barnes:
So my favorite song of hers is That's No Way to Say Goodbye. When we get off you have to check that out. I love that song man, so much. There's no way to Say Goodbye, Killing Me Softly, obviously. All of her songs with Donnie Hathaway, but her first album was a classic too.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And I heard you were a big Prince fan.
Derrick Barnes:
I love Prince so much, man. When I mentioned the musicians that I like, I almost never mentioned Prince because I guess I'm being interviewed about children's books and Prince really, at nine to 11 really made me feel naughty in a lot of ways.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
He does still so that.
Derrick Barnes:
Yeah, but also it was a lot of freedom in his music. Here is a black man who is a prodigy, really. Taught himself how to play all these instruments and he was very open about his sexuality. There was no other artist like him that was effeminate in a lot of ways, but he was very open about the way he felt about love and women, just very free.
And for a young black artist, seeing somebody put themselves out in the world that way makes you feel like I can be myself too. I can write about what I want to write about. I can sing about what I want to sing about. So Prince provided me with a lot of freedom.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Do you teach that to your kids now?
Derrick Barnes:
Yeah, in a subliminal way. And I think it's important that we listen to their music too. I think we get into this ageism type world with our children and talking about how horrible their music is, but you have to understand why they are into... A lot of it is a group thing too. They maybe listen to certain artists because everybody else listens to them.
I do try to listen to their music and when they're in my car, it's just my music. I do give them a chance to play their music. But ever since they were babies, we exposed them to a lot of music, jazz, world music. My wife listens to a lot of Afrobeat, a lot of African music. She's a West African dancer, so they pretty much heard everything.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay, so music from today with an open mind. I got that. What about the hip hop of today, given the impact that the genre had on you as a kid?
Derrick Barnes:
The level of hip hop music has changed and there's a direct correlation to the emphasis that our current education system puts on language arts, and a real sincere effort to really focus on language and the richness of language and the huge array of talented writers. We don't have that anymore.
Like I said, I was in elementary school and high school in the eighties and the nineties and I had a lot of great teachers. It was the tail end of the civil rights era. When I heard of Rakim, I was able to appreciate he was one of the first MCs to use in a rhyme instead of that AB pattern. So instead of saying, "I went to the store and got me a drink, sat on the curb so that I could think that's a AB pattern, but Rakim was able to put rhymes in between those spaces. I take seven MCs, putting them in the line as seven more brothers who think they can rhyme. It'll take seven more before I go for mine. Now that's 21 MCs eight up. At the same time.
I was able to recognize that because of the literature that we were reading and the different structure of the poetry stances. You really put value into that. So even people marvel at the Wu-Tang Clan, but you can tell they had great English teachers because the language is so complex. Their rhyming patterns are so complex and when you hear today's MCs, it is something beneath the simple AB pattern. They don't even have a vocabulary. They don't have a extensive vocabulary to use. It's just a-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, it is a really interesting take on it but let's get back to your early writing. You mentioned that your career began in fifth grade. So what was the story that you wrote about?
Derrick Barnes:
I had just finished watching Lady and the Tramp. So I wrote a story about these dogs traveling across the country looking for a magic bone that was going to save the world. I discovered my superpower that day that I can use the English language in my imagination to captivate people. I discovered a skill that my peers didn't have that I was able to make things appear where nothing was there, just out of thin air be able to tell stories and craft and create character. So I started writing everything after that, more poems, more short stories, more raps, love letters, everything. Anything I can give my hands on.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Were you a romancer with your-?
Derrick Barnes:
I was. I was. I learned how to talk to girls early, especially in middle school, in high school. And really, a lot of it is listening to a lot of R&B music and studying those lyrics. And really the writers that we love the most, I think this is the case for all of us, the writers that we love the most are ones that are able to be the most vulnerable and able to make us feel things. I think listening to a lot of R&B music early on when I was a kid allowed me to tap into that in my writing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So you knew early on, you knew you wanted to write?
Derrick Barnes:
I think a lot of it was I didn't see anybody. I mean obviously I knew about Walter Dean Myers and writers at a distant, but there were no black male writers that were tangible that were accessible to me so that wasn't even a possibility. The only thing, I just love writing and I kept a lot of spiral notebooks and just wrote and created characters.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Always poetry, always inverse or more prose?
Derrick Barnes:
I always wrote a lot of free verse. To be honest with you, I didn't write a lot of verse until I started working at Hallmark Cards. August of 1999, I was hired as the first black man in the history of Hallmark Cards to be a creative copywriter.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow.
Derrick Barnes:
And it was like being in graduate school. I met so many talented painters, artists, lettering artist, writers obviously. Yeah, it was the first time I felt like I was around my type of people on a daily basis, other creatives. And I got healthcare, which my mother was really proud of me.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Do you remember some of the first cards that you worked on?
Derrick Barnes:
I did everything. I did mahogany, I did every holiday.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Excuse me. Was mahogany happening before there were black copywriters?
Derrick Barnes:
Yeah.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Interesting.
Derrick Barnes:
Yeah, it was crazy. Sometimes they had an all white, so they may have black illustrators, but they were white writers. And so say if we were working on Valentine's Day, it was really tripped me out. The first project was Valentine's Day, it was mahogany. And when we got done... So say they would need 12 new cards and there'll be maybe four, five illustrators, maybe three writers, and they would have a sheet and tell us what we need. It had these categories. We would divide them and I would work with one illustrator and I have two of those cards.
And when the meeting was over with, they had a table with all these black resources like Jet Magazine, black movies because it was mostly white writers. It was just myself and it was another lady, Sharon. She was really sweet to me, still is. And then while I was there, I think they hired three more black women, but that was about it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's how they were like, here, get to know black people. Read these magazines.
Derrick Barnes:
Yes, talented writers, but from a cultural standpoint, they needed a little help.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Hot from the creative crucible of the Hallmark Writer's Room, Derrick's first two books, Stop, Drop and Chill and the Low-Down, Bad Day Blues both came out in 2004. But earning a living as an emerging author proved to be a challenge.
Derrick Barnes:
We were broke and if you name it, I probably did it down there if it was legal.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What kind of stuff?
Derrick Barnes:
From 2003 to 2005 substitute teaching, I did real estate. I worked for a company called Iron Mountain. I drove trucks. I did a lot of temp jobs, I did landscaping. And when I came home, I was working on my first novel, which came out in 2007, The Making of Dr. Truelove. I finished it and a month later in 2005, hurricane Katrina happened. We were able to escape a hurricane Katrina moved back to Kansas City, Missouri, and The Making a Dr. Truelove came out in 2007. That was my third book. And then in 2008 I signed a chapter book series with Scholastic for a series called Ruby and the Booker Boys. It was four books.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I remember Ruby.
Derrick Barnes:
So I had seven books out 2010. My first middle grade novel entitled We Could Be Brothers, Scholastic published that. I'm thinking I'm about to be the next Walter and then be filthy rich. I went like seven years without any books being published.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
But while he struggled with his own career, Derrick remained connected to the growing community of black writers and artists around him. Even when times were slow, Derrick stayed committed to a fresh vision for black children's books focused on genuine 21st century characters and experiences. He told us that a lot of the inspiration to do so came from one of our former guests, the legend that is Kwame Alexander.
Derrick Barnes:
Kwame Alexander really kicked the door down, I think for black male children's book authors to write in our voice, in our vein and just really be authentically black and have success. I mean he went through a lot too before Crossover, not being able to be published. Crossover was turned down a gazillion times, but when that book hit, I think it really opened up the doors because in a lot of these houses at that time, and I think it has got a little bit more diverse, a lot of the acquisition editors or a lot of gatekeepers, I thought I was writing authentically black books. I wanted to tell black stories, but just wasn't feeling that.
So we were shopping a book about a 10-year-old, Miles Davis, who had a magical trumpet and he was fighting the heat wave. It was in East St. Louis and that book got turned down by everybody. There was two editors. One said they didn't know who Miles Davis was and another one didn't think the book would resonate with anyone so-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What?
Derrick Barnes:
Yeah, it was crazy. I started paying attention to American Library Association Awards when I was at Hallmark, and one thing I noticed was all the books that won that were written by black authors or black illustrators, they all are slavery or runaway slaves. And I said, man, if I ever get a chance to write beyond these two early reader books, I'm going to write books where black characters are similar to the boys that I knew when I was growing up or similar to my boys and black men. To me, we are cocky, we have a lot of swag.
With all the jobs I've had, I see black men from all walks of life. I see them in the projects. I know black judges. Another job I had was outreach for the Kansas City Public Library and we went to the juvenile detention center twice a week and it was full of black and brown boys. We did writing exercises there and some of the most brilliant children I've ever met were incarcerated.
So I was like, if I ever get a chance to write these stories, man, they're not going to be in the projects. They're not going to be, I don't know, just these very noble characters that don't have any personality. They can't be multifaceted like most human beings are. I want my protagonist to be real black boys. And so I think Kwame really kicked down the doors for that. I love him for that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In 2016, that dedication paid off. That was the year that another black artist would inspire the story that changed Derrick's life, Crown and Ode to the Fresh Cut.
Derrick Barnes:
Man, I wrote like 30 some odd books between 2010 and 2017. I just couldn't get any of them published. So what ended up happening was we moved to Charlotte in 2014, still broke. I was approaching 40 years of age and I didn't know what was going to happen. A lot of depression, really down, trying to raise these four boys the best I could. I think that's the reason why we're so close because I poured a lot of myself into them. And staying up late working on books that nobody wanted. So 2016 I was on Facebook and I saw a post by a illustrator named Don Tate.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I love his work.
Derrick Barnes:
And he posted a picture of his teenage son who's now in law school. It was a profile picture of him and he had these designs in his head. It was a beautiful sketch and it's a part of my presentation now when I talk about Crown. So I reached out to him and asked him if he could do that like two more times with different hairstyles and I would write poems to each sketch about how much we love our sons and how much we hold our boys up.
He thought it was a great idea, but he was actually getting paid. He had deadlines. I didn't have anything at the time, but I reached out to Gordon and Gordon was going through some financial issues as well. He actually lives here in Charlotte. He said, yeah, and there are no mistakes in this universe. Gordon C James was meant to illustrate Crown and Ode to The Fresh Cut and I'll be forever grateful for him doing such a amazing job.
And the book came out 2016. 2018, man, I've never received a star review in my life. We had like five or six of them.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It was your mother.
Derrick Barnes:
I never won a award in my life. We won like eight major children's book awards and everything just opened up for me. That was my 12th book.
"My master and myself had quite a number of differences. He found me unsuitable to his purpose. My city life, he said, had had a very pernicious effect upon me. I had almost ruined me for every good purpose and fitted me for everything which was bad. I had lived with him nine months during which time he had given me a number of severe whippings all to no good purpose. He resolved to put me out, as he said, to be broken. And for this purpose he let me for one year to a man named Everett Covey.
Mr. Covey had acquired a very high reputation for breaking young slaves and this reputation was immense value to him. I lived with Mr. Covey one year. During the first six months of that year, scarce a week passed without his whipping me. I was seldom free from a sore back. My awkwardness was almost always his excuse for whipping me.
I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languish. The disposition to read had departed. The cheerful sparked that lingered about my eye died. Mr. Covey seemed now to think he had had me and could do what he pleased.
But at this moment from whence came the spirit, I don't know. I resolved to fight. In suiting my action to the resolution, I seized covey hard by the throat and as I did so I rose. He held on to me and I to him. My resistance was so entirely unexpected that Covey seemed taken all aback. He trembled like a leaf. This gave me assurance and I held him uneasy, causing the blood to run where I touched him with the ends of my fingers.
We were at it for nearly two hours. Covey at length let me go, puffing and blowing at a great rate saying that if I had not resisted, he would not have whipped me half so much. And the truth was that he had not whipped me at all. I considered him as getting entirely the worst end of the bargain. For he had drawn no blood from me, what I had from him.
My long crushed spirit, rose. Cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place and I now resolve that however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping was also succeed in killing me."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
The range of human experience is, well, extensive. There are agonizing pains and fervent loves, exhilarating joys. The list goes on. Derrick's idols throughout his life all embraced their blackness and also the many other facets of their personhood, of their individual human experiences, from pop icon Prince to rap virtuoso Rakim. The searing words that Derrick just read are from Frederick Douglass's memoir, "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
I was a little surprised at first that Derrick chose it since we had talked mostly about contemporary black idols like Prince and Walter Dean Meyers. But the common echo, that of black men sharing their raw experiences with unflinching honesty, resounds in this passage from 1848, just as it does in the lyrics from 1988. Reading Frederick Douglass was a turning point for young Derrick Barnes. You read that in fifth grade.
Derrick Barnes:
10 years old reading that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
10 years old.
Derrick Barnes:
Yeah. I was like, whoa.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's mind-blowing when you're, I mean, it's mind-blowing right now.
Derrick Barnes:
And to just be able to recall that with such elegance, with something so vicious and harsh that happened to you, and he was 16 years old when that happened. I thought that was powerful to be able to write, which I think is passed down as well, the trauma of slavery and the effects of white supremacy. Those kind of things are embedded in us. I think that was embedded in me. It has allowed me now to do what I do, which at the time was very jarring to read what he had gone through.
This is one of American's greatest thinkers, diplomats of all time. And to actually visualize him taking lashes and having broken bones and being sent to someone that was meant to not only break his body but break his spirit. And how that section ended was very, it was encouraging to me, which led me down rabbit hole to learn more about slavery votes.
If you just take slavery in this educational system at it's face value, you would think that slaves were happy-go-lucky and they were happy to be in their place. But there was so many slave revolts, as you can imagine. So when I remember reading that section, it made me encouraged. I wasn't thinking about that at the time. But now that I look back at it and look at what I do now, I consider myself a activist. I consider myself a freedom fighter.
I want to write books that send children down those rabbit holes and have them think about their place in the world and take note of their God-given abilities and what God has given them to use in order to change their environment, in order to be brave and say things that other people may not say in order to make our world a better place, not just our country. Everybody has the ability to do that. I didn't know that at the time when I read this passage, why I was so intrigued by it. Yeah, I want to be a freedom fighter.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You said you feel like you're a freedom fighter, that's what your job is?
Derrick Barnes:
Most definitely. Yeah. I always say that I write to black children, but I write for all children. I make it a point to tell everyday slice of life stories, like the kindergarten books. I have King and Queen of Kindergarten, they just so happen to have black children. But I do write to, these are love letters to black children because I grew up with a dearth of black books. I mean it has gotten so much better. There are a lot more stories being told, but we still could tell more stories.
I was in Milwaukee and I had got off the plane and went straight to one of the schools I was supposed to present. I went to the wrong school. I called my driver up and told them to come back around. I need to go back to the other school.while I was waiting at the door, I think he was in the third grade, this beautiful boy, blonde, blue-eyed. He had a Green Bay Packers jersey on, Midwestern white boy from casting came up to me. He was like, "Mr. Barnes, I'm sorry you have to go, but I just wanted to come up to you and tell you that you are my favorite writers and I have all your books, man."
And I'm looking at this child. I'm like, this is what it's all about. This is what I want to happen. The fact that he reads my stories and he sees these beautiful black characters on it, but he's still able to see himself. He's still able to see himself, and also he's not old enough to read books like Victory Sand, but he will read Victory Sand one day. Those books will take him down a rabbit hole and he'll be able to unlearn any negative things that he's ever been taught about people of color.
I didn't even say anything. I just gave him a hug, man. I gave him a hug and I just thanked him. I said, "Go back to class, man. Get out in the hallway." But that, it really moved me. It made me realize that I am doing what I'm supposed to be doing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's incredible. That was Milwaukee?
Derrick Barnes:
Milwaukee. Yeah, which is really alarming too because I think a year or two ago, I had a week long amount of school visits in a suburb in Birmingham. They were canceled. The superintendent said that there was a parent that was complaining about my books that I was a rabble rouser, and the book they were talking about was, I'm every good thing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh. Not Victory stand?
Derrick Barnes:
No, it was I'm Every Good Thing, which is crazy.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow.
Derrick Barnes:
That was a lot of money. That was a whole week of school visits so I went after him. I reached out to every media outlet that I could and they all responded back to me and I was calling him out. I was trying to get a interview and talk to this guy. I didn't feel like it was a parent. I felt like it was him and all of these wacky school boards across the country who are really doing their children a disservice.
The country is getting blacker and browner and more biracial and you are doing your kids a disservice by not allowing them to learn the history of these people of different cultures. I feel sorry for the children in those spaces. I ended up getting I'm every Good Thing back on the New York Times bestsellers list, but I think artists, we have to go after these people. We have to go after these racist superintendents, school board members, governors even.
I feel kind of uppity sometimes when other artists want me to get involved in banned book type of consortiums. I am going to be a part of a few of those, but I just hate to label my books. I hate to label my own books banned books because they aren't band books. And I think when you put that label on your own work, it kind of stains it, to me.
We have to go after these people and not allow them to do this, not only to us, but the things they're doing to these children. Pulling these books out of schools, books about LGBTQ relationships, issues, books about the history of racism, white supremacy, black history. We're going backwards.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
How does it feel to you to be able to tell those stories, to know there's an audience? You have these people who want those stories now are hungry for the stories. They probably always have been, but I mean in the industry to know that you are able to tell those, to tell the story of Tommy Smith. How does that feel to know that you can have this power?
Derrick Barnes:
When I was struggling, and I always tell this story about how I ended up writing Crown. We're here writing this. This is my office back here. I got furniture and the awards and everything is up, but this room used to be completely bare, nothing. I used to sit in here and work on one of those 30 books that I wrote during my downtime.
This was maybe 2016 and Solo was 11 during this time. He had just came in from outside and I was on the floor right there working on another book. He was eating an apple and he looked down at me and he was like, "Daddy, you know what you should do? You should write the blackest book ever. They already not buying your books so you might as well." And at that time I was trying to write black versions of books.
So during the whole Twilight Era, I wrote a black Dracula book. It was called Dracula Jones. I was trying to tap in with those gatekeepers. What Solo reminded me of was I have an audience that needs these books, that needs the stories of their lives. And I'm so grateful that he reminded me of that because like I said, two weeks later I wrote Crown and Ode to the Fresh Cut.
So now I just really try to, like what he said, write the blackest most authentic stories that I can write, and hopefully write it in such a way that everyone can still see themselves through these characters, through the characters' experiences. We have so much in common, and I think historically for good purpose and good reason, America has done its best to separate us and divide us, a lot of it for economic reasons. But we have so much in common.
I travel all across this country and I meet people in all walks of life, different socioeconomic levels. Everybody wants to be respected and loved and they want their children to have great education. People want healthcare. People want to be understood. Hopefully I tap into that. That's what I tap into by being my authentic self. I'm so grateful that Solomon said that to me that day.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Derrick's entire career has been built around his passion for telling vulnerable and real stories about and for black kids. Given how much he talks about how impactful his own idols were, I asked him what he wants his legacy to be.
Derrick Barnes:
It's kind of the same way that I look at my heroes. The reason why I love John Coltrane so much is because after beating an addiction, he was able to realize that the artwork that he makes is directly connected to God. His music is a extension of what God wants from all of us, and that's for us to embrace the gifts that we've been given to use them for good in order to change the world.
I want to continue to get better as a writer, I want to continue to say things that other people may not say, tell the kind of stories and write the kind of books that I know are going to get to the hands of that little boy in Wisconsin or that little boy in Jackson, Mississippi or that little girl that lives in Los Angeles. I want to write the kind of books that may be the spark to change the way they see themselves and way they see the world and send them down different rabbit holes so they could also join the ranks.
We need as many good people as we possibly can in order to make this thing called life more habitable and hopefully I'm doing that with my work. So I got 11, 12 more books to go. God willing, I may write more books beyond that. I'm putting every single ounce of who I am into every single book that I write so y'all know what to expect. The blackest books you have ever read from yours truly.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yes, we definitely know what to expect. But you said 12 more books. Can you share more about that and what else is next for you?
Derrick Barnes:
I'm under contract to do 12 books right now. When that book comes out, that 12th book, I've been thinking about going back to school. I would like to get my PhD and teach African-American literature from a historic standpoint. But the books that are coming out this year, like I said, Who Got a Game Basketball just came out January.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I love those books by the way. I have-
Derrick Barnes:
Thank you very much.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, baseball and basketball, so good. They really are. These books do not exist. This needed to exist.
Derrick Barnes:
Thank you very much. I'll start working on the Football. That's the last book in the series, football book. I started working on that in the summer, but the Spanish version of I'm Every Good Thing comes out finally in May. So that's going to be awesome. And then I have a picture book by a great illustrator named Shamar Knight Justice. It's called The Brothers and it's just a homage to my big brother and to older siblings and how much they show us the simplest things about just being a human being and being alive.
I just turned in a picture book about one of the experiences of one of the greatest artists, activists of all time, a gentleman named Dick Gregory. I turned in the picture book I'm doing with his son. Oh, neat. Illustrated by the great Frank Morrison. I've been trying to work with Frank. Frank as a friend of mine.
I turned in two books. Gordon James and I are contracted to do two more books. I just turned the second one in. The first one was a collection of 14 essays and 14 original poems. The book is entitled Do It for the People where I'm focused on African American athletes throughout the history of America who have risked it all. So I'm going to use their platforms and many of them have paid for it. So that book is very powerful.
I think Gordon's going to do a great job and just turning in a book of black folk tales. There's some picture book format, but it's a collection of three stories and hopefully we can get a series going. And that's an homage to the great Virginia Hamilton.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
As you heard earlier, Derrick considers himself a freedom fighter, a freedom writer, if you will. This was especially true with his book Victory Stand, which tells the story of one of the most iconic moments at the intersection of sports and civil rights. For his reading challenge, resistance and resilience, Derrick shares a list of fascinating real life stories of freedom fighters, especially some that aren't as well known.
Derrick Barnes:
We talk about resistance and resilience. I just kind of combed through my library and I could have put 50 books on here or a hundred. These were some of the first ones that stuck out to me; Wilmington's Lie. When I first moved to North Carolina, one of the first things I was helping on was learning the history of North Carolina and how important Wilmington was because after reconstruction, North Carolina was the state that had the most black representatives in Congress.
And there were so many communities around the country where black people after the Civil War and after slavery ended, you had communities that were thriving with black businesses. We were a part of the government and black schools, prominent black communities, and they were all destroyed. Wilmington was one of them destroyed by mostly white citizens, and it was okayed by the government. I mean, a lot happened when the Union soldiers were pulled from the south and they just kind of let us be. They just kind of left us to the wolves. And so I was always fascinated by that Wilmington story. That was probably one of the first books that I laid my eyes on when I went through here.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You can find Derrick's challenge Resistance and Resilience at the reading culture pod.com, along with reading challenges from all of our past guests, including Kwame Alexander, Jacqueline Woodson, Katie Camillo, and many more.
Today's Beanstack featured librarian is Connie Sharp, a librarian training and development specialist at Metro Nashville Public Schools. She told us about how her district utilizes Beanstack with community partnerships to encourage students to read.
Connie Sharp:
So we are really excited because not only has Beanstack been a great tool for our schools, but also it's helped to amplify some of our community partnerships. One of our partners is Vanderbilt Athletics, and every year they sponsor two or three challenges for our students. The latest one was Mr. C's Football challenge. So students could read, listen to books, and record their time spent reading or listening and earn badges.
If they complete the challenge, they become Mr. C's Reading Club members. All of the Reading Club members were given two free tickets to a Vanderbilt football game so that was really exciting for our students. They will do different challenges throughout the year that we've had Mr. C's Baseball Challenge, Mr. C's basketball challenge. So we are really excited about that. And then not only are the students earning free tickets, but the winning school who has the highest percent of challenge completions through our district also wins a cookie party from Tiff's Treats. So it's a huge partnership that we are so grateful for.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been the reading culture and you've been listening to our conversation with Derrick Barnes. Again, I'm your host Jordan Lloyd Bookey. Currently I'm reading Instructions for Dancing by Nicola Yoon and Chain Gang, all Stars by Nana Kwame Ajay Brennia. If you enjoy today's episode, please show some love and give us a five star review. It just takes a second and it really helps.
To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture you can check out all of our resources atbetstack.com. And remember to sign up for our newsletter at the reading culture pod.com/newsletter for special offers and bonus content. This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport from Lower Street Media and script edited by Josiah Lamberto Egan. Thanks for joining and keep reading.
I am putting every single ounce of who I am into every single book that I write so y'all know what to expect. The blackest books you have ever read from yours truly.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Derrick Barnes isn't just writing about black kids. He's writing directly to them as sincerely as he possibly can. But to be sincere means to be vulnerable, which is a skill he learned from some of his favorite writers of all time, Musicians.
Derrick Barnes:
Writers that we love the most are the ones that are able to be the most vulnerable and able to make us feel things. I think listening to a lot of R&B music early on when I was a kid allowed me to tap into that, my writing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Derrick is the award-winning author of beloved picture books, Crown, An Ode to The Fresh Cut and the King of Kindergarten. He's won the Ezra Jack Keats book Award, the Newbery Honor, the Coretta Scott King Award among so many others. More recently, he earned a national book award honor for the graphic novel Victory Stand, Raising My Fist for Justice. The man has earned some flowers and surely there are more to come.
In this episode, Derrick shares about how music inspired him to write, about how his idols taught him never to compromise his voice as a black man, and his theory about the quality of music and its connection to our classrooms. He also kind of wraps for us, which is fun.
My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey and this is the Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and illustrators about the ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more. Make sure to check us out on Instagram for giveaways at the Reading Culture pod and subscribe to our newsletter at the reading culturepod.com/newsletter. All right, onto the show.
Let's start when you were younger, where you grew up and what your early life was like.
Derrick Barnes:
Well, my family is from the Delta of Mississippi and they were part of that great migration of black people moving north and moving west just to find jobs and escape the terror of racism and white supremacy. And my folks stopped in Kansas City, Missouri, so that's my place of birth. I always describe myself as a Midwest southern boy. I spent a lot of summers in Mississippi. I'm all Midwest boy, Kansas City, pickup trucks, jeans, boots, football, snowball fights.
I grew up in a single parent household. My mother, she just has a high school education. She was a CNA pretty much my whole childhood. She was a nurse, worked in nursing homes, raised me and my brother Anthony, who's my hero. I fell in love with words very young. I guess when I was in preschool I was reading on elementary school level, got me tested. I was in a gifted program pretty much my whole early education career all the way up until high school. I just fell in love with words and started my writing, my illustrious writing career in the fifth grade. That was a very pivotal year for me.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What happened in fifth grade?
Derrick Barnes:
Well, two things happened. I was diagnosed with type one diabetes.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, I didn't know that.
Derrick Barnes:
That was rough having to cut out all the sweets in my diet and-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
God, when you were in fifth grade.
Derrick Barnes:
Fifth grade having to take four insulin shots a day. Looking back, it has really taught me discipline and structure and I exercise daily. I married a vegan, so I eat pretty clean. It just keeps me sharp, I think.
The second thing that happened was I fell in love with hip hop music. My brother, even though we were in the Midwest, he had a lot of East coast buddies from New York and Philadelphia, so they would always give him mixed tapes. So I always heard stuff before everybody else did, like the new LL Cool J, new Eric B and Rakim, Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince and I just fell in love with hip hop music. And being from Kansas City, which is one of birth places of jazz music, my mother took us to a lot of live shows, R&B, jazz, blues.
I remember I used to copy lyrics from liner notes from albums. You can see the albums up on my wall back there. I used to copy a lot of Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack. I wanted to be like these modern day poets. My fifth grade teacher, Ms. Shelby, recognized how much I love hip hop music and how hip hop is just a child of poetry. So she introduced us to all the writers from the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larson and County Cullen and Langston Hughes, I fell in love with his work. He's one of my homeboys. He's from Missouri, from my home state. So in the fifth grade I studied everything that he wrote.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So you listened to Stevie, you listened to Roberta Flack and then hip hop you were listening to-
Derrick Barnes:
I said Roberta Flack is the first woman I fell in love with. We would get up on Saturday mornings and clean and my mother would have her albums on and she just sounds like an angel to me.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What's your jam for her? If you're going to play something, what are you going to?
Derrick Barnes:
So my favorite song of hers is That's No Way to Say Goodbye. When we get off you have to check that out. I love that song man, so much. There's no way to Say Goodbye, Killing Me Softly, obviously. All of her songs with Donnie Hathaway, but her first album was a classic too.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And I heard you were a big Prince fan.
Derrick Barnes:
I love Prince so much, man. When I mentioned the musicians that I like, I almost never mentioned Prince because I guess I'm being interviewed about children's books and Prince really, at nine to 11 really made me feel naughty in a lot of ways.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
He does still so that.
Derrick Barnes:
Yeah, but also it was a lot of freedom in his music. Here is a black man who is a prodigy, really. Taught himself how to play all these instruments and he was very open about his sexuality. There was no other artist like him that was effeminate in a lot of ways, but he was very open about the way he felt about love and women, just very free.
And for a young black artist, seeing somebody put themselves out in the world that way makes you feel like I can be myself too. I can write about what I want to write about. I can sing about what I want to sing about. So Prince provided me with a lot of freedom.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Do you teach that to your kids now?
Derrick Barnes:
Yeah, in a subliminal way. And I think it's important that we listen to their music too. I think we get into this ageism type world with our children and talking about how horrible their music is, but you have to understand why they are into... A lot of it is a group thing too. They maybe listen to certain artists because everybody else listens to them.
I do try to listen to their music and when they're in my car, it's just my music. I do give them a chance to play their music. But ever since they were babies, we exposed them to a lot of music, jazz, world music. My wife listens to a lot of Afrobeat, a lot of African music. She's a West African dancer, so they pretty much heard everything.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay, so music from today with an open mind. I got that. What about the hip hop of today, given the impact that the genre had on you as a kid?
Derrick Barnes:
The level of hip hop music has changed and there's a direct correlation to the emphasis that our current education system puts on language arts, and a real sincere effort to really focus on language and the richness of language and the huge array of talented writers. We don't have that anymore.
Like I said, I was in elementary school and high school in the eighties and the nineties and I had a lot of great teachers. It was the tail end of the civil rights era. When I heard of Rakim, I was able to appreciate he was one of the first MCs to use in a rhyme instead of that AB pattern. So instead of saying, "I went to the store and got me a drink, sat on the curb so that I could think that's a AB pattern, but Rakim was able to put rhymes in between those spaces. I take seven MCs, putting them in the line as seven more brothers who think they can rhyme. It'll take seven more before I go for mine. Now that's 21 MCs eight up. At the same time.
I was able to recognize that because of the literature that we were reading and the different structure of the poetry stances. You really put value into that. So even people marvel at the Wu-Tang Clan, but you can tell they had great English teachers because the language is so complex. Their rhyming patterns are so complex and when you hear today's MCs, it is something beneath the simple AB pattern. They don't even have a vocabulary. They don't have a extensive vocabulary to use. It's just a-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, it is a really interesting take on it but let's get back to your early writing. You mentioned that your career began in fifth grade. So what was the story that you wrote about?
Derrick Barnes:
I had just finished watching Lady and the Tramp. So I wrote a story about these dogs traveling across the country looking for a magic bone that was going to save the world. I discovered my superpower that day that I can use the English language in my imagination to captivate people. I discovered a skill that my peers didn't have that I was able to make things appear where nothing was there, just out of thin air be able to tell stories and craft and create character. So I started writing everything after that, more poems, more short stories, more raps, love letters, everything. Anything I can give my hands on.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Were you a romancer with your-?
Derrick Barnes:
I was. I was. I learned how to talk to girls early, especially in middle school, in high school. And really, a lot of it is listening to a lot of R&B music and studying those lyrics. And really the writers that we love the most, I think this is the case for all of us, the writers that we love the most are ones that are able to be the most vulnerable and able to make us feel things. I think listening to a lot of R&B music early on when I was a kid allowed me to tap into that in my writing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So you knew early on, you knew you wanted to write?
Derrick Barnes:
I think a lot of it was I didn't see anybody. I mean obviously I knew about Walter Dean Myers and writers at a distant, but there were no black male writers that were tangible that were accessible to me so that wasn't even a possibility. The only thing, I just love writing and I kept a lot of spiral notebooks and just wrote and created characters.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Always poetry, always inverse or more prose?
Derrick Barnes:
I always wrote a lot of free verse. To be honest with you, I didn't write a lot of verse until I started working at Hallmark Cards. August of 1999, I was hired as the first black man in the history of Hallmark Cards to be a creative copywriter.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow.
Derrick Barnes:
And it was like being in graduate school. I met so many talented painters, artists, lettering artist, writers obviously. Yeah, it was the first time I felt like I was around my type of people on a daily basis, other creatives. And I got healthcare, which my mother was really proud of me.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Do you remember some of the first cards that you worked on?
Derrick Barnes:
I did everything. I did mahogany, I did every holiday.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Excuse me. Was mahogany happening before there were black copywriters?
Derrick Barnes:
Yeah.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Interesting.
Derrick Barnes:
Yeah, it was crazy. Sometimes they had an all white, so they may have black illustrators, but they were white writers. And so say if we were working on Valentine's Day, it was really tripped me out. The first project was Valentine's Day, it was mahogany. And when we got done... So say they would need 12 new cards and there'll be maybe four, five illustrators, maybe three writers, and they would have a sheet and tell us what we need. It had these categories. We would divide them and I would work with one illustrator and I have two of those cards.
And when the meeting was over with, they had a table with all these black resources like Jet Magazine, black movies because it was mostly white writers. It was just myself and it was another lady, Sharon. She was really sweet to me, still is. And then while I was there, I think they hired three more black women, but that was about it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's how they were like, here, get to know black people. Read these magazines.
Derrick Barnes:
Yes, talented writers, but from a cultural standpoint, they needed a little help.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Hot from the creative crucible of the Hallmark Writer's Room, Derrick's first two books, Stop, Drop and Chill and the Low-Down, Bad Day Blues both came out in 2004. But earning a living as an emerging author proved to be a challenge.
Derrick Barnes:
We were broke and if you name it, I probably did it down there if it was legal.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What kind of stuff?
Derrick Barnes:
From 2003 to 2005 substitute teaching, I did real estate. I worked for a company called Iron Mountain. I drove trucks. I did a lot of temp jobs, I did landscaping. And when I came home, I was working on my first novel, which came out in 2007, The Making of Dr. Truelove. I finished it and a month later in 2005, hurricane Katrina happened. We were able to escape a hurricane Katrina moved back to Kansas City, Missouri, and The Making a Dr. Truelove came out in 2007. That was my third book. And then in 2008 I signed a chapter book series with Scholastic for a series called Ruby and the Booker Boys. It was four books.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I remember Ruby.
Derrick Barnes:
So I had seven books out 2010. My first middle grade novel entitled We Could Be Brothers, Scholastic published that. I'm thinking I'm about to be the next Walter and then be filthy rich. I went like seven years without any books being published.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
But while he struggled with his own career, Derrick remained connected to the growing community of black writers and artists around him. Even when times were slow, Derrick stayed committed to a fresh vision for black children's books focused on genuine 21st century characters and experiences. He told us that a lot of the inspiration to do so came from one of our former guests, the legend that is Kwame Alexander.
Derrick Barnes:
Kwame Alexander really kicked the door down, I think for black male children's book authors to write in our voice, in our vein and just really be authentically black and have success. I mean he went through a lot too before Crossover, not being able to be published. Crossover was turned down a gazillion times, but when that book hit, I think it really opened up the doors because in a lot of these houses at that time, and I think it has got a little bit more diverse, a lot of the acquisition editors or a lot of gatekeepers, I thought I was writing authentically black books. I wanted to tell black stories, but just wasn't feeling that.
So we were shopping a book about a 10-year-old, Miles Davis, who had a magical trumpet and he was fighting the heat wave. It was in East St. Louis and that book got turned down by everybody. There was two editors. One said they didn't know who Miles Davis was and another one didn't think the book would resonate with anyone so-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What?
Derrick Barnes:
Yeah, it was crazy. I started paying attention to American Library Association Awards when I was at Hallmark, and one thing I noticed was all the books that won that were written by black authors or black illustrators, they all are slavery or runaway slaves. And I said, man, if I ever get a chance to write beyond these two early reader books, I'm going to write books where black characters are similar to the boys that I knew when I was growing up or similar to my boys and black men. To me, we are cocky, we have a lot of swag.
With all the jobs I've had, I see black men from all walks of life. I see them in the projects. I know black judges. Another job I had was outreach for the Kansas City Public Library and we went to the juvenile detention center twice a week and it was full of black and brown boys. We did writing exercises there and some of the most brilliant children I've ever met were incarcerated.
So I was like, if I ever get a chance to write these stories, man, they're not going to be in the projects. They're not going to be, I don't know, just these very noble characters that don't have any personality. They can't be multifaceted like most human beings are. I want my protagonist to be real black boys. And so I think Kwame really kicked down the doors for that. I love him for that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In 2016, that dedication paid off. That was the year that another black artist would inspire the story that changed Derrick's life, Crown and Ode to the Fresh Cut.
Derrick Barnes:
Man, I wrote like 30 some odd books between 2010 and 2017. I just couldn't get any of them published. So what ended up happening was we moved to Charlotte in 2014, still broke. I was approaching 40 years of age and I didn't know what was going to happen. A lot of depression, really down, trying to raise these four boys the best I could. I think that's the reason why we're so close because I poured a lot of myself into them. And staying up late working on books that nobody wanted. So 2016 I was on Facebook and I saw a post by a illustrator named Don Tate.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I love his work.
Derrick Barnes:
And he posted a picture of his teenage son who's now in law school. It was a profile picture of him and he had these designs in his head. It was a beautiful sketch and it's a part of my presentation now when I talk about Crown. So I reached out to him and asked him if he could do that like two more times with different hairstyles and I would write poems to each sketch about how much we love our sons and how much we hold our boys up.
He thought it was a great idea, but he was actually getting paid. He had deadlines. I didn't have anything at the time, but I reached out to Gordon and Gordon was going through some financial issues as well. He actually lives here in Charlotte. He said, yeah, and there are no mistakes in this universe. Gordon C James was meant to illustrate Crown and Ode to The Fresh Cut and I'll be forever grateful for him doing such a amazing job.
And the book came out 2016. 2018, man, I've never received a star review in my life. We had like five or six of them.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It was your mother.
Derrick Barnes:
I never won a award in my life. We won like eight major children's book awards and everything just opened up for me. That was my 12th book.
"My master and myself had quite a number of differences. He found me unsuitable to his purpose. My city life, he said, had had a very pernicious effect upon me. I had almost ruined me for every good purpose and fitted me for everything which was bad. I had lived with him nine months during which time he had given me a number of severe whippings all to no good purpose. He resolved to put me out, as he said, to be broken. And for this purpose he let me for one year to a man named Everett Covey.
Mr. Covey had acquired a very high reputation for breaking young slaves and this reputation was immense value to him. I lived with Mr. Covey one year. During the first six months of that year, scarce a week passed without his whipping me. I was seldom free from a sore back. My awkwardness was almost always his excuse for whipping me.
I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languish. The disposition to read had departed. The cheerful sparked that lingered about my eye died. Mr. Covey seemed now to think he had had me and could do what he pleased.
But at this moment from whence came the spirit, I don't know. I resolved to fight. In suiting my action to the resolution, I seized covey hard by the throat and as I did so I rose. He held on to me and I to him. My resistance was so entirely unexpected that Covey seemed taken all aback. He trembled like a leaf. This gave me assurance and I held him uneasy, causing the blood to run where I touched him with the ends of my fingers.
We were at it for nearly two hours. Covey at length let me go, puffing and blowing at a great rate saying that if I had not resisted, he would not have whipped me half so much. And the truth was that he had not whipped me at all. I considered him as getting entirely the worst end of the bargain. For he had drawn no blood from me, what I had from him.
My long crushed spirit, rose. Cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place and I now resolve that however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping was also succeed in killing me."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
The range of human experience is, well, extensive. There are agonizing pains and fervent loves, exhilarating joys. The list goes on. Derrick's idols throughout his life all embraced their blackness and also the many other facets of their personhood, of their individual human experiences, from pop icon Prince to rap virtuoso Rakim. The searing words that Derrick just read are from Frederick Douglass's memoir, "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
I was a little surprised at first that Derrick chose it since we had talked mostly about contemporary black idols like Prince and Walter Dean Meyers. But the common echo, that of black men sharing their raw experiences with unflinching honesty, resounds in this passage from 1848, just as it does in the lyrics from 1988. Reading Frederick Douglass was a turning point for young Derrick Barnes. You read that in fifth grade.
Derrick Barnes:
10 years old reading that.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
10 years old.
Derrick Barnes:
Yeah. I was like, whoa.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's mind-blowing when you're, I mean, it's mind-blowing right now.
Derrick Barnes:
And to just be able to recall that with such elegance, with something so vicious and harsh that happened to you, and he was 16 years old when that happened. I thought that was powerful to be able to write, which I think is passed down as well, the trauma of slavery and the effects of white supremacy. Those kind of things are embedded in us. I think that was embedded in me. It has allowed me now to do what I do, which at the time was very jarring to read what he had gone through.
This is one of American's greatest thinkers, diplomats of all time. And to actually visualize him taking lashes and having broken bones and being sent to someone that was meant to not only break his body but break his spirit. And how that section ended was very, it was encouraging to me, which led me down rabbit hole to learn more about slavery votes.
If you just take slavery in this educational system at it's face value, you would think that slaves were happy-go-lucky and they were happy to be in their place. But there was so many slave revolts, as you can imagine. So when I remember reading that section, it made me encouraged. I wasn't thinking about that at the time. But now that I look back at it and look at what I do now, I consider myself a activist. I consider myself a freedom fighter.
I want to write books that send children down those rabbit holes and have them think about their place in the world and take note of their God-given abilities and what God has given them to use in order to change their environment, in order to be brave and say things that other people may not say in order to make our world a better place, not just our country. Everybody has the ability to do that. I didn't know that at the time when I read this passage, why I was so intrigued by it. Yeah, I want to be a freedom fighter.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You said you feel like you're a freedom fighter, that's what your job is?
Derrick Barnes:
Most definitely. Yeah. I always say that I write to black children, but I write for all children. I make it a point to tell everyday slice of life stories, like the kindergarten books. I have King and Queen of Kindergarten, they just so happen to have black children. But I do write to, these are love letters to black children because I grew up with a dearth of black books. I mean it has gotten so much better. There are a lot more stories being told, but we still could tell more stories.
I was in Milwaukee and I had got off the plane and went straight to one of the schools I was supposed to present. I went to the wrong school. I called my driver up and told them to come back around. I need to go back to the other school.while I was waiting at the door, I think he was in the third grade, this beautiful boy, blonde, blue-eyed. He had a Green Bay Packers jersey on, Midwestern white boy from casting came up to me. He was like, "Mr. Barnes, I'm sorry you have to go, but I just wanted to come up to you and tell you that you are my favorite writers and I have all your books, man."
And I'm looking at this child. I'm like, this is what it's all about. This is what I want to happen. The fact that he reads my stories and he sees these beautiful black characters on it, but he's still able to see himself. He's still able to see himself, and also he's not old enough to read books like Victory Sand, but he will read Victory Sand one day. Those books will take him down a rabbit hole and he'll be able to unlearn any negative things that he's ever been taught about people of color.
I didn't even say anything. I just gave him a hug, man. I gave him a hug and I just thanked him. I said, "Go back to class, man. Get out in the hallway." But that, it really moved me. It made me realize that I am doing what I'm supposed to be doing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's incredible. That was Milwaukee?
Derrick Barnes:
Milwaukee. Yeah, which is really alarming too because I think a year or two ago, I had a week long amount of school visits in a suburb in Birmingham. They were canceled. The superintendent said that there was a parent that was complaining about my books that I was a rabble rouser, and the book they were talking about was, I'm every good thing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh. Not Victory stand?
Derrick Barnes:
No, it was I'm Every Good Thing, which is crazy.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow.
Derrick Barnes:
That was a lot of money. That was a whole week of school visits so I went after him. I reached out to every media outlet that I could and they all responded back to me and I was calling him out. I was trying to get a interview and talk to this guy. I didn't feel like it was a parent. I felt like it was him and all of these wacky school boards across the country who are really doing their children a disservice.
The country is getting blacker and browner and more biracial and you are doing your kids a disservice by not allowing them to learn the history of these people of different cultures. I feel sorry for the children in those spaces. I ended up getting I'm every Good Thing back on the New York Times bestsellers list, but I think artists, we have to go after these people. We have to go after these racist superintendents, school board members, governors even.
I feel kind of uppity sometimes when other artists want me to get involved in banned book type of consortiums. I am going to be a part of a few of those, but I just hate to label my books. I hate to label my own books banned books because they aren't band books. And I think when you put that label on your own work, it kind of stains it, to me.
We have to go after these people and not allow them to do this, not only to us, but the things they're doing to these children. Pulling these books out of schools, books about LGBTQ relationships, issues, books about the history of racism, white supremacy, black history. We're going backwards.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
How does it feel to you to be able to tell those stories, to know there's an audience? You have these people who want those stories now are hungry for the stories. They probably always have been, but I mean in the industry to know that you are able to tell those, to tell the story of Tommy Smith. How does that feel to know that you can have this power?
Derrick Barnes:
When I was struggling, and I always tell this story about how I ended up writing Crown. We're here writing this. This is my office back here. I got furniture and the awards and everything is up, but this room used to be completely bare, nothing. I used to sit in here and work on one of those 30 books that I wrote during my downtime.
This was maybe 2016 and Solo was 11 during this time. He had just came in from outside and I was on the floor right there working on another book. He was eating an apple and he looked down at me and he was like, "Daddy, you know what you should do? You should write the blackest book ever. They already not buying your books so you might as well." And at that time I was trying to write black versions of books.
So during the whole Twilight Era, I wrote a black Dracula book. It was called Dracula Jones. I was trying to tap in with those gatekeepers. What Solo reminded me of was I have an audience that needs these books, that needs the stories of their lives. And I'm so grateful that he reminded me of that because like I said, two weeks later I wrote Crown and Ode to the Fresh Cut.
So now I just really try to, like what he said, write the blackest most authentic stories that I can write, and hopefully write it in such a way that everyone can still see themselves through these characters, through the characters' experiences. We have so much in common, and I think historically for good purpose and good reason, America has done its best to separate us and divide us, a lot of it for economic reasons. But we have so much in common.
I travel all across this country and I meet people in all walks of life, different socioeconomic levels. Everybody wants to be respected and loved and they want their children to have great education. People want healthcare. People want to be understood. Hopefully I tap into that. That's what I tap into by being my authentic self. I'm so grateful that Solomon said that to me that day.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Derrick's entire career has been built around his passion for telling vulnerable and real stories about and for black kids. Given how much he talks about how impactful his own idols were, I asked him what he wants his legacy to be.
Derrick Barnes:
It's kind of the same way that I look at my heroes. The reason why I love John Coltrane so much is because after beating an addiction, he was able to realize that the artwork that he makes is directly connected to God. His music is a extension of what God wants from all of us, and that's for us to embrace the gifts that we've been given to use them for good in order to change the world.
I want to continue to get better as a writer, I want to continue to say things that other people may not say, tell the kind of stories and write the kind of books that I know are going to get to the hands of that little boy in Wisconsin or that little boy in Jackson, Mississippi or that little girl that lives in Los Angeles. I want to write the kind of books that may be the spark to change the way they see themselves and way they see the world and send them down different rabbit holes so they could also join the ranks.
We need as many good people as we possibly can in order to make this thing called life more habitable and hopefully I'm doing that with my work. So I got 11, 12 more books to go. God willing, I may write more books beyond that. I'm putting every single ounce of who I am into every single book that I write so y'all know what to expect. The blackest books you have ever read from yours truly.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yes, we definitely know what to expect. But you said 12 more books. Can you share more about that and what else is next for you?
Derrick Barnes:
I'm under contract to do 12 books right now. When that book comes out, that 12th book, I've been thinking about going back to school. I would like to get my PhD and teach African-American literature from a historic standpoint. But the books that are coming out this year, like I said, Who Got a Game Basketball just came out January.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I love those books by the way. I have-
Derrick Barnes:
Thank you very much.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, baseball and basketball, so good. They really are. These books do not exist. This needed to exist.
Derrick Barnes:
Thank you very much. I'll start working on the Football. That's the last book in the series, football book. I started working on that in the summer, but the Spanish version of I'm Every Good Thing comes out finally in May. So that's going to be awesome. And then I have a picture book by a great illustrator named Shamar Knight Justice. It's called The Brothers and it's just a homage to my big brother and to older siblings and how much they show us the simplest things about just being a human being and being alive.
I just turned in a picture book about one of the experiences of one of the greatest artists, activists of all time, a gentleman named Dick Gregory. I turned in the picture book I'm doing with his son. Oh, neat. Illustrated by the great Frank Morrison. I've been trying to work with Frank. Frank as a friend of mine.
I turned in two books. Gordon James and I are contracted to do two more books. I just turned the second one in. The first one was a collection of 14 essays and 14 original poems. The book is entitled Do It for the People where I'm focused on African American athletes throughout the history of America who have risked it all. So I'm going to use their platforms and many of them have paid for it. So that book is very powerful.
I think Gordon's going to do a great job and just turning in a book of black folk tales. There's some picture book format, but it's a collection of three stories and hopefully we can get a series going. And that's an homage to the great Virginia Hamilton.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
As you heard earlier, Derrick considers himself a freedom fighter, a freedom writer, if you will. This was especially true with his book Victory Stand, which tells the story of one of the most iconic moments at the intersection of sports and civil rights. For his reading challenge, resistance and resilience, Derrick shares a list of fascinating real life stories of freedom fighters, especially some that aren't as well known.
Derrick Barnes:
We talk about resistance and resilience. I just kind of combed through my library and I could have put 50 books on here or a hundred. These were some of the first ones that stuck out to me; Wilmington's Lie. When I first moved to North Carolina, one of the first things I was helping on was learning the history of North Carolina and how important Wilmington was because after reconstruction, North Carolina was the state that had the most black representatives in Congress.
And there were so many communities around the country where black people after the Civil War and after slavery ended, you had communities that were thriving with black businesses. We were a part of the government and black schools, prominent black communities, and they were all destroyed. Wilmington was one of them destroyed by mostly white citizens, and it was okayed by the government. I mean, a lot happened when the Union soldiers were pulled from the south and they just kind of let us be. They just kind of left us to the wolves. And so I was always fascinated by that Wilmington story. That was probably one of the first books that I laid my eyes on when I went through here.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You can find Derrick's challenge Resistance and Resilience at the reading culture pod.com, along with reading challenges from all of our past guests, including Kwame Alexander, Jacqueline Woodson, Katie Camillo, and many more.
Today's Beanstack featured librarian is Connie Sharp, a librarian training and development specialist at Metro Nashville Public Schools. She told us about how her district utilizes Beanstack with community partnerships to encourage students to read.
Connie Sharp:
So we are really excited because not only has Beanstack been a great tool for our schools, but also it's helped to amplify some of our community partnerships. One of our partners is Vanderbilt Athletics, and every year they sponsor two or three challenges for our students. The latest one was Mr. C's Football challenge. So students could read, listen to books, and record their time spent reading or listening and earn badges.
If they complete the challenge, they become Mr. C's Reading Club members. All of the Reading Club members were given two free tickets to a Vanderbilt football game so that was really exciting for our students. They will do different challenges throughout the year that we've had Mr. C's Baseball Challenge, Mr. C's basketball challenge. So we are really excited about that. And then not only are the students earning free tickets, but the winning school who has the highest percent of challenge completions through our district also wins a cookie party from Tiff's Treats. So it's a huge partnership that we are so grateful for.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been the reading culture and you've been listening to our conversation with Derrick Barnes. Again, I'm your host Jordan Lloyd Bookey. Currently I'm reading Instructions for Dancing by Nicola Yoon and Chain Gang, all Stars by Nana Kwame Ajay Brennia. If you enjoy today's episode, please show some love and give us a five star review. It just takes a second and it really helps.
To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture you can check out all of our resources atbetstack.com. And remember to sign up for our newsletter at the reading culture pod.com/newsletter for special offers and bonus content. This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport from Lower Street Media and script edited by Josiah Lamberto Egan. Thanks for joining and keep reading.