The Shoulders of Giants

March 21 - Today's post contributed by Kristy Dempsey

The Shoulders of Giants

I feel so privileged to be part of this year’s Kidlit Celebrates Women’s History Month because of the legacy of women that have influenced my own life, some of whom have been personal to me as family members, and others to whom I have been exposed through the arts and literature. I am very fond of a quote by Isaac Newton that represents the impact of these women on my life:

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

My own giants have spanned race, religion and culture and have nurtured humility and respect in my soul not only for their great achievements as women, but for their character and service to others.

One such giant – in reality, a tiny sprite in stature! – is Janet Collins, the first African American to perform under contract with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. Collins was the inspiration for my recent picture book A DANCE LIKE STARLIGHT (published by Philomel/Penguin Putnam). I am neither African American nor a ballerina, but in learning about this resilient woman, I strongly identified with her desire and passion. The fire of her dream to dance shines a light on the dedication and hard work it takes to pursue any dream. 

Janet Collins experienced tremendous discrimination in her quest to become a professional dancer. After a successful audition with the famed Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, she declined the prestigious position when they informed her she would have to paint her face white to perform. Throughout her life, Collins also suffered from bouts of depression. During one such occasion, she was hospitalized and later woke to discover she had been sterilized, in accordance with California’s eugenics laws. This undeserved tragedy traumatized Collins, yet she became more determined to pursue her dream and to dance so well that the color of her skin would be no objection. She did just that.

After much success in New York for her solo and ensemble performances, on November 13, 1951 Collins became the first African American to perform under contract with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet.  This event was widely publicized and celebrated by the New York City media.

The reviews were celebratory. The New York Times singled out Collins: "Miss Collins, of course, is magnificent - beautiful of body, technically superb and every sense a dancer." Collins performed with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet for three more years and then chose to leave to pursue other opportunities for performance, as well as teaching dance and choreography.

Eventually though, Collins left the dance world altogether to paint and pursue religious devotion. It was an inauspicious end to the career of the woman who broke the color barrier for African American ballerinas. Yet, Collins was still fervently pursuing her dreams, even as they grew and changed. She was not allowing the opinions or demands of others to determine the course of her life.

It is this character of determination that so appeals to me in Janet Collins as a “giant” who has gone before, as a woman who has made history. It is also why, in A DANCE LIKE STARLIGHT when the main character asks:

Could a colored girl like me/ ever become a prima ballerina?

the answer comes from Janet Collins’s performance.

It is like Miss Collins is dancing for me,Only for me,Showing me who I can be.

Even though Janet Collins broke the color barrier for African American ballerinas in 1951, her passion still serves as an example for the many African American ballerinas who struggle to make their place in a field that continues to be dominated by white dancers. Collins is just one example of the many women in many different fields who have pursued their dreams with hard work, dedication and persistence. A DANCE LIKE STARLIGHT is my song of thanks to all the women throughout history who have shown us who we can be and have given us an example to pursue our dreams with passion.

Kristy Dempsey grew up in a Tennessee holler, became a teenager in a South Carolina town named for a truck stop and went to college thinking she would become something that would take her far, far away from hollers and small towns. She became many different “somethings,” the most recent of which has her a continent away from home working as a teacher and a librarian in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, a bustling city of 4 million people. Ironically she often finds herself writing about home and small towns, brave choices, family relationships and all the things she misses most from her childhood. She is the author of Me with you (Philomel), Mini Racer (Bloomsbury), Surfer Chick (Abrams) and the recent A Dance Like Starlight (Philomel) which received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist and is a Spring 2014 Junior Library Guild Selection.

An Embarrassment of Riches

March 19 - Today's post contributed by Tonya Bolden

An Embarrassment of Riches

In 1906, four-year-old Sarah Rector received a gift that kept on giving: a land allotment of roughly 160 acres in Indian Territory. This was shortly before Indian Territory, along with Oklahoma Territory, became the state of Oklahoma.

And rough Sarah’s acres were—horrible for farming—but down below were barrels and barrels of black gold! In the summer of 1913, at the tender age of eleven Sarah Rector was in the money! This girl was living with her family in the weather-whipped cabin in which she had been born. This was on the outskirts of the small town of Taft, Oklahoma, not far from Muskogee.

Sarah Rector was a “Creek Freedmen,” as black members of the Creek Nation were called, even those, like Sarah who had not been enslaved by Creek Indians (as Sarah’s grandparents and other blacks had been).

Sarah Rector was one of many black and Indian children in early Oklahoma who wound up with oil-rich land after the U.S. government put an end to Indian nations in Indian Territory holding the land in common. Instead, they were forced into individual land ownership. With the Creek Nation the government mandated that each member receive 160 acres more or less.

Year after year, as oil on Sarah’s land kept flowing so did her money from her 12.5 percent of the oil produced by outfits with drilling rights to Sarah’s land. When she turned eighteen in 1920 this lucky young lady had a net worth of more than $10 million in today’s dollars. I cover all this and more in my book Searching for Sarah Rector: The Richest Black Girl in America.

How does her story fit into this site’s 2014 theme? Was Sarah Rector a woman of Character, Courage, and Commitment?

As I reveal in the book, my search for Sarah Rector was rather frustrating as I never got a hold of her—while learning plenty about the drama around her embarrassment of riches. I can’t help but feel that she was in a sense held hostage by her money—money managed by guardians until she was in her twenties, money that brought out the worst in warped, greedy people. I imagine that Sarah had precious little space or peace of mind to develop into her best self. Oil-rich children like Sarah were swindled, kidnapped, murdered. Oil-rich children had to be on guard. Dangers aside, a sudden “rags-to-riches” experience is often very traumatic.

There is evidence that, as a woman, Sarah Rector enjoyed the “good things” in life, from expensive cars to jazzy clothing. However, I never found proof that she devoted some of her money to the endeavors of women who come to mind when we think of Character, Courage, and Commitment, women such as educator and civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune and activist-journalist Lucile Bluford of Kansas City, Missouri, where Rector lived as an adult. Then again, our oil millionaire may well have made donations to many worthy causes anonymously.

While I searched for Sarah Rector I thought a lot about money, a lot about women and money and women’s financial literacy: how we spend, how we save, how we invest.

I still think about women and money today, especially considering the revelations in "The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink." This report, produced by Maria Shriver in partnership with the American Center for Progress, was released on January 12, 2014.

“For too many American women, the dream of ‘having it all’ has morphed into ‘just hanging on,’” said Maria Shriver, daughter of Sargent Shriver, LBJ’s lead general in the War on Poverty when I was a girl. [http://www.americanprogress.org/press/release/2014/01/07/81640/release-the-shriver-report-a-womans-nation-pushes-back-from-the-brink/]

Those “too many American women” of whom Maria Shriver speaks are not a few million women, but 42 million souls living in or on the edge of poverty. These 42 million women have about 28 million children depending on them.

According to the Census Bureau, in 2010 there were nearly 157 million females in the nation (a little more than 50 percent of the population). Of that number, about 40 million were age 19 and under and about 117 million age twenty and up. [http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf]

So if 42 million of roughly 117 million women in America live in or on the brink of poverty, then nearly one in three is in dire financial straits, a stressor that often leads to mental and physical health problems. And, remember, some of these women have children.

Poverty in America is an income of $11,670 for an individual.
Poverty in America is an income of 15,730 for a family of two.
Poverty in America is an income of $23,850 for a family of four.

Wealth in America?

It’s Oprah Winfrey with a net worth of 2.9 billion; Abigail Johnson (Fidelity Financial Services) with a net worth of more than 17 billion, and Jacqueline Badger Mars (think Mars bars and M&Ms) with a net worth of more than $20 billion. I certainly do not begrudge these women their riches. I’m just reminding us all that we do not live in a poor nation and yet we have millions of women—along with girls, boys and men—in hardship. What’s more the wealth gap is widening. “Income for the highest-earning 1% of Americans soared 31% from 2009 through 2012, after adjusting for inflation,” reported AP Business Writer Hannah Dreier in February 2014. [http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/02/23/5-tycoons-who-want-to-close-the-wealth-gap/5757367/]

American women (and men) of Character, Courage, and Commitment have a job to do.

The job of coming to grips with the howling poverty in our land.
The job of understanding the systemic causes.
The job of making straight-up donations of cash, goods, and services.
The job of teaching people to fish.

We can all do something. When I dream a world, the generals in charge of a new War on Poverty include women with an embarrassment of riches: women who earned it, inherited it, or, like Sarah Rector, just got lucky.

Tonya Bolden, a native New Yorker, is a magna cum laude baccalaureate of Princeton University with a master’s degree from Columbia University. She has authored, co-authored, and edited more than thirty-five books, most for children and young adults. Her work has received a Coretta Scott King Honor Award, a James Madison Book Award, a Cleveland Public Library Sugarman Award, a Virginia Library Association Jefferson Cup, and a NCTE Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children.

You make history every day

March 17 - Today's post provided by Jim Ottaviani and Maris Wicks

You make history every day.

History is, after all, what we choose to remember. You and I and all of us together decide it will be important to talk about "this" event, "that" place, and "those" people in the future.

One of the most important contributions Dian Fossey made, and Jane Goodall and Biruté Galdikas continue to make, is to preserve the history of our nearest neighbors on the evolutionary tree, our next of kin who don't speak or write. They spent the time that others didn't want to give and made the effort others had dismissed as futile.

Especially now that we accept the idea that most people will have many different jobs and maybe even careers, their commitment to doing one important thing and getting better at it every day over the course of decades is almost unbelievable...and is unbelievably admirable.

(By the way, Maris and I are not over here shaking our fists at kids these days who can't stick with one thing for a lifetime. She and I are both well into our second and third careers, respectively!)

What they got in return for this dedication was the chance to see things nobody imagined seeing and map worlds and societies that nobody imagined existed. They got a chance to show us what it means to be human. And then, in the spirit of scientists everywhere, they shared what they learned. All they asked in return was for the opportunity to go learn more and share that too. Sure, they got famous. Or two of them did, anyway. Jane Goodall is one of the best-known scientists on the planet and Dian Fossey ended up with a feature film about her. But when we talk to people about Primates, Maris and I often hear "I know about those two, but who's that last one?" Biruté Galdikas doesn't have the name recognition of her peers, and that's why she has a special place in our storytelling hearts.

She's the one that holds our book together, and her orangutans are the most difficult of all the large primates to study. I remember reading that Dr. Goodall said she could see more chimpanzee behavior in days, maybe even hours, than Dr. Galdikas could in weeks. And yet orangutans may be the most clever primate of all. As the story goes, if you give a caged chimpanzee a screwdriver, he'll probably break it or throw it at you. A gorilla is more likely to cower, or just ignore it. An orangutan, though? She may look like she's ignoring it too, but when you come back the next morning the screwdriver might still be there but you won't find her, since she'll have used it to remove the hinges of the cage door and leave.

I half suspect that this is just a story primatologists tell to describe the different temperaments and intelligences of our fellow primates, so it might not be the kind of true story we read in history books. But it's a story that tells a truth.

You probably have true stories of both kinds in your head. So I hope you spend some time this month remembering and sharing them. Maris and I get to share by making books. It's a privilege afforded to animals with thumbs and computers and paper and publishers and world wide webs at their disposal. I bet you're the kind of animal that has some of those things handy too, so please make some history by filling the world with more stories.

Jim Ottaviani has written nonfiction, science-oriented comics since 1997, notably the number one New York Times bestseller, Feynman and Fallout which was nominated for an Ignatz Award. He has worked as a nuclear engineer, caddy, programmer, and reference librarian. Primates is his first collaboration with artist Maris Wicks. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Maris Wicks (Primates) lives with fellow primate Joe Quinones and their cat, Biggs, in Somerville, Massachusetts.  She has used her opposable thumbs to draw comics for Adhouse Books, Tugboat Press, and Spongebob Comics, and written stories for Image and DC Comics.  When she's not making comics, Maris works as a program educator at the New England Aquarium.  She is an avid tool user and is particularly fond of bananas.

Finding Mumbet

March 14 - Today's post contributed by Gretchen Woelfle

Finding Mumbet

I love writing about little-known people and I’m pleased that editors are publishing books about them. Every season sees more new heroes entering the lists. As for Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman, the hero of Mumbet’s Declaration of Independence (Carolrhoda Books), I discovered her while researching Write on, Mercy! the Secret Life of Mercy Otis Warren. Not for the first time, research for one book led to the next one.

Both Mercy (white and well-educated) and Mumbet (an illiterate slave) lived in Massachusetts during the American Revolution – Mercy in Plymouth, Mumbet in the Berkshires on the western edge of the state.  Both used Revolutionary fervor to advance their causes: Mercy, to write and publish her political views; Mumbet to sue for her freedom. Mumbet, owned by Col. John Ashley, the richest man in town, and tormented by his cruel wife, retained an inner strength that kept her dream of freedom alive.

I try to bond with my subjects, and that often happens when I travel to their home territory. This was true with Mumbet.  ‘Twas a frigid day of January that I was given a “Mumbet tour” in Sheffield and Stockbridge, Massachusetts by historian Barbara Dowling, working for the Trustees of Reservations, the conservation group that owns Ashley House, where Mumbet spent her slave years. The house was closed for winter – it being colder indoors than out! – but Barbara opened it for me to search for traces of Mumbet’s life there.

Ashley House is a comfortable, not grand house, with a big-hearth kitchen where Mumbet worked. An important scene in the book takes place here. Mrs. Ashley, prone to vitriolic outbursts, tried to strike Mumbet’s daughter, Lizzy, but Mumbet took the blow instead. I peeked up the chimney, stuck my arm into the baking oven, gazed into the small room off the kitchen when she and Lizzy probably slept (nearer to the heat than the icy family bedroom upstairs.) I climbed the narrow stairs that she climbed, bringing refreshments for Ashley and other white men who discussed their fight for political freedom from the British. Those were close quarters for a family of six, plus Mumbet and Lizzy, and Mumbet kept her eyes and ears open.

When we left the house and continued our tour, I saw the nearby Bartholomew’s Cobble, far-off Berkshire mountains, and the Housatonic River. They all presented themselves as symbols of Mumbet’s strength and courage, and found their way into my book.

Mumbet finally found her moment and, helped by an ambitious young lawyer, Theodore Sedgwick, sued for her freedom in 1781. He argued that the new state constitution declared that “all men are born free and equal,” and that included Mumbet.  Two years later a judge, citing Mumbet’s case as a precedent, declared slavery unconstitutional in Massachusetts, and all 5000 slaves in the state were freed.

A few miles away from Ashley House sits the imposing Sedgwick estate where Mumbet worked for two decades as housekeeper and second mother to the seven Sedgwick children. She saved enough from her wages to buy a small farm in the hills outside Stockbridge, and retired there to live with her daughter, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.  Her house is gone, but I envisioned her, looking out over the Housatonic Valley that held a lifetime of memories. Her grave, among the Sedgwicks, includes this epitaph written by Catharine Sedgwick, one of Mumbet’s charges:

She was born a slave and remained a slave for nearly thirty years. She could neither read nor write yet in her own sphere she had no superior or equal. She neither wasted time nor property.
She never violated a trust nor failed to perform a duty.
In every situation of domestic trial,
she was the most efficient help, and the tenderest friend.
Good mother, farewell.

Catharine Sedgwick became a writer and it is from her reminiscences that we know much about Mumbet. I ended Mumbet’s Declaration of Independence just after she won her freedom, but she lived long after that, and her life led to me many other African Americans of that era, and another book about worthy and under-reported lives.  I include Mumbet’s later adventures there, but you’ll have to wait until 2015 to read those.

I want to give a shout-out to Alix Delinois, whose illustrations capture the courage and commitment of Mumbet.  She was a victor, not a victim, and Alix’s richly-colored, dynamic paintings perfectly match the character I tried to describe in the text. Alix will be giving a talk on his artwork at Ashley House [http://www.thetrustees.org/places-to-visit/berkshires/ashley-house.html] in Sheffield, Massachusetts on May 10, and we’ll be signing books together.  Do come and join us.

Gretchen Woelfle writes award-winning middle grade fiction, nonfiction, and biographies from her home in Los Angeles. Visit www.gretchenwoelfle.com

See more of Alix Delinois’s work at www.alixdelinois.com