Zetta Elliott's Blog, page 50

I Am Here!

Have you seen I AM HERE! Girls Reclaiming Safe Space at the Skylight Gallery? You haven’t?! Then come out to Restoration Plaza tomorrow and join us for a day of Black women writers, Black girl readers, and lots of BOOKS! In the morning, Restoration celebrates its founder, Robert F. Kennedy, with a Memorial Holiday Party that includes free books for kids. Then at noon, I’ll be participating in a reading, book sale, and signing along with Renée Watson, Tonya Cherie Hegamin, and National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson! I even made butter tarts for the occasion, so please come and eat some for me (otherwise I’ll be having butter tarts for breakfast until Xmas).

silence of the season

I woke up on Friday with a severe case of reverse bronchitis; I know I said I wasn’t going to self-diagnose anymore, but I got bronchitis and/or pneumonia almost every winter as a kid, so I know this illness pretty well. The day before I’d been to see the nutritionist about my high (bad) cholesterol (turns out I’m not pre-pre-diabetic). Came home feeling fine, and not totally convinced that one piece of cake a week was to blame for my test results. Then that evening I had some tightness in my chest and 24 hours later I was curled up on the couch, teeth chattering, unable to stay warm despite multiple layers of clothing and blankets. By Saturday my voice was gone, which hasn’t happened before, but I did notice some improvement. I am slowly getting better but I have a Skype visit scheduled today and worry the kids won’t be able to hear me. Mostly I’m grateful for my healthy immune system, which has worked so hard to fight back against this nasty virus. And I’m grateful for the comforts of my home–the soft couch, the warm bed, the kettle, the food in the fridge, the hot shower (and hot water bottle). Over the weekend I submitted files for my latest MG novel, An Angel for Mariqua. My designer is in Indonesia so she would send me files just as I was going to bed, and I’d keep the computer close by so I could tell when CreateSpace approved the files for printing. My friend Katie Yamasaki worked with incarcerated mothers at Rikers Island to create a mural; she’s now collecting dolls of color for the annual kids Xmas party at Rikers and I’m hoping to also donate copies of this book. Mariqua’s mother has been sent to prison and her older friend Valina has a mother who’s dying of AIDS. This is an excerpt where Mariqua learns about how the virus works:

“Every body has an immune system that’s like a coat of armor,” she said. “The armor helps to protect us from viruses and infections that can make our bodies weak. A person with AIDS loses her armor, and that makes it difficult for her body to heal itself after an attack. When a person with a healthy immune system catches a cold, she gets better after a short while. But when a person with AIDS is exposed to a virus, sometimes that person gets sicker and sicker even though they’re taking medicine.”

I know diseases and prisons aren’t generally associated with Christmas, but I think it’s important to focus on the true spirit of the holidays: love and compassion, forgiveness and redemption. I put up my silver tree yesterday; it’s not the same as having a live tree but it’s still pretty and once the Xmas carols came on, I started to feel more festive. Christmas is my favorite time of year but I also keep it very low-key—no family, maybe no friends, just a lot of quiet time and good food and hopefully a few hours of writing. I watched Peter and the Wolf yesterday, which I just love and has become one of my annual traditions. No words, just Prokofiev’s beautiful music…so touching. You can watch it on You Tube.

 

night wind

walk out into the night

let the wind suck from your eyes

the tears you won’t let fall

World AIDS Day

I’m almost ready to release An Angel for Mariqua; over the weekend I took photos of my lovely model, Sumi, and my designer is now working on the cover. A colleague from the NYC Health Department is working on a kid-friendly afterword, which is important since this middle grade novel addresses HIV/AIDS in the Black community. Here’s a summary:

“Christmas is coming, but eight-year-old Mariqua Thatcher isn’t looking forward to the holidays. Mama’s gone and Gramma doesn’t know what to do with her feisty granddaughter. Almost every day Mariqua gets into a fight at school, and no one seems to understand how she feels inside. But things start to change when a mysterious street vendor gives Mariqua a beautifully carved angel as a gift. Each night Mariqua whispers in the angel’s ear, and soon her wishes start to come true! Mariqua begins to do better at school, and she even wins an important role in the church pageant. But best of all, Mariqua becomes friends with Valina Peterson, a teenager who lives in Mariqua’s building. Valina helps Mariqua learn how to control her anger, and reminds her pretend little sister that “everyone has a story to tell.” Their friendship is tested, however, when Mariqua discovers that Valina has been keeping a secret about her own mother. Can the magic angel make things better?” 

I wrote this novel back in 2000, and wish I could say that HIV infection rates were no longer at crisis levels, but that simply isn’t true. Black women are particularly impacted and I hope my book will help start a much needed, family friendly conversation in our community. I thought I would share some statistics from the CDC since today is World AIDS Day.

New HIV Infectionsa

African Americans accounted for an estimated 44% of all new HIV infections among adults and adolescents (aged 13 years or older) in 2010, despite representing only 12% of the US population; considering the smaller size of the African American population in the United States, this represents a population rate that is 8 times that of whites overall.
In 2010, African American women accounted for 6,100 (29%) of the estimated new HIV infections among all adult and adolescent African Americans. This number represents a decrease of 21% since 2008. Most new HIV infections among African American women (87%; 5,300) are attributed to heterosexual contact.c The estimated rate of new HIV infections for African American women (38.1/100,000 population) was 20 times that of white women and almost 5 times that of Hispanic/Latino women.d

HIV and AIDS Diagnosese and Deaths

At some point in their lifetimes, an estimated 1 in 16 African American men and 1 in 32 African American women will be diagnosed with HIV infection.
In 2011, an estimated 15,958 African Americans were diagnosed with AIDS in the United States.
By the end of 2010, an estimated 260,821 African Americans ever diagnosed with AIDS had died in the United States.

Mayor Bill de Blasio speaking at the Apollo Theater in Harlem on Worlds AIDS Day in NYC.

Indies First!

It’s Small Business Saturday and if you’re thinking of giving books for the holidays, I urge you to order them online from Teaching for Change. If you can visit the DC store, you’re in for a real treat—the majority of their kids books are by and about people of color! Plus the people who work in the store have a commitment to social justice so you can trust that the CONTENT of those diverse books is CORRECT. I was honored to have one of my books included on their Best of 2014 list. Indie bookstores often want authors to support them, but they won’t all support indie authors like me. Teaching for Change is one of the few bookstores that carries my books for young readers, but they’re facing hard economic times so please give them your support!

attitude of gratitude

Walter H. Williams, Butterflies (1973)

Yesterday I grabbed a post-it note and wrote, “I am american/but not the way you are American.” Then I stuck the note on my bulletin board and went back to writing The Return. I managed to get 2000 words down before turning in for the night, and all in all had a pretty wonderful Thanksgiving. Canadian Thanksgiving is in October and I’ve never really observed the holiday here in the US; I don’t have family in NYC, it’s too close to Christmas, I hate to shop, and spending the day with someone else’s family can be an agony. This year I picked up some traditional fare from a gourmet deli in Brooklyn Heights and planned to spend the day on the couch with my laptop. I went for a run in the morning, then heated up my feast and wrote about Nyla and Keem’s adventures in Senegal. I was tempted to start a new picture book inspired by the work of Walter H. Williams (1920-1998); I saw one of his paintings in DC and immediately a story began unfolding in my mind. Children appear to be picking cotton but beyond the dead tree, the cotton field transforms into a child’s paradise filled with butterflies and sunflowers. A little online research let me know that Williams was from Brooklyn and took art classes at the museum, but spent most of his life as an expat in Copenhagen. Orange is the color of my childhood and these paintings from the late 1960s really resonate with me. I’ve opened a new file but will try to get a few thousand words done on The Return before I switch gears.

This morning I received another terrible Canadian review, this time for The Phoenix on Barkley Street (the reviewer said the phoenix looked like “a buffoon”). I have many things to be grateful for, and the immigrant/expat in me will ever be thankful for the chance to trade my life in Canada for this american life. I’m lucky to have been born and educated in Canada, but I thank God my late father gave me a way out…

Walter H. Williams, “Roots, Southern Landscape”

ghost

I woke at 4:30am on Monday, an hour ahead of my alarm. I was so looking forward to my day in DC that I couldn’t sleep, and I knew I’d have time to doze on the train. I think I’ve been fixated on dandelions and hummingbirds because I realize how central movement is to my identity. I’m a homebody but I’m also a migrant; I’m a creature of habit and cling to my little routines, but every so often I still need to uproot myself and move. I think it’s in my blood. My father was restless and when he slipped into one of his moods, he would get in the car in drive—sometimes around the city, sometimes across the border. I prefer the comfort of Amtrak’s quiet car (no driving means more dreaming). I didn’t get a window seat on the way down to DC, but I still spent the three hours dozing and daydreaming and wondering just how I manage to live this life. I can leave NYC and slip into some other city like a ghost, totally anonymous, invisible, not speaking except to ask for directions. The Amtrak agent said I could take the Metro to the National Mall but I looked at the map and it didn’t look that far. Of course, my feet are blistered now because I wound up walking 20K steps on Monday. I walked from Union Station to the Lincoln Memorial, stopping to visit a few gardens and the Museum of African Art along the way. Then I backtracked and went to the MLK Memorial before walking up to Busboys & Poets at 14th and V. And that whole time no one spoke to me except one brother on the street, and by that point in the day I didn’t even mind because I’d had enough silence to satisfy me. Indie bookstores want authors to support them and I generally do, but some indie bookstores are better than others and the Teaching for Change bookstore (which is inside the cafe) is THE BEST. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many of my titles prominently displayed in a bookstore. I bought a copy of Brown Girl Dreaming while chatting with the sales guys about Ursula Le Guin’s speech at the National Book Awards and the potential of WNDB to create lasting change in the publishing industry. Then I sank into one of the cafe’s plush sofas, ordered a pomegranate lemonade, and disappeared again inside Jackie’s beautiful book. The ladies arrived two hours later and by then I was no longer a ghost; people who knew me called me by my name and my anonymity was gone. There were two women in our party I’d never met before, Nina and Kya, but we all chatted and laughed and shared food as if we’d known one another forever. And that is the migrant’s miracle…in an instant, any place can become home. I *really* like DC. As I dragged myself up 14th Street I could see signs pointing to Carter G. Woodson’s house; many of the blocks I looked down were lined with row houses that looked more than a hundred years old and I thought to myself, “There’s history here.” Other ghosts with stories to tell. I will definitely be going back…

l-r: Edith Campbell, Nina Candia, me, Ebony Thomas, Kya Mangrum, Deborah Menkart

a singing tree

I have a headache today but I don’t want to take any aspirin. I have a headache because I need to cry but I don’t want to cry because what good would that do? I think today should be about discomfort. This morning I said I would practice radical self-care and saw myself going to the park for a run, but instead I just came home with two slices of pizza. Tomorrow my doctor’s going to tell me that I am pre- pre-diabetic; my lab results were posted online and I worked it out for myself. I have to lose 7% of my body weight and that means giving up sugar. Something sweet and a cup of tea—that’s what comfort looked like when I was a child. And yes, obesity and diabetes run in the family. Yesterday I pitied myself for having to give up sugar but today it feels appropriate. I tried to “stay positive” this morning. I read and responded to some kids in Colorado who read Bird and sent me their reviews and artwork. I decided to send them my latest books when one girl, Anastasia, urged me to “keep riting.” But then I listened to analysis of the Ferguson crisis on the radio and wound up going out into the grey day scowling. The clerk behind the glass at the post office was chatting with her friend and I decided not to be annoyed; maybe they’re talking about Ferguson, I thought, but then she leaned in and told me that one of their colleagues had died suddenly overnight. “You never know when your time will come,” she said before wishing me a good day. I offered my condolences and then went over to the farmer’s market, bypassed all the people buying fresh vegetables for Thanksgiving, and went straight for the pastry tent. I was good, I bought a sugar-free apple pocket, and decided to walk a few extra blocks to the train. Then a young white man asked the Black woman in front of me, “Would you like to help save the polar bears?” and I muttered, “Get the f*** out of here with that mess.” Not because I don’t love polar bears but because he has the nerve to expect Black women to care about his cause when he probably doesn’t care about ours. I don’t think he heard me and I know I’m making a lot of assumptions, but today I feel I have that right.

I will turn this day around. I’m reading Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming and that’s a balm for the soul. In the pizza shop they were playing Ella Fitzgerald and Louie Armstrong, and singing along to “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” made me feel better for a few minutes. We still have something to hold onto. They haven’t stripped the whole tree bare. “One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes/An everlasting song, a singing tree…”

the seed within

Lately I’ve been thinking about seeds. I need to design a new Rosetta Press logo and want to add some art to my website landing page (possibly a dandelion). I woke up this morning with Jean Toomer’s words from Cane in my mind: “One seed was saved for me.” Which I misremembered—it’s “plum,” not “seed”—but the sentiment is the same. With the mass protests in Mexico over the government-involved disappearance of 43 students, this meme has been circulating on Facebook: “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” And then a couple of days ago I declared myself “too through” with the publishing industry but a wise friend pushed back:

ME: reacting to racism sucks up SO much of our time and energy and limited resources. They give us more money and we keep working to “fix” people who don’t want to be fixed…

NATHALIE: Though you might feel at times it’s waste of your time, your voice is missed if you don’t keep speaking up. Just one seed sowed can sprout a hundred, and more. Whether it be through pushing with the stories you miraculously manage to put out there, or answering a simple FB post. Thanks for giving the latter another try. It’s not in vain.

This morning I read an article sent to me by Libertad about race and the absence of racism in The Hunger Games and other YA dystopian books-to-films. I just saw Mockingjay on Friday and didn’t have much to say at the end. More Black folks dressed as sharecroppers (I guess they’re still picking cotton), more PoC looking to Katniss for salvation (which quickly gets them killed, of course), and a couple more secondary characters to replace Cinna and Rue. I don’t think I saw any Asians in the film, maybe one Latino. The article ends with a consideration of Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, which again got me thinking about seeds. I haven’t read the Bible in ages but if I remember correctly, the lesson for the sower is not to waste time throwing seeds on unreceptive soil since seeds will only thrive under the right conditions. But Nathalie’s point is that if you scatter seeds by speaking out, you never know how many people you might reach. This morning on Twitter folks have been sharing a quote from my 2013 conversation with Ibi Zoboi, “Black Girls Hunger for Heroes, Too.”

ZETTA: I haven’t read the trilogy, but I watched the first film at home and the second one in the theater. And when it got to the part where Gale was being whipped, I could sense the tension in the [interracial] audience. And I thought to myself: “How many people in here went to see 12 Years a Slave?” It’s interesting to me that in the white imagination, the dystopian future involves white people living through the realities that people of color have lived or are living through right now!

You never know how far your words may travel, or where they’ll take root and grow. And sometimes seeds can thrive even under less than optimal conditions, which is what it means to live as a person of color in this country. Ferguson is simmering. Just thinking about the potential for state-sponsored violence against the people makes me queasy. But I carry this seed within:

In a time of destruction, create something.

Thank you, Maxine Hong Kingston.

Song of the Son

By Jean Toomer

Pour O pour that parting soul in song,
O pour it in the sawdust glow of night,
Into the velvet pine-smoke air tonight,
And let the valley carry it along.
And let the valley carry it along.

O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree,
So scant of grass, so profligate of pines,
Now just before an epoch’s sun declines
Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee.
Thy son, I have in time returned to thee.

In time, for though the sun is setting on
A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;
Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet
To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone,
Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.

O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums,
Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air,
Passing, before they stripped the old tree bare
One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes

An everlasting song, a singing tree,
Caroling softly souls of slavery,
What they were, and what they are to me,
Caroling softly souls of slavery.

Celebrate Jackie!

Jacqueline Woodson won the National Book Award! She won, she won, she won! I’m so proud of her, and that’s all I’m going to say. The internet’s full of all the other stuff so I won’t waste my breath/ink on that mess, though I strongly encourage you to read Nikky Finney’s brilliant response. Jackie won, and hopefully that will set more brown girls dreaming…