flex time

I’m less than thrilled about having yet another cold, but I’m grateful that I slept through the night and woke with enough energy to get 13K steps in by noon. It feels like spring today and there are more crocuses than I can count along the sidewalk that leads to the library. I walk this strip of Flatbush Avenue quite often and each time I marvel at the determination of crocuses—whether it’s pouring rain or threatening to snow, these tiny, purple flowers persist—INSIST upon their right to bloom NOW. I’m trying to be more flexible with my historical fiction class at Brooklyn Prospect Charter School. On Tuesday I started thinking about what it would take to develop an “Africans in the Americas” course for middle grade students. I wanted to show the Middle Passage scene from Amistad last week but had technical issues; this time around two of my students tried to fix the sound but we just couldn’t make it work. I was ready to give up but the students assured me they were fine (“There are subtitles!”), so we watched the gripping scene and had a rather abbreviated conversation after they wrote on their own for a few minutes. I’m realizing that I need to do more and less; I need to provide more structured writing time, more time for sharing, more time for processing all this information. And at the same time I need to accept that this is not a 16-week college course; I only have 4 weeks and so I can’t cover all topics in depth in the limited time we have together. Last week we talked about “home” and whether you can insist that you belong in a place where you’re not wanted; we discussed the colonization movement and whether African Americans belong in Africa or the US. This week we talked about the Black Lives Matter movement and I touched on some of the riots that took place in NYC (1834 & 1863) and the city of Brooklyn (1862) around the time that Weeksville was founded (1838). We talked about war but didn’t get to the conditions of peace…so next week we’ll slow down. At the library today I picked up another copy of Maritcha: A Nineteenth-Century American Girl by Tonya Bolden; I bought 3 copies last week and scanned the pages covering the NYC Draft Riots so we’d have enough copies to go around. We read that section aloud together, pausing to create a cast of characters. Hopefully over break the students will start a diary entry from someone participating in the riots—African Americans who fled in terror, white police officers brought to tears by the chaos, a kind German neighbor who was beaten days later for helping Blacks escape the mob. I had a smaller group this week, which I expected, but these middle graders seem committed. I dropped off copies of A Wish After Midnight for all of them this morning so in our next two classes I can talk about how I took actual historical events/people and turned them into a novel…

photo by BPCS librarian Leslie Gallager

I was thrilled to learn today that one of my self-published titles, Room in My Heart, has been included in the Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Books of the Year, 2015 Edition. I can still remember my father throwing the handmade book aside when I first wrote the story back in 2000 or 2001. It’s about a girl who finds it hard to adjust when her divorced father starts dating a new woman. The father in the book is nothing like my father; he brought plenty of women into our lives but offered no reassurance that our place in his heart was secure. The first time I defied my father was when I was 8 or 9; my sister and I arrived for our weekend visit and found another woman and her two daughters living in my father’s house. Things quickly went from bad to worse and I called my mother to pick us up early. Now that I think of it, my father started calling me a “troublemaker” from that point on. Writing Room in My Heart was therapeutic for me, even if it enraged my father. I tell kids that my writing is guided by the principle of sankofa: there is no shame in going back to retrieve something of value you left behind. In some ways I’m still recovering from my parents’ divorce but I’m glad this story resonates with others, and I hope it can serve as a guide for divorced parents who are bringing new people into their kids’ lives.