Picture book biographies introduce children to Toni Morrison and Ruby Bridges
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. And we're wrapping up this week of women writers on the pod with two biographical picture books for kids. In a bit, we'll hear from Ruby Bridges herself about telling her story of integrating a segregated school through the eyes of a six-year-old. But first, And She Was Loved is a picture book about the life of the legendary writer Toni Morrison. It's written by Andrea Davis Pinckney, who actually knew Toni Morrison and edited Morrison's children's books.

Now, if you're up on your literary history, you might know that Morrison worked in the publishing industry as an editor. And Pygmy spoke with here and now Lisa Mullins about what it was like editing one of the great writer editors of our time. That's coming up. This message comes from Thrive Market. The food industry is a multibillion dollar industry, but not everything on the shelf is made with your health in mind.

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Author Andrea Davis Pinckney was just a child when the writings of Toni Morrison came into her life. Pinckney had struggled in school with a classroom reading list full of books that felt disconnected from her experience as a young black girl. But Toni Morrison's books were different. To her, they were the glistening key that unlocked her soul and helped her feel understood.

Well, Pinckney grew from that young reader to a publishing professional and eventually edited Morrison's children's books. Now she's out with her own. It's about Toni Morrison and her life. Welcome to Here and Now, Andrea. Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. So the book takes the form of both a poem and a love letter to Toni Morrison. And the reader is speaking to Morrison and she speaks back at the very end.

it's an interesting format for a children's book and I wonder what made you come up with that.

Yes, it's a praise poem. It is a love letter. It's a thank you, but it's also an invitation into the experience of Toni Morrison as a child expressing herself through her creativity, through writing, drawing pictures, because that's the way that children express themselves creatively. And what kind of stories did you find the most entrancing when you first discovered Toni Morrison?

Well, when I first discovered Toni Morrison, it was the fact that she grew up in the oral tradition that is so core to the black experience. There were stories everywhere in her young life. And that was what inspired me as someone who heard stories on porches and in backyards and picnic settings and church settings. That inspired me to

tell the story of Toni Morrison, who, again, like many of us, grew up hearing stories and then eventually writing them down. And you also worked with Toni Morrison as a publisher editing her children's stories. Yes. So I have the great privilege and pleasure of having worked with Toni Morrison. I was the editor of her books for children.

And as you can imagine, the tall order of having to be the editor of Toni Morrison, I call it the quivering pencil period of my career because how do you edit Toni Morrison? What I learned from her is that storytelling comes from the heart and that the best stories are those that are authentic,

and real and that's what she did so beautifully in her works for children and for the works that so many of us know for her narratives for adults. By the way, how do you edit Toni Morrison? How do you edit Toni Morrison? Well, this was, I started to work with her in 1999 and

It was before the advent of, you know, rapid email and attachments and Google Drive docs and all that. And she would write longhand. She would write muses and reflections and poems and narratives longhand. She would say, you know, she'd call me up, Andrea, go to the fax machine. I'd go to the fax machine and out would come this waxy, squirrely,

scrolling paper with the very calligraphic, decorative, cursive handwriting of Toni Morrison, and I would save that piece of paper, and then a day later or a week later or a month later, Andrea, go to the fax machine, and again another scroll of paper would come out, and that would be how we would collaborate and build the narratives that she ultimately published for young people. I love the idea of these narratives

Beautiful books coming out of one fax and then another fax and then another fax. Right, right. Building a story. So could you do a reading for us from the book, maybe some of your favorite parts of the book? And we should say it's targeted toward kids between four and eight years old, and many of them will be experiencing your poem out loud as they get their parents to read it to them. And so I wonder if you can read some for us.

Yes, absolutely. So Lisa, we, in the book, And She Was Loved, we, the reader, the child, we speak to Toni Morrison and she in turn speaks back to us. So the book opens, Oh, Toni Morrison, do you feel it? Your love has lifted us to places untouched. You born with a roar for stories that speak.

And then as we go, Toni Morrison in turn speaks to us. She says, "Now child, invite your imagination. "Dear one, dream with wide open eyes. "When a stick of chalk fills your fingers, "when mama muse visits you at twilight, "when all you wanna do is write, write, write, "make your mark, stitch your story, you are loved."

And the you are loved comes from where?

Yes, so the title, And She Was Loved, comes from Toni Morrison's groundbreaking seminal novel, Song of Solomon, in which the main character, Pilot, is affirmed for her worth, her dignity, and the fact that it is her birthright to be loved. And that is true of all of us, and especially children who go into the world knowing they are loved, and it's the thread that runs through so much of Toni Morrison's work.

We're, of course, in a moment now where diversity and inclusion are political targets. And it makes me wonder what space you hope your book about Toni Morrison fills in this era and what you think she would make of this time.

Yes. Well, we're in an era now where I think the North Star is that we don't back down, we double down. And Toni Morrison herself said, you know, this is precisely the time when artists go to work. There isn't time for despair. We can't focus on self-pity or silence or fear. This is the moment. We speak, you know, we write, and that is how civilizations move forward.

Andrea Davis Pinckney is New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of nearly 50 books for children and young adults. Her latest is And She Was Loved. It's an ode to the life of Toni Morrison. So nice to speak with you. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa.

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Ruby Bridges became the first black child to integrate a school in 1960. That year seems, at the same time, so long ago, and not that long ago at all. In her picture book, I Am Ruby Bridges, she recreates what that moment felt like. And Bridges tells MPS and Mary Louise Kelly in this interview that even today, kids can relate to her feelings of loneliness and isolation.

The morning of November 14th, 1960, a little girl named Ruby Bridges became the first Black child to desegregate the all-white William France Elementary School in New Orleans. Ruby was six, and as she got dressed and left for school that day, she told me she didn't know she was making history. I had no idea that it was going to be a white school. It wasn't something that my parents explained to me.

As a matter of fact, the only thing they said is, Ruby, you're going to go to a new school today and you'd better behave. Four federal marshals had to drive her. And an angry white mob greeted her at the school. Living in New Orleans, I was accustomed to Mardi Gras. And that's exactly what it looked like to me. White people, Black people all lined up together and

you know, shouting and waving their hands and throwing things. Today, Ruby Bridges is a civil rights activist and an author. Her new children's book, I Am Ruby Bridges, tells her story through her six-year-old eyes. So I asked her to read a bit for me. Second day, when I arrived at my classroom, my new teacher opens the door and greets me.

"Hi, I'm Mrs. Henry, your teacher. Come in and take a seat," she says. And aren't I surprised because she is also white. I never had a white teacher before. The biggest surprise of all, I am the only kid in the class. I didn't see any other kids at all. Not one. That test must have been a lot harder than I thought.

Why am I the only kid in my class? Not to mention the only kid in the whole school. And why don't I see anyone who looks like me? And then that's when it hit me. As I was reading, it took me a minute to get that, why there were no other kids. This is because white parents had come to school and pulled their kids out, taking them home? Yeah.

Absolutely. When I arrived on the first day, the mob of people standing outside rushed inside of the building behind me. I was escorted to the principal's office where I sat the whole day with my mom waiting to be assigned to a classroom. But that did not happen because every one of those parents rushed in behind me, went into every classroom and they pulled out every child. I watched them parade around.

right past me out of the school building. So by the time I got there on the second day, the school was totally empty. I'm so sorry you had to go through that. Did it get better? Did other kids eventually show up? You know, I think part of the story that lots of people are not aware of is that there were some white parents who actually tried to cross that same picket line, that same mile,

during that year to bring their kids to school with me. But it was only a handful, maybe five, six kids. And the principal would take them and she would hide them so that they would never see me and I would never see them. I remember hearing voices, but I never saw kids. And it kept me wondering where the voices were coming from.

If they were real at all. What I did not know is that every time I would mention it to Mrs. Henry, she was going to the principal and advocating for me. She was saying, you know, the laws changed and kids can be together now, but you're hiding down from Ruby. If you don't allow them to come together, I'm going to report you to the superintendent.

And that forced them to allow Mrs. Henry to take me to where they were being hidden. And that was near the end of the year. Near the end of the year. I'm thinking I just introduced you as the first African-American student to integrate an elementary school in the South. And it sounds like integrate was way too strong a word for what was happening at that school for most of that school year. Yes. You know, that was always...

something that bothered me. I was the only kid and it stayed that way until the end of the year. And Mrs. Henry took me to this other classroom and opened the door and lo and behold, there they were, four or five kids sitting there playing. And I was so excited. It didn't matter to me what they looked like. I just wanted someone my own age to play with. So I was excited to find them finally.

But I have to say that that was the day that I realized that everything was about me and the color of my skin, because a little boy said, I can't play with you. My mom said not to play with you. And he called me the N word. And that's when I had my aha moment that the reason why there were no kids here was because of me and the color of my skin. He actually made it make sense.

I did not realize what was going on around me until he told me. And that, my first encounter with racism, he introduced it to me.

You're only in your 60s now. What happened to you that first day of school was so recent in the grand scheme of things. And it occurs to me that the kids reading this today, many, most of them will take it for granted that black and white kids go to school together. This is totally normal. Like, how else would it be? They've never known anything else. How did you think about writing to kids for whom this must feel like ancient history in a way? And yet it so clearly isn't.

What I've found in the past 25 years visiting schools and talking to kids and working with them, I think that they relate to the loneliness. They relate to someone not wanting to play with you for no real good reason, not giving you a chance. And so kids, it resonates with them. They don't quite understand why someone would do that.

Why someone would treat another person like that. And I think that they feel like, why don't we give each other a chance? Try to get to know each other. That everyone at that age wants a friend to play with. And I think that that's part of what they resonate with. The fact that it's also explaining a time in history when we couldn't be together. You know, it touches on something that I truly want them to understand.

that racism just does not make any sense. And they get that. And, you know, once this book is closed and I know that they've gotten that, then I feel like part of my work is done. We've been speaking with Ruby Bridges, author of the children's book, I Am Ruby Bridges, How One Six-Year-Old Girl's March to School Changed the World. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

And that's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. Let us know what you think. You can write to us at bookoftheday at npr.org. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The podcast is produced by Danica Panetta and Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mayer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Mia Venkat, John Ketchum, Ashley Brown, Lauren Hodges, Emiko Tamagawa, Catherine Fink, Justine Kennan, Kalyani Saxena, Michaela Rodriguez, and Todd Munt. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks

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