Two new children's books view the natural world as a site of personal growth
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. I grew up in a city, and so back then, one of my only access points to nature, to the pastoral, was books. Today, we've got two children's books that do just that. Push readers to see what's outside.

literally. In a bit, we'll hear from this son of famed illustrator Jerry Pinckney to find out what he's been working on. But first, one of the kids in Kiese Lehman's new book, City Summer, Country Summer, is, like me, from New York City. And when he heads south to visit his grandmother, it's not just a new geographical space that he's exploring. He's also finding a different, softer side of his own identity. Lehman talks to NPR's Michelle Martin about his new book after the break.

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When school's out and parents need a break or cheap long-term babysitting, for generations, kids, especially city kids, have gone to spend time with relatives in the summer. What are those days like away from home? What happens, though, when they're young black boys who are allowed to roam and explore away from rules and routines, but also away from everything they know? Right?

Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome. Thank you for having me, Michelle. I'm happy to be here with you. Why a children's book? I think people who know your work know that one of your most well-known books, Heavy, it's titled Heavy, can be a little heavy.

heavy. You know, we talked about heavy when it came out. And one of the things that you said when we talked about that book was it's just hard in this book. And I wanted to create something that was softer and honest. You know, I think that book was about like the origins and the consequences of a lack of safety for children. And so I wanted to really like sit in what happens if we really explore a culture and a society and grandmothers that help create safeness in spite of the unsafety of the world.

So tell us about the characters and the storyline in City Summer, Country Summer. Yeah. So there's this kid in New York who comes down from New York to visit his grandmother. And then there's other two kids who come from Jackson, Mississippi. And so for the kid from New York, it doesn't matter that those kids are from Jackson, which is a city. They're country to him. And it doesn't matter for the country kids whether New York is actually from New York or from Rochester or from Albany. Or New Rochelle. Or New Rochelle. Right. Right.

He's New York to them. And so I just wanted to also create a book that was about like the imperative of like black boy softness. I think people a lot of times talk about black boy joy, but I don't think we talk a lot about the importance of black boy touch, black boy play and black boy experimentation. And I got lucky and that the artist Alexis Franklin came on to create like, I think one of the most lush picture books I've ever seen. And we really wanted to get forest and gardens together.

into this space, because in my childhood, those were spaces that were ironically like the most safe for us. Those forests and those gardens were where we learned how to touch, where we learned how to accept touch. And even though we didn't use these words, they're also where we learned how to accept love. And that's really what I just wanted to create. Well, why don't you read us some? Absolutely. This is the point in the book where they've been together for a bit. Yeah. So they're in the woods for the first time. And I'll just start.

New York wandered away from us and walked closer to the edge of the woods. You good? We asked. I'm ready to go home, he said. Something in those central Mississippi woods reminded New York of the language of home. Being reminded of home so far away from his newborn sister, Cece, so far away from the bodegas, the fire hydrants in the city blocks, terrified or satisfied New York.

Whether it was absolute fear or exquisite satisfaction, wandering through those cool spots in those Mississippi woods was too much for New York's body. We didn't speak this. New York didn't speak this. But our bodies knew. That is lovely and it's poignant and it does so many things.

Because one of the things that it made me think of is how, not just black boys, but maybe particularly black boys, we sometimes don't give them enough credit for having a depth of feeling. That's true. I mean, so much of the literature, it seems to me, around black boyhood is about being hard or being cool, but just the ordinary feeling of missing your baby sister. Yeah. And being homesick. And being lost. Yeah.

And, you know, and I want to create art and read art where Black children are allowed to be lost because being lost is a kind of experimentation. I just wanted to explore that sensibility of being somewhere new and missing somewhere old and longing for touch.

There's another passage I wanted you to read where you talk about that healing power. Would you read that for us, please? Absolutely. So at this point, they've been looking for New York in the garden. They're playing Marco Polo, and they can't find him. Well, hold on. People just... I don't know. Does everybody know what Marco Polo is? It's like a game a lot of times you play in the pool. So when I came up north...

I found out that people play Marco Polo in the pool because we played Marco Polo in the garden. Oh, okay. Because we didn't have pools, right? So at this point, New York has found the boys and the boys have found New York. In the middle of the garden, we felt a forceful wind getting closer to us. And when we turned around, New York tackled us and tumbled upon a row of my grandmama's butter beans.

On the ground of that garden, covered in vegetables and dirt, coated in so much laughter, I want to say that the Mississippi and New York and our black boy bodies were indistinguishable from each other. That would be a lie. We absolutely contrasted. But the sights, tastes, and smells of our contrast felt like safeness, not safety. Safeness. And safeness sounded like love.

Do you want to say more about that? What is the difference between safeness and safety? Yeah, for me, I think, you know, growing up in Mississippi, you know, my grandmother worked in a chicken plant factory. She grew up in 1929. She knew segregation in ways I would never knew. She knew unsafety. And I grew up in the 80s and 90s, which are sort of unsafe times for a lot of black children. But even in those unsafe spaces and times,

I think there was like a bodily, psychological, emotional feeling of safeness when I was in my grandmother's house and my grandmother's like touch when she could see me. And so I'm trying to encourage us to one, realize that every child on this earth deserves safety.

But also, I think as parental figures, there's like a psychological, physical, spiritual safeness that we have to ensure that I think our children have. And it's hard to do that when we don't have it ourselves. And creating a sense that this is important, acknowledging that it's important. Absolutely.

I'm feeling like this book isn't just about sort of calling out something that's wrong. This book is about celebrating what could be right. I wish I had that sentence when we were putting the book out. But it is absolutely about celebrating something that can be right. And that's something that can be right. We have to remind ourselves that.

can be our bodies. I think a lot of us move through the space in the world. I did as a young Black boy, thinking that my body was necessarily unsafe because of the way adults treated me, the way police treated me. But I was never treated unsafe by my grandmother. And I wonder if maybe in a way this book is meant to be healing for adults too. Absolutely. You know, before kids can read letters, they can read faces. And so my hope is that like, you know, people who read to not, you know, five-year-olds or fourth graders can share those facial expressions with

with young people who you know are in need of safety, but who are also in need of seeing that their fathers and their mothers and their uncles and their aunties' faces contort with the kind of joy that I think only children's books can bring. Kessie Lehman is the author of the new children's book, City Summer, Country Summer. Kessie Lehman, thank you so much for talking to us. I'm so thankful to be here. Thank you.

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Illustrator Brian Pinckney knows that there's a certain pressure that comes with carrying on a family name. His father was the famed illustrator, Jerry Pinckney, and it was Jerry who was originally supposed to do the art for the new book, The Littlest Drop. Jerry Pinckney died in 2020, but Brian Pinckney decided to keep the project going. He and writer Sasha Albert talk about how the book came together. Here's Empire's Asha Roscoe to help set it up a bit more.

In the new children's book, The Little Witch Drop, birds sang in the trees as monkeys swung through their branches. Snakes slithered around their trunks and giant cats crept silently below on one small branch of one tall tree, a tiny hummingbird. The hummingbird has just built her nest and a fire breaks out.

The Littlest Drop is Sasha Alper's first picture book based on a parable from the indigenous Quechua people of South America. All of the animals flee to the river except for the little hummingbird. She goes and gets just one little drop of water because that's all she can hold.

Finally, the largest animal, the elephant, asks her, Little hummingbird, what are you doing? You can't put out this fire. And she says, I'm doing what I can.

So my father was originally going to illustrate this story. That's two-time Caldecott Honor winner Brian Pinkney. So my father's Jerry Pinkney. He's won a Caldecott Award. He's won about four, I think, Caldecott Honor Awards. And it's just prolific. Probably one of the most prolific children's book illustrators that ever has been in America. And

He passed away. So this was his last unfinished project. For our series, Picture This, Sasha Alper and Brian Pinckney talk about how their children's book brought some of Jerry Pinckney's final illustrations to life. A publisher called me and said, you know, now that your father isn't alive anymore, would you like to finish his book? And my first thought was, how am I going to do this? He was a master at doing animals. And I've done like maybe a couple animals on a spread, but never like 20 animals.

And I thought, I'm going to have to do like the hummingbird and just do one little paint stroke at a time. You know, I've been reading your father's books since I was very young. My father owned bookstores, so I had so many of them. For me, I'm just so overjoyed that you both illustrated it. I mean, I know it's very bittersweet. Mm-hmm.

But I just, I got really lucky. You know, it was interesting. I spent my whole childhood watching him illustrate his books. I would come home from school and spend time in his studio and watch him while he was drawing. And I would learn how he worked. And then he would give me techniques. And I would practice doing them in my own little home studio, which I had set up in my room. Actually, it was a walk-in closet that my mother took all the clothes out. And I'd practice doing what I saw him doing.

So I knew his technique very well, yet my style went in a little bit of a different direction. I just think that the collaboration between the two of you is so beautiful because your dad did have such an amazing way with just the extraordinary expressiveness of animals.

But the incredible way that you show movement and your use of color, the way it dramatizes the story, I just think that it's so beautiful together. My dad was much more detailed, orientated than I am. I'm much more fluid, a little impressionistic, energetic in a way, and broader strokes than

And also, I couldn't draw as small as him. What he did with this book was, I realized, once upon reading it, he tested himself, like he always does with his artwork, to reach farther. So he had done a dummy book, a very small dummy book. I think a lot of it out of his head. With many back views of animals and little ants, the size of original ants, I had to actually blow up

his dummy book like 300% so that I could see it. And then I just started sketching and I started painting using the materials that I like, watercolor and acrylic. So after that, I would have a beautiful painting in watercolor. And then I would have to go back in with a black ink line to highlight his lines that would also draw the characters, the different animals.

Yet in my style of painting. So it was kind of like a meditation in a way because I literally was combining my dad's structure, like the architecture of his drawing with my brushstroke. And once that was done, I went back over that then with acrylic and I built up the color that way. And I would use that color palette that my dad had used in some of his books, like The Line in the Mouth. That's one of his classics.

You know, you use so many different things in it. Some of the pages really look just, you know, peaceful and you have those softer colors. And the way you'll do the sort of gradations of color, I love that, you know, with the watercolors, how it sort of subtly changes color. And it really, it makes it look like movement, but it's so subtle that it took me a few times of looking at it.

To realize that. And I also love there's a whole spread in the middle that's two pages of just fire. And having read this to some kids now, they are just riveted by that picture.

They like drama, they like action, and that fire feels so alive. The characters are the hummingbird, the elephant, the giraffe, the crocodile, the hippopotamus. There are lots of characters. And I also saw the fire as a character. So it was important that the fire kind of grow and have a presence in the book. And then the presence diminishes as the fire goes out. It was very much an environmental book to start. And

And while I think it is still very much that, and the climate crisis only worsens, I do now see it as broader than that. You know, I really thought about this little hummingbird a lot. I really wanted a good ending for her. As a children's book, you know, children are dreamers, and they need to keep hope. Children now are facing an incredibly challenging world.

That was author Sasha Alper and illustrator Brian Pinckney talking about their new children's book, The Littlest Drop, which was also illustrated by the late, great Jerry Pinckney.

Our series Picture This is produced by Samantha Balaban. For more conversations like this one, head to npr.org slash picture this.

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 Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mayer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Samantha Bauban, Ed McNulty, Elena Burnett, Ashley Brown, Melissa Gray, Elena Torek, Patrick Jaron-Watananan, Jeffrey Pierre, Adriana Gallardo, and Monsi Carana. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.

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