Next up in the What My Last Book Taught Me series is children’s author Cynthia Levinson’s story of her critically acclaimed book, “We’ve Got a Job.” She even received praise from the President of the Children’s Defense Fund, for telling an “incredible story of a key piece of civil rights history.” Join us as she talks about the laborious but fulfilling process of writing her first book.
What I Learned from My Last Book: Truth is Not a Dot-to-Dot
Cynthia Levinson
“I feel like I’ve spent the last month sitting in a Birmingham city council meeting.”
That’s what my editor wrote in a marginal comment on Draft #20-something of what, eventually, became my nonfiction middle-grade book, We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children’s March. I was so immersed in my research on the political backstory to how 3000-4000 black school children desegregated the town that Dr. King called the most racially violent city in America that I didn’t realize, at first, that she meant her statement as a criticism. Oh, good, I thought, I’ve put the reader right into the scene.
Then, it struck me that ten-year-old readers would not want to feel as if they were stuck inside a city council chamber, listening to middle-aged white guys bicker about municipal politics. They would not care whether Birmingham had had a city council or a commissioner form of government, 50 years ago. They would quickly stop being readers.
“Why is this important?” my editor wanted to know about the petitions, elections, and court cases I was explaining in eyelid-drooping detail. “Can’t we get back to the children?”
The children she was referring to were my four “main characters,” as I called the real kids, aged nine to sixteen, who picketed and marched to protest segregation. Theirs was the front-story. But to understand and explain why the police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, assaulted Arnetta with surging water from monitor-gun fire hoses, other protesters with snarling German shepherds, and Audrey, James, and Washington with imprisonment, I had to figure out the unstable politics on the shifting ground.
Birmingham, in May 1963, was a perfect storm of innocents confronting a city hall where no one was officially in charge. How did Bull have the power to charge in? Was it simple, awful racism or was something more complicated going on?
In more ways than one, I grew up with a “just the facts, ma’am” sensibility. I recall watching Sgt. Joe Friday intone this demand, deadpan, to an over-wrought woman on “Dragnet” every week. (In my recollection, it was always a woman who was inappropriately hysterical over something like her child’s kidnapping; the child’s father was sensibly dispassionate.) In addition, that’s how history was taught. As a collection of facts.
President William Henry Harrison caught a cold at his inauguration, died, and, so, dot-dot-dot, pretty soon, Texas joined the Union. (Maybe my editor should have shortened Harrison’s speech, which he delivered in a driving rain storm.) Duke Ferdinand was shot, so, dot-dot-dot, we had the First World War. (I never did quite understand that one.) There were three main causes for fill-in-the-blank.
I’m partial to facts (which, since I’m expressing a bias, sounds almost like an oxymoron). Given a choice–and, there’s always a choice–I try to go with the facts. But, there are at least two problems with just-the-facts history. One is that there are so many of them. Where does one start? Where does one stop? That was my issue with the Birmingham city government. My source was a 750-page book on the history and politics of Alabama’s three main cities. Why not include it all?! That’s way easier than figuring out what’s relevant.
Another problem is that rat-a-tat history is de-populated. It’s unmotivated. Events don’t just happen. People, for idiosyncratic reasons, do, or do not, do things. It’s their actions and inactions, their drives and their hesitancies, their rationales and irrationalities that make things happen. Why did President Harrison refuse to wear his hat and coat, despite his friends’ urging them on him? Why did a Bosnian Serb teenager pull the trigger on Ferdinand and his wife Sophie? Could he have known that what we, anachronistically, refer to as the First World War would be the result? Probably not. Because fallout doesn’t just happen. The often unanticipated and unintended consequences themselves are also triggered by people.
So, I backed away from my encyclopedic source and looked more closely at the people–in this case, the grownups who were writing the petitions and holding the elections. In the midst of Dr. Martin Luther King’s coming to town and organizing pickets, sit-ins, marches, and boycotts, who cared what kind of governmental system Birmingham had? Why did it matter? Above all, how did it relate to the children?
It turned out that the complex political machinations in the background, which soon affected the foreground, began with a local businessman’s embarrassment and his desire to protect his business interests. Months earlier, Sidney Smyer was trying to drum up sales in Japan when a story about Bull Connor’s awful racist tactics hit the front page of a Japanese newspaper. Smyer’s hosts wanted to know what kind of place they’d be dealing with. Worried more about losing sales than about how black people were being treated in his hometown, he decided to get rid of Connor. And, he figured, the only way he could do that was to change the city’s governance structure.
So, it wasn’t the particular system that mattered. It wasn’t even a high-minded concern for racial equality that led to the attempts to change the system. Many other people participated in the process for their own reasons. But, one man’s need to stay solvent initiated their actions that produced the power vacuum into which Connor rushed with hoses, dogs, and arrest warrants. Once I understood the fundamental, human motivations, I could figure out what to delete.
And, as my editor rightly wished, I could return to the children and show what motivated them to face whatever Connor threw at them.
Cynthia Levinson writes nonfiction books and articles for young readers. She also writes and makes presentations for other writers and schools. Her debut book,We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children’s March (Peachtree Publishers, 2012), won numerous awards, including the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, NCTE’s Orbis Pictus Honor Book, and the SCBWI’s Golden Kite Book Award. Forthcoming books focus on civil rights, the U.S. Constitution, and Circus.