In-depth Written Interview
Insights Beyond the Slideshows
Angela Johnson interviewed while in Madison, Wisconsin on October 6, 2005.
TEACHINGBOOKS: You've won the Coretta Scott King Author Award three times — for
Toning the Sweep,
Heaven and
The First Part Last. Your book,
Heaven was written before
The First Part Last but is a sort of prequel to it. How did you come to write
The First Part Last after having already written
Heaven?
ANGELA JOHNSON: The wonderful thing about
The First Part Last is I didn't want to write the book at all. As far as I'm concerned, I don't do prequels; I don't do sequels.
Then, I went to New York and visited some after-school programs for a
week. I was on the subway and there was this beautiful kid. He looked
about 15 or 16, and he was with a baby. It was 11:00 in the morning, and
I was thinking, "Why is this kid not in school? Is this his daughter;
is this his sister? What's the deal?"
The train stopped, and he got ready to get off the train, I actually
wanted to follow this kid down the street and question him. Something
came over me. I went back to the hotel and wrote three chapters of what
became
The First Part Last. I felt provoked, and I didn't want it to happen. Sometimes it just comes over you and there is the story or the character.
The First Part Last was the easiest book I've ever written. Bobby was just there. Everything was there.
TEACHINGBOOKS: The First Part Last, like many of your books, carries some heavy messages, though your writing never comes off as preachy.
ANGELA JOHNSON: Preaching to teens about teenage pregnancy is like preaching to a lamp. These are human beings, and they do what they want.
The First Part Last is definitely a cautionary tale, but
it's not preachy. Bobby loves his baby, but what has he lost? He's lost
the love of his life at 16. He's lost many of his freedoms. His friends
still love him, but he's lost part of that relationship. He's lost being
a child, because he is now the daddy. I always figure, show what's real
— you don't have to preach. I love Bobby's responsibility. He has
almost a romantic belief that, "I've lost Nia, so I'm going to raise
this baby." It's noble. But then reality sets in, and some of it is not
pretty.
The majority of parents have said they like
The First Part Last.
But, I have had parents say, "I'm not letting my kid read this book
because it'll give them ideas." I said, "Ideas about going into a coma?
Ideas about having this baby who's weighed you down and you've lost your
childhood?" I mean, which idea? Obviously these people haven't read the
book.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Will you write about any other characters from
Heaven?
ANGELA JOHNSON: Yes. One more book — it's called
Sweet.
It's about Shoogy. Shoogy is still unknowable to me. I'm writing about
her, and yet I still don't really know her. She is an enigma.
TEACHINGBOOKS: You also write and have written many picture books. Where did your idea for
A Sweet Smell of Roses emerge from?
ANGELA JOHNSON: I based the two little girls in
A Sweet Smell of Roses on two real little girls who had marvelous spirit and participated in civil rights marches. In the documentary called
Eyes on the Prize,
two women were interviewed who were around seven and eight during the
civil rights movement. They shared their experiences about how they
would go off to marches without their parents. The wonderful thing is,
the adults around them took care of them as if they were their own
children.
Something really interesting happened in the creation of
A Sweet Smell of Roses.
In creating picture books, there's usually little or no collaboration
between author and artist. The illustrator, Eric Velasquez, was selected
by my editor; I never did share anything to him about why I wrote the
book. Would you believe, Eric included artwork from the
Eyes on the Prizedocumentary, and he wrote a foreword for the book about the documentary's filmmaker. It's just this bizarre kismet.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Several of your books don't have happy endings. How do you respond when people point this out?
ANGELA JOHNSON: At the end of some of my books,
everything is not always happiness and light. Life is not always this
big, jolly party. It is just life, and it just goes on. But I always
like to leave the end as a beginning. It's not necessarily happy, and
it's not necessarily sad. It is just life. I'm a happy person, but I'm a
realist and I write contemporary realism.
TEACHINGBOOKS: You also like to include humor in your books.
ANGELA JOHNSON: I believe there should be more fun
books with African-American children in them. We're inundated with
family stories and folk tales and the happy family. I understand that; I
write those books, too. But there has to be a place for humor.
I love humor in any way, shape or form.
Where Have You Gone, Vivian Dartow
is going to be my funny book. Writing this book, I relived high school
all over again — I thought I had it down, and in reality, I was just the
biggest nerd.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you do when you're stuck?
ANGELA JOHNSON: When I have trouble writing, I do
everything but write. I like to travel when I'm blocked, and I usually
come out of writing blocks after I travel.
As it turns out, my books are usually geographically motivated. I wrote
A Cool Moonlightwhen
I was in Aruba. I was on a beach with lots of sunlight writing a book
about a child who can't go out in the daylight. I had just come back
from Cape Cod when I wrote
Looking for Red.
The First Part Last came from New York, and
Toning the Sweep came from when I was in the desert with my brother. Bird is the one book that was written when I was loving being at home.
There's always going to be something in life that will ignite you. I
always believe that. It's going to be a newspaper article. It's going to
be something you heard at the supermarket. It's going to be something
you felt when you were going for a walk.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What other influences make their way into your writing?
ANGELA JOHNSON: I have two nieces and a nephew. When
they were much younger, their presence in my life had an interesting
effect on my writing. I took care of them a lot, and it gave me a sense
of the world of children. It was wonderful. As they get older, I see
myself writing books for older children.
It has always been important in my books that the adults can be even a
little emotionally neglectful or just living their lives, but in the
end there is a safety net with them. In a wonderfully healthy
adolescence and teen world, your parents are there — they're supportive,
they're loving, they're not too obnoxious — and you go on about your
life. When you're home, you're secure and they're there and they leave
you alone and then you go out again. I had a huge safety net in my
parents as a teenager.
Every book has pieces from my life. For instance, all my nieces and
nephews are biracial. I have gay friends who have children. I had a
friend whose child ran away. I take looks around me. Another example is
that a female friend of mine died, and one of her children kept thinking
she saw her, as a ghost out in the garden. There are so many things
that I've incorporated in my books. Obviously, these are subjects that I
care about and are important.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you like to talk with students about?
ANGELA JOHNSON: I always ask if any of them journal.
I find journaling is a touchstone. When kids do that, they are secure
in their writing. There are kids who, as far as they're concerned,
writing stops when they leave the school. But, there are kids who are
putting down any feelings they have; they're raging on paper. I say not
everyone is going to be a writer, but everyone can write. No one ever
has to see what they've written.
I tell them "We're not all going to be published, but your emotions —
all of you have such strong emotions! Start journaling and become
comfortable with what you feel. Write it down and remember. If nothing
else, when you're 40 you can laugh about it like I do when I look back
at mine."
TEACHINGBOOKS: What sorts of things happen when young people write-?
ANGELA JOHNSON: I'm amazed by teen poets — the
poetry slams are just amazing. I am in love with the idea of teenagers
getting up there and just going for it. The kids who are participating
in poetry slams are the ones with something deep about them, and in
recent years, now have this incredible outlet.
When I was in school, if there were some guys who were poets, I
didn't know it. Now you're seeing these young men who are. I love that
they're being handed the power to do something positive.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Have you ever run up against censorship of your books?
ANGELA JOHNSON: I have been asked not to come on author visits. I don't know that I have been banned.
One private religious school asked me not to come because in
Toning the Sweep
I talk about lynching — not graphically, of course, but I do talk about
lynching. Even though I was going to speak to their elementary-aged
children, who were too young to have read the book, they said, "We just
need to know that you will not mention that book." I said, "No, I'm
sorry, I can't do that." So they asked me not to come.
Last year in Michigan, I was speaking to a library reading club, and a
couple days before I came, the aide associated with the club decided to
call the parents and tell them that in
The First Part Last,
which was one of the books that the kids were reading, I had "language."
She made calls to the library board, she called the parents, and she
got nothing. Everyone felt the book was age-appropriate — what kids
don't speak like this?
The reasons for banning books are just ludicrous to me. It's
interesting to me that the last thing that is banned is always violence.
Sexuality, language and content are banned. Violence is not. You can
blow up a few buildings, and you can have people dragged down the
street. People will stick guns in their children's hands and send them
out in the woods to shoot animals, but they don't want to hear about
sex. It's so ridiculous.
TEACHINGBOOKS: Please describe your writing process.
ANGELA JOHNSON: I like to write longhand on legal
pads. I just stick my legal pad in my backpack and go down to the park.
Nowadays, everybody's in the coffeehouses on their laptops. That really
freaks me out. I just started with a computer a couple years ago, but I
think I'll always have the legal pads with me as well.
I lost the first half of
Toning the Sweep on a word
processor with no hard drive in it. It was before I understood about
hard copies. I lived in a neighborhood next to an elementary school that
always used to blow the electricity. At least twice a day the
electricity on the whole street would go out. And there I was, page 47, I
remember it vividly, had not printed anything. Everything was saved on a
disk. I didn't push the little "s." The electricity went out, and it
was all gone.
TEACHINGBOOKS: How did you come to write in such a wide variety of formats (picture books, poetry, novels)?
ANGELA JOHNSON: I lucked out in the beginning of my
career with my editor, Richard Jackson. He never told me that I had to
make choices. He never said, "You write picture books." There was never a
time when he said, "You can't write poetry or short stories." I have a
collection of short stories. I wrote board books. Anything I wrote, he
said, "Okay."
Then, I started meeting other writers and saw that there are people
who just write novels. I know I sound naïve, but I was surprised that
they just write novels or they just write picture books or they just
write poetry. I thought it was a given to write whatever I felt like,
and I thought everyone did it. There are no parameters for me, which is
wonderful. The only thing I won't touch is adult literature. But as far
as kids' stuff is concerned, preschool to teen and all forms in between
are great.
TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you believe is the importance of writing books with African-American protagonists?
ANGELA JOHNSON: I can equate it to the first time I
was in school and I picked up a book by Ezra Jack Keats. I opened a book
and there were children who looked like me. I cannot tell you the world
that opened up. When I was a child, Ezra Jack Keats' books were the
only ones with African American children in them.
What he was doing was looking out his window and these were the
children he was seeing. It doesn't matter that he was white. There was a
little girl in a tiny library in Ohio — me — who opened up this book
and saw someone who had my skin color.
In all my books, though the stories are universal, the protagonist
will likely be an African-American child, because I remember that
feeling of being in a sea of books where no one looked like me. My
textbooks did not have any African American children. Finally in the
'70s I started to see books with African-American child protagonists,
including the book
Cornbread, Earl and Me.
Even though I want this to be a universal experience, I love the idea
that there is an African-American child saying, "This belongs to me.
Someone has recognized that kids who look like me are important and
valid."
I've gone to schools that were mostly white, and I've had children
ask me, "Why do you just write books with black children?" I say, "I'm
African American, and I'm writing through my eyes." And then I say,
"When you go into your library, how many books do you pick up that have
kids who look just like you?" And they always say, "Yeah, there are a
lot of them, aren't there?" Then I say, "Don't you think you need a few
more like these, too?" And they say, "Yeah, okay."
TEACHINGBOOKS: Despite an emphasis on African-American characters, the themes and emotional journeys in your books strike a universal chord.
ANGELA JOHNSON: I believe we're all connected. One
of the big problems in this country is people don't always feel that
they are connected. We're all on this road together, bumping into each
other, and we're all so connected. We have been thrown in this place.
There has to come a time where we say, "It doesn't really matter if he's
black or if he's Asian or if he's white. This is a universal story."
In the end what I want is for anyone to be able to pick up one of
these books and it doesn't matter: the color of the children, where they
live. All of these stories are everyone's story. If anyone can pick my
book up and say, "Yes, this is just a wonderful story; I've felt this; I
knew someone who felt this," then I've done what I was supposed to do.
What else is there? It's great. It's better than ice cream.
