TitleTales

Author Interview: Sharon Draper

BWI: What books did you like when you were a child, and what writers do you admire?

SD: I was a reader child. I was one of those little girls whose mother took her to the library when she was three and four and five, and my mother used to read to me every single day. I would check out ten books at a time and take those back and get ten more. I read all of them: the Little Women books, the Little Men books, the Little House on the Prairie books. I would just get involved in the stories; in the lives of the characters. Kids ask me all the time what’s my favorite book from childhood, but I don’t really remember because I read so many books. Caddie Woodlawn stands out for some reason…I think I liked her audacity. I read every single book on the elementary side of our local library, so, by the time I was ten or eleven they gave me a special library card so that I could check out adult books. You were supposed to be fifteen, but I had already read all the elementary things and was bored. The librarian knew me really well and so she gave me the special card, but she would check every time to make sure that I didn’t check out anything that was too mature for my tender years, but she was absent on Thursdays!

Currently, I still am a reader. That stack of books by everyone’s bed—I have that same stack: books I’ve read, books I’m going to read, books I need to read, books that people have told me are good books to read. My favorite author right now is Diane McKinney-Whetstone. She’s an African-American author, and if I could write grown-up books, I’d write like her. She just writes beautifully, with quality and with depth. I sent her an e-mail recently and said, “I don’t want to sound like one of the 15-year-olds who write to me, but gee, I like your writing!” I really did sound like a kid when I wrote it.

BWI: When did you first discover that you had writing talent?

SD: I’m not sure. I was always a good writer in school. I have always gotten good grades in writing classes; I have always gotten an A in English. But it never occurred to me to be a writer, to try to write something for other people to read. It just never occurred to me. I had a husband, four children, two dogs, a cat, several hamsters, rabbits—I didn’t have time to write. I got started when I had a student said to me, “Why don’t you write something sometime?” He gave me an application for a short story contest, and I wrote the story, and I won first prize. I got my picture on the front page of the Cincinnati Enquirer, and I got a letter from Alex Haley that said, “Dear Mrs. Draper, I think you’re a wonderful writer.” I will always treasure that letter. It really hurt me when Mr. Haley passed away because he was the only one who said I could be a writer, but he didn’t get to see it.

And so I wrote Tears of a Tiger, which was the first one. And I sent it to 25 publishing companies, and I got twenty-four rejection letters in a row, and the very last letter was Simon & Schuster, and they said yes. So that’s how it got started. It took a long time from the time that I wrote it to the time they accepted it; a long time from when they accepted it to the time that it actually showed up in the bookstores; and no, you don’t get rich and famous when you have a book published. It’s like: You have a book published, now go back to work! Nothing really changed in my life except that Tears of a Tiger really took off: Teachers started liking it, and kids started responding well to it, and there was just this huge response. So when they asked me if I had something else, all I really had was the story that won the contest, so I made that short story Chapter One of Forged by Fire. It kept going from there.

BWI: Do you find that you have to put yourself on a writing schedule?

SD: I like to write when inspiration hits me, but sometimes I’m in an airport or not at home when that happens. I keep a little notebook with me, and I jot down things all the time, and I’m always thinking about new stories. But in order to write, I have to have blocks of time. I need to steal time to get in the neighborhood of where my characters live. I have to be there. I can’t just go visit and then come back two weeks later and do something else; I have to be there and live in their world. When I have stolen that time, I get up at 4 o’clock in the morning, I write until seven or so. I’ll stop and get a cup of coffee, and then I write all day long. If I do that for two weeks and I’m in that world, it flows really well.

BWI: Can you talk a little bit about how teaching has affected your writing, or if it has enhanced it?

SD: I’ve retired, but I’m in schools quite often, so I may as well be teaching. I think I understand kids’ mindset. Kids change, and slang changes, and the way young people look at the world changes a little bit, but basically, if you’re 15, you’re too tall, too short, too fat, too skinny, your hair’s too curly or too straight —you’re never quite right. If you understand that all 15-year-old girls feel like that whether they let you know it or not, then you can start to build a character. The girls will say to me, “That’s just the way I feel!” You know 15-year-old boys are worried about whether 15-year-old girls will like them. They might know a lot more than we knew at their age, but there’s still that innocence of a child. I think because I was a teacher I can capture that, and kids trust me. They write me letters like, “Dear Sharon, Girl, you is the bomb!” They write to me like they know me because I write like I know them, and they seem to feel it. They ask me questions; they ask me for advice. It’s amazing the things that they write to me.

Copper Sun is different from my other books because there’s no school, no teachers, no books, no lockers. It’s a completely different world for me. So what I had to do was think like a modern 15-year-old who doesn’t know about slavery and doesn’t care. I thought: How can I write something that will make them know and make them care? So I focused on the character instead of the time period, on the girl who is suffering, rather than the history she represents.

BWI: Why did you choose to write about slavery in the 18th century instead of the 19th?

SD: There’s more written about the 19th century and the pre-Civil War because by then slavery was an established institution. Slavery was just getting a good foothold in the 18th century, but it was extremely strong and lots of people were making lots of money on the Triangle Slave Trade as early as 1738. The first slaves came to this country in 1619. So it was well over a hundred years into the development of slavery that the book takes place. The reason I picked 1738—and I played with years for a long time…is because I wanted to write something that had not been written before, and because I found an interesting slave refuge that only existed for a few years in the early 1730’s and 40’s. It’s called Fort Mose, and it was in Florida.

BWI: Were Amari and Polly based on real-life people, or were they composites of people you found in your research?

SD: Amari and Polly are composites of people, but I believe that Amari or someone very much like her lived at one time. I really believe that I was chosen to tell this story. I went to Africa—to Ghana, Ethiopia, Togo, Kenya—and I went to the slave castles, where the people were taken when they were marched from their villages. Castles mean luxury; these were not. They were just dungeons; black holes. There was just a little light at the top, and no sanitation, and food was just thrown in. People were treated like animals. They may have stayed there for a couple of months before they were taken to be shipped out.

And when they were taken out, there was a door called the Door of No Return. It’s low to the ground, so the person had to crawl on his hands and knees to get through it. You can’t stand up like a real human being; you have to crawl. When I went through that door, the stone walls were rubbed smooth by the number of bodies that had gone through. When you get through that door and come out, you’re on this bright white beach, and if you’re from the interior of the continent, you’ve never seen a beach before, and you’re terrified. And beyond this beach is this huge blue water, and you’ve never seen an ocean before, and floating out on that water is the biggest house you’ve ever seen, and you’re terrified. You don’t know what these people are going to do or why they’re doing it. They take you out on the beach and they take a hot poker and they brand you, and then you’re put on this big ship and you’re terrified. I really, really, really felt the presence of the spirits of those people who had gone through that door. And that was when I knew I had to tell the story of what it was like for one girl. Amari represents all of them.

With Polly, I wanted to bring out a little bit about the plight of an indentured servant. When we think about whites in America, we think about slave owners who had property and who had money. The indentured servants had nothing—they had no money—which is why Polly didn’t like the slaves. They worked for free, and how can you compete with somebody who works for free? The other reason that Polly is in the book is because Amari is learning English, but she doesn’t understand enough to know what’s going on. The point of view switches to Polly’s when Amari gets to this country, so that everything that’s going on can be explained to the reader by somebody who speaks English.

Mrs. Derby is an interesting character, because she’s the wife of a slave owner, and that’s what Polly wanted to be. It was the best she could strive for in that society, but it wasn’t much: white women really had not many more rights than a slave. They couldn’t buy, sell, or inherit property; they couldn’t own a business; they couldn’t work; they couldn’t do anything except sit around and look pretty and do sewing and knitting and watch their husbands run down to the slave quarters. They were really, really—what’s the word? Abused? Oppressed? They were very low socially, even though they were respected and put up on this pedestal. There were exceptions, of course, but generally the wife of a slave owner had no power at all.

BWI: You talked about the females not having any power, but there are lots of strong female characters in the book. Even the females with small roles are very well-drawn. Can you talk a bit about creating those characters?

SD: Well, I’m always conscious of having a strong girl for my girls to read about and connect with. Boys have lots of books with strong boys, and I think it’s important that girls have strong female characters. I consciously worked on trying to find female characters like Fiona. Fiona was strong and went along with the status quo, but she broke the rules to help them. She didn’t really see anything wrong with slavery—you know she’d never thought that through, but the fact that she went out of her way to give them the carriage, to give them the wagon, to help them escape, gave her a little bit of oomph; a little bit of strength. Mrs. Derby, bless her heart, she had her own way of objecting to the status quo. I’m also mindful of the other side: Do I have any good strong male characters? Have I made all men look like horrible people? It’s important to balance it out.

BWI: As Polly is listening to Mr. Derby discuss buying and selling slaves at the dinner table, we catch a glimpse of the banality of evil, while so much of your story offers a vision of an active evil. Would you talk about your decision to include the different types?

SD: When you’re writing a story, you don’t pre-plan that a certain section is going to deal with the philosophical ethics of slavery; it just evolves and emerges. And a story has to be balanced so that there is action—like when Amari is beaten—as well as things to discuss and to think about later. You can’t have all action and you can’t have all thought. If the whole thing had been like that dinnertime conversation, nobody would read it, because it’s all thought; it’s all theory. It is necessary to balance it with action. I don’t think I consciously did that, although my editor might have…she was very conscious of many things throughout the process.

BWI: The theme of hope is clear throughout your book. Can you talk about your understanding of hope and its role in surviving traumatic events?

SD: I think if a human being doesn’t have hope, that person cannot survive. It doesn’t matter whether you’re going through traumatic experiences or just day-to-day life. You have to hope that you’ll get to the drugstore before it closes because you have to get your prescription refilled. You have to hope that you’ll get home safely from a long trip. That’s what life is based on: it’s based on hope, and without hope we have nothing. I think all of my stories have that kind of theme built into them. Amari goes through more than any other character, but I think that hope is in all of the stories, as an underlying theme. I’m working now on the sequel to The Battle of Jericho—the title is November Blues — and the main character goes through a terrible ordeal! She wouldn’t make it without hope, and she’s just a high school girl trying to make it through normal activities.

As more kids read Copper Sun, I’ll be able to do more teaching about hope and about the future and the next generation. Young people need to think about the next generation as well as about their past.

BWI: About young people: How do you think they’re doing? You offer advice to teachers on your website, but what about librarians—especially in the digital age? I think that might fit in with how you think young people are doing today.

SD: I’m working on three books at once, and one is an educational book. A main section/thrust of that book is librarians, because they’re my main supporters. Without librarians, the books wouldn’t get into the hands of the kids. Those early librarians in my life made a real positive impact on my life.

And the kids: I think they’re surprisingly okay. I really do. I think they have good heads on their shoulders, I think they know what they have to do to succeed, and I think they probably know more than we do what they’re up against and how hard it is to make it in today’s world. All I know is that I am just very thankful to you for distributing the books to the libraries. It blows me away that I can go to a school or a library and just see rows and rows of Sharon Draper books. As a teacher who used to introduce an author, and who’s now the author being introduced to students, it’s a lovely feeling. It’s very rewarding and very significant because I know what it means in the whole scope of schools and classrooms and libraries and education.

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