Consider This from NPR - BONUS: 'Nina' And 'Just Us' Offer Ways To Start A Conversation On Race

Episode Date: October 17, 2021

After the protests last year, we heard the phrase "racial reckoning" a lot, as some groups of people struggled to catch up with what's just been reality for many others. On this episode of NPR's new Book of the Day podcast, we've got two books that might help you reckon with that reckoning, in two different ways: Traci Todd and illustrator Christian Robinson's bright and powerful picture book biography Nina: A Story of Nina Simone and poet Claudia Rankine's Just Us: An American Conversation, in which she puts together poetry, essays and images to bring readers into an uncomfortable but necessary conversation about race. Listen to NPR's Book of the Day on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or NPR One.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu slash forward. Hey, Consider This listeners, it's Audie Cornish, and we've got something new for you to listen to, a new podcast called NPR's Book of the Day. And it's just what it sounds like, a way for you to discover a good read or keep up with the books everyone's talking about in short daily episodes, around 15 minutes. That means author interviews, literary conversations, unpacking big ideas across all kinds of genres, memoir, fiction, kids books, current events.

Those conversations are all recorded by NPR hosts like me. And that's what today's episode is. Two books from two authors I spoke with, both of whom offer ways to start a new kind of conversation about race. You can find more from NPR's Book of the Day at the link in our episode notes. Host Andrew Limbaugh starts things off here. Hey, welcome to NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Remember after the protests last year, people kept using the term racial reckoning? It felt like a weirdly pretentious way of over-explaining how one portion of the population was just playing catch-up to the reality that always existed for another portion of the

population. Anyway, it's a phrase that does not show up in these next two conversations. I'd guess because the authors aren't concerned with playing catch-up, they're too busy dealing with the now. In a bit, we'll hear a conversation with the poet Claudia Rankine. But first, NPR's Audie Cornish talks with the author and illustrator of a new children's book, Nina, a story of Nina Simone. As you'll hear, the writer, Tracy Todd, actually changed the ending a bit after feeling despair at what she calls the adult world, something Nina Simone knew a thing or two about. We're going to tell you the story of a dream almost deferred. It begins with a little girl raised in the segregated South of the 30s and 40s. It was Eunice Kathleen Wayman. She was born in Tryon, North Carolina, and she really wanted to become a classical musician. This is author

Tracy Todd, and the way she tells it. That dream didn't come true, but Nina found a way. Nina found a way. Eunice became Nina Simone, the prolific composer and singer behind To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, among many other songs. You are young, gifted, and black Tracy Todd tells the story of Simone's early life in vibrant, emotional hues in a new children's book called Nina, A Story of Nina Simone. It's illustrated by the critically acclaimed artist Christian Robinson.

So what inspired them to take on a version of Simone's story, a story marked by racism and mental health struggles, and make it into a story for kids. There's a world, little girl, waiting for you. The weight of it all did not occur to me when I started writing. I recognized that there was a difficult story to tell here. But eventually I got to the point where I felt like I had a story that made sense and that honored Nina Simone. I very much wanted to tell a story that, you know, showed the trajectory of her life, showed how her experiences as a child impacted who she was as an adult. Christian Robinson, for you, I think, you know, when I look at some of the other work that you've illustrated, whether it's The Dead Bird, Margaret Wise Brown, which is, you which is a picture book essentially about death. You've also illustrated

a book about Josephine Baker. How did you think about approaching this? Well, I love the stories that are a little bit more challenging to approach and to present to a child. But I think those are the stories that are most important to tell, the ones that show the difficulties of the world, but in a way that is honest and approachable for young people. Did there come to be a look though that you felt like, oh, this is how I can evoke her, meaning her profile or her hair or some posture of hers? Was there something that as you're looking at those album covers sort of starts to come to you? It was the hair for me,

I think is what I kind of kept thinking would be the thing to graphically like capture her, also her profile. Typically when I illustrate, I'm all about simplicity. So I'm always simplifying things. But with Nina, I felt compelled to show her features,

make sure that they're prominent because that was a part of what made her so special and important. Yeah, because she cared about being seen But with Nina, I felt compelled to show her features, make sure that they're prominent, because that was a part of what made her so special and important. Yeah, because she cared about being seen as a Black woman, right? That was very much part of her public ethos. She wanted to be seen as a dark-skinned Black woman and for people to find beauty in that. Yeah, she was authentic. She came across as just so real and so human. You'll notice the cover of the book is pink.

Not just pink. This is the brightest, pinkest pink possible that you could find. Well, yeah, pink is a wonderful color. It's a bold color, but it's also a soft color. And I think it was important for me when telling her story visually to not only show her strength, but her vulnerability. You know, oftentimes a character like Nina is seen as this pillar of strength who overcame so much, but, you know, all those things and experiences that she went through affected her deeply. And it was important for me to visually show that vulnerability, that softness. I think that a lot of times when we see stories of civil rights leaders, they're very much sort of pushed into a moment and there's no sense of what came before and how things got that way. And I just wanted to tell Nina's story as an experience of something that built upon the things that came before, because that's sort of how I experienced her music. One of my favorite songs is Turning

Point, which is just this little song where Nina is pretending she's a little girl, and I presume a white girl, because she describes this new friend whose skin is like chocolate. See the little brown girl, she's as old as me And she's telling her mother about it and all the fun that they've had in first grade. And then when she asks her mother if her new friend can come over, the music cuts out.

Mom, what'd you say? And Nina says, why not, Mom? Why not? Oh. And that song is so much about that moment when Nina could not play with young David any longer, who had been her playmate for so long. Right, that's a scene in the book

where the child of her mother's employer is her playmate until one day it's decided that he can no longer be that playmate. Yes. I think it's important for children to see how these people that we revere and that we hold in such high regard were as children and how that impacted who they became as adults. You know, one of the things about Nina Simone is her voice had a lot of texture. And I think in the story, Tracy, you describe moments like a low rumble of anger and fear, her voice being like thunder. Can you talk about your writing style, sort of how you developed? I wanted to have the idea of building. So I used the imagery of thunder and I used the drum.

You know, because so much, I think, of the book is about building to that final moment, building to the creation of Mississippi Goddamn and for activism. Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddamn. That's it! It was really important to me to call upon that imagery, but also to use it in various points of her life. So to talk about her mother's preaching, to talk about her own voice. That's really sort of where that came from. By the end of the book, Nina is sort of drawn to being a more public part of the Black civil rights movement, in part because of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. What do you want people to take away from this,

Christian and then Tracy? When I was making the art for this book, it was the summer of 2020. And oftentimes for me, drawing and making pictures is my escape. But escape wasn't an option because what was going on and seeing the fight for racial justice and the pandemic, it was easy for me to see that thread between the struggle that Nina Simone was going through and that we still have today. And for me, this book was a way to process all those things. It was a way to honor the heroes of that moment and hopefully maybe even inspire some new ones of the future. Tracy, for you? You know, I was also sort of processing everything that was going on and just feeling such a sense of despair in the adult world.

Just feeling like the way things are going to get better is with children. And so I rewrote the ending so that it ended with, and when she sang of Black children, you lovely, precious dreams, her voice sounded like hope. I wanted to end the book with hope. Well, Tracy Todd and Christian Robinson, thank you so much for speaking with us. My pleasure. My great pleasure. Thank you for having us.

This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. There's a section in this next interview with Claudia Rankin where she describes what for me is a nightmare scenario. She's at the airport, right, making small talk with some guy. She says she taught at Yale. The guy says, oh, my son didn't get into Yale, which, you know, fine. Sorry for that kid. But then the dad adds, because my son's friend, who is a person of color, got in. Which, honestly, if it were me, I'd like nope right out of that conversation as fast as possible. But Claudia Rankin's book,

Just Us, is all about those types of conversations. Here she is talking to NPR's Audie Cornish about it. Claudia Rankin's award-winning collection of poetry, Citizen, came out in 2014, the year of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the death of Michael Brown. Her latest book arrives as these same problems afflict the country. It's called Just Us, an American Conversation, and it's a collection of essays, photos, poems, and yes, conversations that she's been having with friends and strangers alike about race. The title comes from a surprising place, the late Richard Pryor, and his stand-up bit on the criminal justice system, where he says, you go down there looking for justice, and that's what you find, just us. Comedians like Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle, Eddie Murphy,

Wanda Sykes, you know, these people are able to hold the good and the bad of it. They're the people I go to who can both see it and hold it and move through it. And they don't abdicate. They really stay in there. Claudia Rankin says this book was not just about listening to what she heard, but reflecting on herself. I'm really interested in what other people say to me, but I'm also really interested in why I say the things that I say. Because we are all socialized inside a system that was shaped with the tenets of white supremacy. So how is that affecting my behavior? How is that affecting the amount of patience I have in conversation with you? What am I hearing when you speak to me? Why am I saying the things that I'm saying to you?

So all of those questions were the guiding questions in the making of Just Us. One of the things you do in the book is you are pursuing conversations with white men who you say, in general, you don't have a lot of interactions with. Can you help me understand that, especially to people who might Google you and say, I think she has a white husband. So what does she mean by this? I have interactions with white men in terms of work, and I am married to a white man, but I don't have conversations, long conversations, exploring a subject without a destination, in a sense, with white men in general.

And so the task I gave myself was to approach white men in the way that I might have a conversation with a white woman just because I'm sitting next to her, but really to push the moment so that these white men would talk to me about this idea of white male privilege. And if I could move the conversation to that subject, I did. This is not an easy thing to do, it sounds like. And in the book, sometimes I feel your reluctance, like kind of getting up the nerve to do it. How did you think about approaching it? I mean, can you remember the first time trying to do this? Well, I think initially, I thought I would just wait for somebody to give me an opening in conversation.

You know, so you're sitting next to a guy. You're waiting. The plane is delayed. He asks the time. He asks what did the gate agent say. And then that leads to something else and leads to something else. And in one of the situations recounted in the book, eventually he asked me what I did. And I said, I taught at Yale. And he said, you know, his son didn't get in on early decision. And even

then I wasn't willing to say, let's talk about white male privilege. But then when he said his son didn't get in because his son's friend, who was a person of color, got in, then I thought, okay, he is in my wheelhouse and we can start this conversation. So that's sort of, I didn't want to feel like I was pressing because I didn't know these people. And it didn't always work out. There was one occasion where a white man, I was waiting in line to board the plane, and the two of us were standing there, and he says to me, you know, I love airplanes

because you don't have any news. You don't have, you know, this constant chatter around the news. I said to him, you shouldn't have voted for him. And at that point, he turned to me and he said, it's not just him. And that was the end. But that was the sort of project of the book was to push these moments to their crisis. I want to ask about another one of these conversations that starts in an airport, one that starts, you describe as having the ease of kicking a ball around on a fall afternoon, which is a lovely image. This is on page 49. And I was wondering if you can read it to us. It begins,

eventually he told me. Eventually he told me he had been working on diversity inside his company. We still have a long way to go, he said. Then he repeated himself. We still have a long way to go, he said. Then he repeated himself, we still have a long way to go, adding, I don't see color. This is a statement for well-meaning white people whose privilege and blind desire catapult them into a time when little black children and little white children are judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I get it, he said. His tone was solemn. What other inane things have I said? Only that, I responded. You follow by saying you refuse to let the reality he was insisting on be my reality. And one of the things that struck me is that you're having a meta-conversation.

Like, in your mind, you're seeing this conversation through how he would view it, how you would view it, society, history, like, it's this, like, multi-layered thing. And that's actually quite common, especially for people of color, that you're having the double consciousness in your conversation, so to speak. Yeah, I think Du Bois's notion of the double consciousness is a ruling metaphor for how black people exist in the world. So you're always a little bit suspicious about the source of statements coming at you. And it's sort of sifted through all of history. A friend who reads your book comments to you that there's no strategy here. Why is there no strategy here?

Well, because there's no strategy because I'm not interested in telling people what to do. I'm not offering a prescription. Just Us is a book that says, look at this. Let's see what it means to be in conversation. Let's see what it means to try, apprehend the same reality. When you see a man put his knee on another man's neck until he dies and has to call out for his mother, what is behind that? What allows us both to be able to hold that as part of America? You know, it would be in a different category.

What are those categories? Self-help books or something? It's not that. That's not the section we'll find this in? That would be a serious surprise for some people. Yeah, that was never my intent. My intent was to look, to look at a thing.

Well, Claudia Rankin, thank you so much for spending the time with us and really digging into this book. It's really lovely. Thank you so much for having me on. That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day.

I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The podcast is produced by Megan Lim and edited by Petra Mayer, Megan Sullivan, and Taylor Burney. The show elements this week were produced and edited by Ed McNulty, Emma Peasley, Gabe O'Connor, Justine Kennan, Daniel Hensel, Sean Saldana, Mark Rivers, Reena Advani, Janaki Mehta, Ashley Brown, and Art Silverman. Beth Donovan is our managing editor. Thanks for listening and happy reading.