I’ve been a fan of Kadir Nelson’s work ever since I saw Big Jabe in 2000. I loved his combination of sketchy outline and painterly, atmospheric light. Clearly, this guy knew his figure drawing, but he was also willing to distort his characters in the interest of moving the story forward and conveying emotion.

When his subsequent books moved toward a more realistic style, I worried he would lose me. I’m not very tolerant of illustration that looks as if it’s heavily based on photos. Too often the result is accuracy at any cost, sacrificing a sense of immediacy. When photos are used as reference for a scene showing two characters interacting, the emotional connection between them on the page tends to be blurred or even severed.

To my eye, Kadir Nelson has never fallen into this trap. Each face he draws manages to show someone at a precise moment in time with hidden but almost-revealed thoughts behind the eyes.  I have learned to relax and trust him, no matter how realistic his paintings get.

I SO want Kadir Nelson to win a Caldecott Medal, but I want it to be for a book that truly shows why he is so great. I Have a Dream has stunning paintings, but it’s so monumental and necessarily hagiographic that it doesn’t allow him show off his ability to play with character and have some fun.

Am I being stingy here? I think this book will live a long life with or without an award, as it should. But I want Nelson’s Caldecott, which I firmly believe WILL happen one of these days, to be for something a little different.

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Donna Bray and Kadir Nelson. Photo: Alessandra Balzer.

By Donna Bray

It was May 2008, and I had just started my first new job in twelve years, as co-publisher of a new imprint at HarperCollins. I was energized, excited — and, frankly, a bit terrified. Being an editor without any books in the pipeline is, I imagine, like being a librarian with empty shelves. Luckily, before I had even unpacked my boxes, Steve Malk from Writers House sent me a proposal from Kadir.

The proposal was just a couple of pages long, but it was eloquent, powerful, and incredibly ambitious. Kadir wanted to create nothing less than a history of America and African Americans. While he had, of course, illustrated many books on African American subjects and had recently published his first work as an author, here he was synthesizing the material for children in a way that showed that American history is African American history — that this country could not have realized the promise of its founding documents without the contributions of African Americans. I knew right away that it was the book Kadir’s whole career had been building to — and that I had to publish it. Kadir and I had worked together successfully on the first book he wrote and illustrated — We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball, a book of similar size and ambition — so I knew we could do it again. HarperCollins Publisher Susan Katz and editor in chief Kate Jackson were just as enthusiastic and ready to take the leap with me. I had acquired my first Balzer + Bray title. (Thanks, Kadir!)

Over the next several months, Kadir and I talked occasionally, and he’d tell me about the books he was reading and the documentaries he was watching. It was so fascinating that I wished I had the time to research with him. But as we talked about the scope of the project (and the closer the deadlines loomed), I confess, I started to get a little nervous. This was one massive subject, to say the least. (Kadir later said that he’d been nervous about wrangling the material, too. Apparently we were each too worried to tell the other!) Over the course of a few months I gently suggested narrowing the range a bit, creating a framework for the narrative that would allow Kadir to focus the story and selectively include — and necessarily, leave out — information. Although we didn’t have a concrete plan for the book for a while, I always had faith in Kadir’s amazing vision. And the more anecdotes he told me about the books he’d read, the places he’d visited, and the family members he’d interviewed, the more excited I became.

Then Kadir delivered the first draft of Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans, and the fun began. As with We Are the Ship, the narrative was made accessible and intimate by the voice of an elder — that of a centenarian recalling her family’s history and her own history. Knowing how close Kadir is to his mother and grandmother, I felt certain their voices infused the story with their love and honesty. In the early drafts, the challenge was to make that voice consistent throughout, while conveying the historical moments just as convincingly as the family stories. This was no easy task, but luckily Kadir is not only a natural storyteller, whose turns of phrase and carefully chosen details can still, dozens of readings later, give me chills, but he is also an inspired and willing reviser. Working with Kadir ups my game, the way a match with a talented tennis player might — it’s exhilarating and I learn a lot!

Sometime after the first draft, Kadir sent in his thumbnail sketches for the art he had planned. The art director, Martha Rago, and I marveled at how just a few deft lines could suggest so much emotion and majesty — really, it was extraordinary. We made some suggestions here and there, but for the most part the best thing we could do was stay out of his way. We wanted him to paint what moved him, and it was clear that these were truly inspired pieces. Anyone who has seen Kadir’s work can attest to the power of his paintings, especially his portraits. The subjects often stare frankly and directly at the viewer, conveying so much while hinting at mysteries below the surface. The subjects are living, breathing people. The fierce determination of the girl at the center of “Brave children, Little Rock, Arkansas” is so palpable it’s almost shocking. Then there’s the gentle love in “A young woman teaches her father how to read”; the defiance in the eyes of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass; the pride of the buffalo soldier; the defeat in the postures of the men in “Out of work”; and the camaraderie of the women in “Bus boycott, Montgomery, Alabama, 1956.” Even the trees Kadir painted in this book all have different moods and tell different facets of the story.

It is no wonder that Kadir’s art is so accomplished; he started drawing at the tender age of three and hasn’t stopped since. His whole family supported his obvious talent, buying him art supplies and saving his childhood efforts. He later attended Pratt Institute, where his talent is so legendary that even now illustration teachers are (jokingly?) advised to grade on a curve, with Kadir being an A. I was fortunate enough to hear Kadir give a talk to students at his alma mater, where he revealed the painstaking hard work that led to his seemingly “lucky” breaks. At Pratt he had been a tireless and dedicated builder of his portfolio and a standout worker at the Society of Illustrators, where he had landed an internship. The impressions he made there and elsewhere led to his being recommended to create concept art for the movie Amistad. Working on the film, he met producer Debbie Allen, who was so impressed by his work that she tapped him to illustrate her first picture book. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Kadir’s achievements in books alone are impressive: his titles have been named New York Times Best Illustrated Books of the Year and have won many awards, including Caldecott Honors, a Sibert Medal, Coretta Scott King Awards and Honors, and a Jane Addams Children’s Book Award Honor. He also has a thriving fine art career (his paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world) and is becoming an important national portraitist: he was commissioned by Congress to paint the official portrait of Shirley Chisholm, the first African American congresswoman, and by the U.S. Postal Service to create stamps featuring the Negro Leagues, activist Anna Julia Cooper, and author Richard Wright. He was even chosen to create the art for Michael Jackson’s posthumous album, Michael. This kind of success takes uncommon determination, hard work, and rare talent, for sure. But it also requires extraordinary vision. It’s this vision that I trust absolutely when Kadir comes to me with an idea for a new project.

Speaking of which: last fall Kadir and I were taking a cab across town after celebrating his Society of Illustrators Original Art Show Silver Medal for Heart and Soul when I asked him what he was thinking about for our next project. It’s much too early to share here, of course, but I can tell you that it will be totally different from anything Kadir has ever done. Whatever it is, I’m in.

Donna Bray is vice president and co-publisher of Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books. From the July/August 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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By Kadir Nelson

Good morning. It’s a pleasure to be here with you to celebrate the work of African American authors and illustrators whose books have been chosen as the best of the best of 2011. I feel privileged to share the company of esteemed peers whom I have long admired.

I have always considered myself a painter, and have only recently begun to don the hat of an author. So I feel all the more honored to be recognized for my writing efforts by the Coretta Scott King committee. To have my work acknowledged by librarians who link good books with avid readers thrills me beyond measure. Thank you all for serving our youth in this noble way.

For much of my life and career I have been engaged in the pursuit of truth — about myself, about my family, about those whose histories bear similarities to my own. The African American story was one that most resonated with me and became my primary focus. For most Americans, this piece of history has often sat in the shadows, left to be discovered only by those whose curiosity would lead them to search deeper, beyond the generic survey of history we are generally fed in our classrooms. I knew the American and African American stories only as well as most Americans, and having both African and European blood in my veins, I felt a strong pull to learn them on a deeper, more personal level. American history is often presented in a one-dimensional, picturesque, and patriotic fashion that leaves students with a rather lacking impression of the African American story. This was certainly my experience. However, as I took on projects that expanded my understanding of American history, I discovered that the “sidebar” treatment of African American history was inaccurate and gravely inadequate.

This became crystal-clear to me during a visit to the United States Capitol building in Washington, DC, in 2008. Displayed inside the building’s famous rotunda are several large paintings that were created to tell the story of how America was founded. There are images of gallant soldiers on battlefields, our proud forefathers signing the Declaration of Independence, the end of the American Revolution, and so on. These massive paintings are filled with an all-star cast of early Americans, Europeans, and Native Americans. They are quite striking and beautiful. However, just as striking is the fact that there are no representations of African Americans. Not one. For those who know better, this omission and the reason for it is obvious. The stain of slavery and its integral part in America’s story might provoke questions about a proud country that was founded on the premise of freedom and yet held a large segment of its inhabitants in bondage. And rather than expose this paradox and inconvenient truth, the artists decided to — or were instructed to — simply leave it out.

I wondered what the psychological impact of such a slight would be upon the multitudes of children who visit the Capitol building every year. I concluded that it would make them feel the way I felt: that my story and that of my ancestors didn’t matter. As a result of my visit, I resolved to delve into that story, find my place in it, and share it through my work.

I began by looking no further than my own proverbial doorstep: I called my grandmother. For many years she and most of my elders were tight-lipped about the past — and for good reason. There are dark parts of American history that can be a heavy burden on young ears, and my elders were careful about what they shared so as not to weigh us down with grievances. However, I think that as time passed, stories that had been considered shameful began to lose their bite. In 2010, Michele Norris from NPR’s All Things Considered noted that with the joyful election of Barack Obama, elder African Americans felt a bit safer to share their stories. I tend to agree with her. The struggles of our ancestors seemed to have served a purpose and found relevance with the election of one of America’s darker sons.

And so my grandmother shared her story with me. She spoke about her husband, my grandfather, whom I never met; about her father; and about the last slave in our family, a man who refused to celebrate New Year’s Day with the traditional meal of black-eyed peas because of a painful childhood association. I found that by learning her previously untold story, I was able to put our family story into greater context. I began to interview other family members and friends. I heard tales of great world wars, labor disputes, factory accidents, and civil rights demonstrations. It was through these stories and history that the larger American story came alive. It’s one thing to read a history book filled with names, dates, and facts, but it is entirely another to hear these stories directly from people who lived them. For me that is the most compelling way to learn and share history.

As an artist, my primary means of telling stories has almost always been through paintings. Although the story of Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans is shared through the spoken word, the visual story here is just as important. Heart and Soul is illustrated with more than forty original paintings, many of which are reminiscent of old family photos and early American art. As with any other project that is dear to my heart, I took great care to create artwork that is consistent with the power and grace of the story. I planned, as I had with my last series, to create large paintings that could fill each spread and eventually museum walls. However, as my deadline approached, those paintings grew smaller and smaller — but only in size. Some of the images have painted frames around them, which serve as a metaphor: this massive American story is literally “framed” by the intimate family story of the narrator. We purposely gave the cover of the book the appearance of an old family album or scrapbook for the same reason. It is a humble entreaty to readers to pick up this book and run their fingers over the cover. An experience that no e-book can ever offer. As picture books are often the very first encounter that children have with art, I feel that we, as creators of illustrated books, owe it to them to make it a meaningful one.

Now, as a youth, I was not a lover of history, nor was I a big fan of reading. So it is not a little ironic that I would grow up to become an author who writes about history.

My mother can tell you that it was quite the chore to get me to read as a child. And surely getting me to read about history was an even greater task. Every author knows that the prerequisite to being an author is to read — a lot. I was not interested in that assignment, and yet I really loved to listen to stories. I would soon make the connection that history can be looked at as a string of personal stories.

It wasn’t until I reached the tenth grade that I read a book I couldn’t put down: The Autobiography of Malcolm X. It would spur me on to become a lover of nonfiction and biographies. As a result of that experience, I looked forward with excitement to finding the next great book, the next great story.

Shortly after having published my first book as an author/illustrator, and almost twenty years after reading Malcolm X’s autobiography, that story would present itself to me inside the rotunda of our nation’s Capitol building, and from the recollections of my grandmother, my mother, aunts, uncles, and dear friends. I would construct a narrative that spoke to the individual and collective stories of families like mine, and then weave them into the greater context of the American story. America is a very large family, made up of millions of smaller families. All of which have their own stories to tell, and, when combined, tell the larger history with which we are all familiar.

Heart and Soul is a historical document that tells the story of America through the recollections of a century-old African American woman whose family story is closely tied to the greater American story. Her words and style of speech are reminiscent of both my grandmother, Verlee Gunter-Moore, who speaks with honesty and directness, and a sweet Texan by the name of Debbie Allen. Together their voices are merged into one very warm and sincere narrator who tells her story as though she were grandmother to us all.

Heart and Soul is not the definitive history of America and African Americans, but rather a starting point, a launching pad for readers of all ages to uncover the truth for themselves, so that when they sit in their classrooms or visit our national monuments and museums, they will understand that their stories do, in fact, matter. For we are all our nation’s heart and soul. Thank you.

Kadir Nelson is the winner of the 2012 Coretta Scott King Author Award for Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans, published by Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books. His acceptance speech was delivered at the annual ALA conference in Anaheim, California, on June 24, 2012. From the July/August 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Roger Sutton: Your new book, Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans, weaves together historical facts—about slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, real people like Rosa Parks and Dr. King—with the stories of the relatives of your fictional narrator. It must have been quite complicated to do. What was your entry point?

Kadir Nelson: Initially it was overwhelming; it was a huge amount of history to cover. The narrator was the key to distilling it, because she could make it very intimate. I wanted to tell this great American story as if it were a story, not a series of facts. When I began, I thought the book would be narrated by this ancient voice from across the ocean, maybe an ancient African spirit. It was very broad and nebulous, but as I started to shape the voice, it became something more specific, the voice of an African American woman who was a little over a hundred years old. I found that she could talk about people in her family — not only herself, but her grandfather, great-grandfather, her ancestors. I figured I could have these relatives touch different parts of American history. She could talk about the last slave in her family, for example, and how when he became free he fought in the Civil War and then went out West as a buffalo soldier. Later the family would all move up from the South to the North, the Great Migration. She could have relatives in the great World Wars, and she could talk about her personal experience as an African American experiencing the civil rights movement. I could address the significance of it all in a very intimate, personal way. I wanted the book to read and feel like this narrator, this elderly woman, was inviting a young child to sit on her lap, saying, “Let me tell you this story as I remember it.”

RS: What I like is that you don’t make her into Forrest Gump. She doesn’t run into all these historical people. Just enough to be convincing, to sort of ground her in history. But you don’t get a lot of unlikely “so then I was walking down the street and I saw Rosa Parks coming in the other direction.”

KN: Right. And I made a choice not to show the narrator’s face, except when she was a little girl, as a photograph. You see her from behind, and you see her hands at the end, but she’s part of that anonymous group of people that we don’t hear or read about. But her and her family’s contributions to the formation of the country and to the character of America are just as important as those by people we do read about.

RS: In researching this book, what was the most interesting or surprising thing you discovered?

KN: When relatives and friends talked about the last slave in their families, they knew their names or they could describe them. My aunt’s aunt remembered that the name of the last slave in her family was Pap. I was so pleased that she remembered his name. And it was such a great name. Very sweet. Hearing those personal accounts really helped bring that part of history alive for me.

RS: Did you find that writing this book gave you a new connection to your family?

KN: It helped to open up a dialogue, because in African American culture, details about slavery were not shared openly or willingly very often. I addressed those historical taboos because they’re a blemish on our national character. You hear it over and over again, that this was a country that promoted its freedoms, yet a large part of the population was enslaved.

RS: It’s also an integral part of the history. It’s not like we were a great country but had this nasty habit of slavery. As your book points out, in many ways, slavery built this country.

KN: We became a great country because we had slaves.

RS: I love those two pages in the book where on the left side you have a picture of a really inviting walk down to a plantation house. You just want to get on that path and walk to that beautiful house. And facing that illustration is information about just why the house is so beautiful: slave labor. I thought it captured the irony really well.

KN: I knew I wanted to visually show the irony of a country that was free yet held a number of its people enslaved. Another way I did this was to show this proud president, George Washington, sitting on his horse, and his slave standing next to him, holding his hat.

RS: That painting is interesting for a lot of reasons. It looks like eighteenth-century classical portrait painting. The mood is pastoral. There’s this nice light that’s glinting right off of George’s face, with the black groom in shadow next to him. But it’s a very peaceful-looking painting.

KN: That’s part of the paradox. And if you look at the image of the slave ship, it’s a beautiful day, and yet you see what’s going on in the image, and that’s not so beautiful. It was that juxtaposition I was aiming for.

RS: So many of these paintings look like you started with the sky as your canvas. The first thing I noticed about the book was how much use you made of the sky in conveying the mood of a painting or commenting upon text. Like the picture of the young slave boy, young Pap. Here he is barely clothed, but it’s a beautiful day. That painting is two-thirds sky, at least.

KN: The sky helps tell the story. It adds emotion to the image. The intense, saturated blue sky complements the intensity of the look of the boy. If you look at his countenance, he’s a little boy, but he’s a little man. He has kind of an old spirit. Or if you look at illustrations like the slave ship where there’s a dark cloud hanging overhead, or, say, the image of Harriet Tubman, where there’s a really emotional sky behind her, I’m using the sky to add to the emotion of the subject.

RS: There’s also a sense in so many of these pictures that we’re looking up, we’re looking up at the central figure. In the Frederick Douglass picture we’re looking up at him and he has something of that same look in his eye as young Pap does in his picture — determination and strength. But by the time Douglass is here the clouds have rolled in behind him. You know, heavy weather ahead. And then you turn to the next page, and the clouds are even bigger, with Harriet Tubman. It’s a very capital-R romantic ideal, this marriage of subject and setting. The way those are integrated throughout the book is one of its achievements.

KN: You touch on something that was very intentional when it comes to the style of the art, specifically of the image of George Washington or the woman sitting in the pile of cotton. I’m drawing on historical sources, whether they’re old daguerreotypes or classical American paintings, images by Thomas Eakins or Frederic Remington, for example. The style was a conscious choice. I’m really glad that you picked up on it.

RS: I like the portrait of the Revolutionary War soldier, where again we have that determined look staring out at us from the page, but the landscape is very eighteenth-century American.

KN: I wanted to present images from American history that we’ve never seen. We’ve never seen an African American Revolutionary soldier in that way.

RS: Painted in that heroic manner.

KN: Right. We’ve seen images and engravings of battle scenes but nothing that would present the subject with as much reverence. That’s what I was aiming for. Even with the image of young Pap. We’ve seen pictures of children who were slaves but not with that much power. Or presence.

RS: And intimacy. So many of the images we see of people who weren’t famous in those times, like — I’m not talking about the Washingtons and the Lincolns. But historical people. We look at them at a distance and say, “Oh, so that’s what people looked like in the nineteenth century. That’s what a slave looked like.” Whereas Pap looks like an individual.

KN: Right. With a character and a spirit.

RS: The double-page spread of Fort Wagner, 1863, that’s the little-boy page to me. This is the one that the boys in the library are all going to open up to and not be able to take their eyes off of. It’s really an amazing painting.

KN: Oh, thank you. I worked on that for months. I wanted it to have that intimate feeling as if you were right there with those soldiers on the beach storming that fort. And I wanted you to see the powder, the smoke from the cannon blasts, and their muskets, and the sand being sprayed as bullets were hitting them, coming off of the boots of a soldier. I wanted you to be in that scene.

RS: The color is just stunning — I mean, there are seventeen shades of blue here, sparked by the yellow flaring from those cannons. And then the smoke misting over. I asked you what you had learned about history from writing this book. What did you learn about painting from illustrating this book?

KN: I was employing a new technique that I hadn’t necessarily used before. Going along with that juxtaposition of freedom and slavery, I’m playing with the juxtaposition of a very cool palette versus a very warm palette. For instance, there’s an image of two men who are out of work during the Great Depression. The men are standing in shade, and they’re illuminated mostly from the top, from the blue of the sky, as well as the light that’s coming up from the reflected sunlight that’s hitting the sidewalk in front of them.

RS: At the bottom of the painting, just a little sliver of it.

KN: It’s a very small part of the painting, but it’s so important, because it creates a space, a dimension between. I’m playing with the warm sunlight versus the cool hues within that shaded area.

RS: Then you turn the page to see Joe Louis on top of the world.

KN: That’s what he was. He was a very powerful and a very good-looking person, and he was also a hero according to many, which is why he’s portrayed sitting on top of the world in Harlem, New York City.

RS: But very human at the same time. It must have been hard in this book to resist over-heroizing these people, particularly the real people, to keep them on a human scale.

KN: Well, one way is to present them from a perspective where you are looking up at them, but to show their humanity in their expressions and in their eyes. They’re heroic but also very human.

RS: It’s not an easy thing that you’ve done here. How are you going to top this one, Kadir?

KN: That’s a good question. That’s what I ask myself every day. I don’t know. It all depends on where I am spiritually, and that’s what will determine which way I go next. It’s a matter of turning that into something that’s tangible and not didactic. Where I’m not preaching to the choir but –

RS: Not preaching, period.

KN: Not preaching at all, yeah.

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I know, half of you are rolling your eyes and saying, “Isn’t that the same dang thing?” Well, according to the Gods of the Caldecott Award, no. This whole picture book/illustrated book difference is an important distinction. According to the definition in the manual, “A ‘picture book for children’ as distinguished from other books with illustrations, is one that essentially provides the child with a visual experience.”

Kadir Nelson’s oil paintings are phenomenal. They allow the reader to fully understand the lives of the African Americans who are such an important part of the history of this country. There are breath-taking spreads depicting the Middle Passage and the Civil War. Portraits of Pap and his family peer into the readers’ eyes and souls.

Is the book important and beautiful and moving? Yes. Should it be part of every child’s reading and learning experience?  I think so.

But, is it a picture book? I would have to say no. The book is not “essentially a visual experience.”

The committee will wrestle with this one. What say you?

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As a kid, I prided myself on being a good student. However, it wasn’t until my sophomore year in high school that I realized I wasn’t really being challenged in my classes, which were generally pretty basic. That year, I found myself in an advanced English course with a teacher who was a real stickler for quality. Until then, I’d skated easily through my English courses, and, not surprisingly, I never learned how to write with much skill. I didn’t know how I ended up in this advanced course: perhaps my counselor felt I had potential based on my older sister’s performance the previous year, or maybe I impressed my basic English teacher. Whatever the reason, I found myself confronted with an English teacher who would change my life.

The first assignment Ms. Visconti gave the class was to write an essay about something we’d read. No problem, I thought. I wrote my essay, and felt quite confident upon turning it in. The next day our essays were returned to us, and, sneaking peeks at grades written on the papers of my peers, I eagerly anticipated mine. To my chagrin, my paper was casually placed on my desk with only the words Not an essay written at the top. What?!? I was profoundly offended and embarrassed. I could have blown it off, or continued writing non-essays for the rest of the semester. But I enjoyed making good grades, and I certainly wanted one for this class. So I asked Ms. Visconti if she’d teach me how to write an essay, which she very kindly did. She thus prepared me for my college courses and, much later, my authorial debut, We Are the Ship.

Thank God for good teachers.

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