The first book in this planned trilogy, The Door of No Return, was set in 1860, ending with the main character, Kofi, facing an unknown fate. Black Star jumps forward in time to the 1920’s segregation era, to when Kofi is a Nana himself, with the gaps in his story slowly being revealed as he shares them with his granddaughter, Charley. What inspired you to structure the trilogy with a multi-generational jump in between books?
I thought about a couple things. For one, I did not want to write about slavery. Writing The Door of No Return was tough enough, and I found myself often being sad or feeling in a dark mood. I knew if I delved deeper into what happened at the end of book one, I would be back in those blues. And I’m generally, you know, a happy person. I try to stay in that space.
So, I thought: well, why don’t I do this? I’ve been watching a lot of sci-fi, and I love books that play with time. While Black Star isn’t sci-fi, I did play with time in the sense of doing a time jump and giving myself a story set 60 years in the future. I asked myself, what would that look like for Kofi? Of course, for us, it’s historical fiction, but for Kofi, it’s 60 years later. This was a cool thing for me to do as a writer: to be able to do that and then also still reveal what happened at the end of The Door of No Return, to bring some closure to that narrative while not delving deeper into it.
The last thing is that I really wanted was to write some new characters and tell the same story. All these things came together and contributed to my decision.
A theme throughout both books is the power of storytelling, as Kofi used to revere his nana for his storytelling abilities and has now stepped into the role of the storyteller for his family. Why was it so important for you to show readers this way Black history is passed down?
I thought, he’s going to become his grandfather now, and I felt like that was a really cool thing to do in the story. I felt like it came kept it fresh, definitely for me and hopefully for the reader.
Stories have always been a way that lessons are passed down generation to generation. In West Africa, there are these men and women who are called griots, and they are responsible for keeping the history of the community, the village, the family, intact, generation by generation. So, they passed down these stories, and they share them. My mother was also a storyteller. She told African folk tales. And so, storytelling as a way to teach, a way to learn, as a way to ensure that your history is remembered – I knew that this was going to play a huge role in continuing what I had started in The Door of No Return.
I read that you chose to make Kofi’s granddaughter the protagonist of Black Star because a fan wrote in saying she enjoyed your books but wished one would feature a girl main character. How did you approach writing your first female protagonist to create Charley’s authentic voice?
I have two sisters, a mother, a bunch of aunts. I have two daughters, and I’ve been married. So, when I decided to tackle this book with the girl as the main character, I was like, oh, I got this. It’s gonna be easy. I know women. I’ve grown up around them. I love them. They love me. I mean, this is easy. And so, I wrote the first draft, and I let four of my writer friends read it, who are all women. They all came back to me very politely, and they were like, Kwame, this is a beautiful story. But you haven’t given any agency to the main character. You’ve given it all to her best friend, Willie Green. In the earlier drafts, Willie Green was basically telling the story. Charley was almost a side character. I was straddling the fence, not really delving into Charley’s personality or giving her agency. Instead, I was basically having her follow along with Willie Green.
I’ll give you an example from the first draft of the book. Willie Green loves baseball. It was his thing, and he was convincing Charley to play with him. My friends were like, “well, Kwame, wouldn’t it make sense if she’s the main character, and this is her story, that she loves baseball? He can love it too, but perhaps it emanates from her, her desire, her obsession with the sport.” I was like, oh yeah, duh, and I began to give her more agency and delve deeper into who she is, what she wants by the end of the novel and by the end of her life. I explored the things that are important to her, the things she doesn’t care about. I asked myself, how are her relationships with her friends, with her rivals, with her family? How do we see these people through her eyes? Once I figured all of this out, which took some work, I arrived at a fully fleshed out, whole, three-dimensional human being.
All your middle grade fiction books feature a main character that is completely devoted to a sport. As you say in your author’s note, “I love writing about America through the lens of sports.” What is it about sports that draws you to incorporate them into your verse novels?
I love sports. I’ve played a lot of sports. Sports are a great metaphor, and they’re almost like a hook. We can all connect or relate to a sport. We can relate to the different concepts in sports: teamwork, winning, losing, perseverance, grit, being motivated, dreaming. Sports are a great way for us to talk about the things that are happening in our lives vis-à-vis what’s happening on the field or the court or in the pool or on the track.
What’s interesting to me is, I heard this commentator talk about how Usain Bolt, who was the fastest man in the world, ran the 100-meter dash in 9.58 seconds, which is insane and incredible, but that was just 10 seconds of his life. That’s it. And like he’d been practicing and training for 10 years. He trained 10 years of his life for 10 seconds. Like that’s incredible. And so, I think sports are a way for us to acknowledge the 9.58 seconds, but to really try to get behind those 10 years. What made that person? How did they become this dedicated, this committed? So, I like talking about someone’s backstory and using the sport as both the hook and the framework.
You also say in your author’s note that Black history, while about historical timestamps, is “also about the regular families that lived, laughed, loved, danced, worked, failed, hoped, cried, and died just like everybody else.” Your dedication to portraying this is most evident in the Sunday dinner poems. Are there any moments in your own family’s story that inspired those scenes?
Yes, every moment, literally. I mean, people often think, Black people sit around and talk about racism over at the dinner table. No, we talk about the Olympics, and we crack jokes just like everybody else. That’s always my goal with writing. It’s just to remind Black people that we are human beings and to not allow ourselves to be othered, and to remind non-Black people that y’all need to remember that we are all human beings. And it sounds cliché, but we don’t hear it enough, and we need to know it.
Charley uses a lot of creative hyperboles throughout this book, my favorite being “It’s so quiet / I can hear the moon.” How do you come up with such impactful figures of speech?
Other than being brilliant? I mean, I’m a poet. This is what I do. I traffic in words, in images and similes and metaphors and showing rather than telling. That’s my goal. I think that’s probably one of the big differences between writing a novel and prose versus a novel in verse. You don’t have a whole lot of words with a novel in verse. You’ve got to make sure that every word counts, and every word has to be the right word in the right order. We want to show you something. We want you to feel something. You know, my chapters are maybe 30 lines, if you viewed each poem as a chapter. A prose writer would have three to 30 pages to write one chapter. So, it’s an economy of words, and that makes me focus on the rhythm, the figurative language, the conciseness, the feeling.
In both this and The Door of No Return, there is sparing use of typographical manipulation, which adds impact to the moments you do things like change the font or spacing on a page. How do you go about choosing which moments need the emphasis?
I read each poem out loud, and when I’m writing it, I’m reading it out loud, I’m saying it out loud, and how it sounds to me is how I want it to look on the page, so that when you read it, it will sound as close to how I intended as possible.
Both of these books, as well as several of your others, feature a major climatic moment toward the very end of the book. Why do you like throwing readers those curve balls (pardon the pun)? What do you think it adds to their reading experience, especially with this series?
So that’s really that’s a really cool pun. I’m so gonna steal that when I go on book tour. It’s so good. Love it.
It’s a trilogy, and I need you to finish reading one book and say, oh snap, I can’t wait for the next one. That’s one reason. The second reason is, I’m a big fan of imagination and allowing readers to wonder and sort of figure out what’s going to happen next on their own, figure out what’s possible. I don’t like to tell everything. I like to keep some things for myself and for the character, and I think at the end of Black Star, that’s the situation that Charley finds herself in. It could go a number of different ways, and I like that. But ultimately, everyone knows that if you’ve read any of my books, I am quite hopeful about life, and I sort of envision a world where eventually things are going to work out. So, if Kofi is in book two, then you know, it’s some in some capacity, his story worked out. But there are still things to deal with. There’s still drama, and in some instances, there’s still trauma. I like playing around with that when I end.
Can you tell us anything about where the next book in this trilogy will take us?
Oh my gosh, I so want to tell you. And I’m trying to think, can I give you a hint? Well, I will say this. The Door of No Return was set in 1860. Black Star was set in 1921. So, stay tuned, people.
