[APPLAUSE]
No.
There've been a lot of things written about Mrs. Parks.
But one of the things that I wanted to show
was the woman I knew.
So my book starts with, "Mrs. Parks was having a good day."
[LAUGHTER]
Because everybody acts like Rosa had an attitude,
she's on the rag or something.
See what I'm saying.
[LAUGHTER]
She was having a good day.
Mrs. Parks lived with her husband, Raymond,
and her mother.
They did not have biological children.
They live in a small apartment.
Actually, they lived in the project.
Mrs. Parks, like any other woman,
got up before her husband and made breakfast.
Raymond got up, and sat down, and ate it.
[LAUGHTER]
But Mrs. Parks' mother was not feeling well.
And I gave her the flu.
Now, that is not an actual fact that I
know to be a fact, that she was, on that day,
not feeling that way.
But nonetheless, I have to do something with it.
When you're writing a story, you have--
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
Her mother's an old woman, so I have
to do something to bring her into the story, right?
And so I gave her the flu.
[LAUGHTER]
I didn't want to give her a cold, because A cold is
something you take aspirin for, and the flu is achy, right?
So Mrs. Parks fixes breakfast.
And mother came to the table.
And in 24 years, when you hear older people talk, and I
hope some of you do as you become writers,
you get a lot of--
things are not as exact, right?
And so you put the story together
that's going to make sense.
So she came to the table.
And she, of course, fed her family.
She ate with them.
And then she is going to wash the dishes.
Now, normally, mother-- and that we do know--
mother's home all day.
Normally, mother would have done the dishes.
But Mrs. Parks is going to do the dishes
on this day, because mother is not feeling well,
and she wants her to be able to go into the living room,
and turn on her soaps, or whatever it is she does,
and relax.
She wants her to take it easy.
Mother's not feeling well.
So Mrs. Parks washes and dries her dishes--
this is before the era of dishwasher-- dresses
herself, and goes to work.
Now, you have to recall, of course, that they had a car.
People forget that.
Because everybody had one car.
It's not like today, where everybody has-- every family
of four has five cars.
[LAUGHTER]
But they did-- but they did have the car.
But Raymond worked at Maxwell Air Force base.
So he needed the car to go to work,
which is going to leave Mrs. Parks on the Cleveland Avenue
bus.
She gets dressed and she goes to work.
Now Bryan Collier, who's winning--
we won.
We took Caldecott on this year and we took Coretta Scott.
So Brian is doing a really good job, here.
Mrs. Parks was always buttoned down.
She was always very neat.
And you think of any picture you ever saw Rosa Parks,
you just never saw her anything other
than buttoned down and neat.
But I also wanted to show that she was a nicer person,
that she was a human being.
So I have her colleagues are teasing her.
She's a seamstress.
And they're teasing her that she's Rumpelstiltskin,
and that her sewing is magic, because she was always
a hard worker.
Mrs. Parks had worked all of her life.
She was always a hard worker.
And so she's laughing back and said, it's not magic.
I'm just doing my job.
I concentrate.
I also wanted to show that she had good relationships
with her supervisor.
We know, in 1955, her supervisor is white.
There's just no question about that.
She's working at Montgomery Fair.
So I wanted to show that she wasn't having any problem
dealing with white people.
I show that, because the supervisor is
going to say to her, Rosa, I know
your mother's not feeling well.
Now whatever it is that you know about Mrs. Parks,
you know that she was a private person.
Because for 50 years, Mrs. Parks kept her own counsel.
We never had any scandal coming from her.
We had some people around her that had some, but never
from her.
So she obviously knew how to conduct herself.
If this woman knew that Mrs. Parks' mother was sick,
it's because Mrs. Parks didn't mind to let her know.
Otherwise, that woman would have never
known she had a mother, right?
No she's close, now.
I mean, this is a woman who has to conduct herself.
And she's always been under some kind of microscope.
And so her supervisor says to her, why don't you
go on home, because it's the 1st of December.
You got 23 shopping days until Christmas.
You know that the women in Montgomery
are going to do what women do every place.
They're going to wait until the 16th or 17th to come
in and need their dress fixed, so that they can be someplace
on New Year's-- on Christmas Eve.
So she knows that Rosa Parks will stay to do that.
So it's a good deal.
Let her go on home.
So Mrs. Parks, of course, accepts the offer
and goes home.
Now this is where she's getting ready to get on the bus.
And we have a problem here, because
under segregationist laws of Alabama,
what she has to do is get on the bus, at first,
drop her dime in, get back off, walk around to the back,
and get on at the back, right?
Now I have her-- we should share this, if you don't mind.
In illustrated children's books, it goes a couple of ways.
I don't have anything to do with the illustrations.
I don't believe that the writer should.
I know that there are some writers who do,
but I think it's stupid of them to do that.
I write the story, and I send it in to the editor.
The editor sends it to the illustrator.
The first thing that happens is something
called thumbnail sketches.
So the illustrator does a-- sort of an idea of what he thinks.
And that usually goes back to the editor.
But it didn't come back to me, because Bryan Collier
is a genius.
I knew him to be a genius.
And since he didn't look over my shoulder,
I was going to look over his.
So we didn't have that.
But the second stage, with the illustrators,
is called F and Gs, Fold and Gathers.
And we pull that when they've decided we--
he does the drawings.
They do the separations.
And we pull it to check the cover-- the color,
how things are going to work.
And so, for reasons totally, actually, unknown to anybody,
we all sort of together--
Brian didn't know Mrs. Parks-- but we all said,
you know, why don't we send her the F and Gs,
and see what she thinks.
And I'm so glad we did, because if we had waited,
she would not have seen the book,
because we had said we were going to send her bound book,
but somebody decided to send her the F and Gs.
Mrs. Parks had, like, a distinct--
I mean her voice.
And I can think of the people who have called me.
Nina Simone has a distinct voice.
Lena Horne has a distinct--
[SINGLE DRUM BEAT]
There's just things that you don't miss.
And so the phone rings, and it's always, baby.
She said, "Baby, this is Rosa Parks."
Well, I knew who it was right away.
That's like-- I said, how are you doing?
She said, "Oh, baby, I got that lovely book."
But I heard the but.
[LAUGHTER]
I heard.
I said, well, did you like it?
She said, "It's beautiful, baby."
She said, "I like it."
I said, but?
She said, "but, baby, you had me fiddling for the dime
to get on the bus," because I used the line,
"she fiddled for the dime."
And I said, yes, I did.
She said, "Baby, I've never fiddled in my life."
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
I said, well, Mrs. Parks, you're fiddling in my book.
[LAUGHTER]
And I have her fiddling, because I wanted the children who
read this to know that it was important for her
to get the dime, and not have to ask the bus driver for change.
So I have her fiddling.
[LAUGHTER]
She got onto the back of the bus.
And the back of the bus was full.
And so she's coming, now, into the neutral section.
She sat down to a man.
And she does not remember-- did not remember--
who she sat down next to.
So I got to identify him, to suit myself.
And I just called him Jimmy's father,
because Mrs. Parks did the youth--
the NAACP youth conferences and things.
So she knew the man, didn't know his name.
But he's reading-- for those in the back, who cannot see,
he's reading a newspaper.
And the headline says, Emmett Till.
Now we're going to have a problem with my editor, who
is a very nice woman.
And my editor said to me, when I wrote it,
do you think Emmett is important?
I said, Laura, yes, Emmett's important.
She said, well, I'm not so sure.
And I said, Laura--
[LAUGHTER]
--it says, by Nikki Giovanni, you know--
[LAUGHTER]
Emmett's important.
So she googled Emmett, and she said, well,
I can see why you might think, so but aren't you
giving him too much--
[LAUGHS]
[INAUDIBLE]
I said, Laura, this is a deal breaker.
Emmett stays in the book.
And the reason that we're going to do this
is, the Supreme Court, May 17, 1954, ruled in a 9-0 decision
that separate is inherently unequal.
And we're always grateful that it was a 9-0 decision
because, because had been an 8-1 or 7-2,
it would have been overthrown by now.
We know that the South's response to that
was massive resistance.
All over the South, they just closed everything they could.
We also know that Mississippi's response was even crazier,
because what we have in August, is a little 14-year-old boy--
just turned 14 in July--
to get on the train, go down to visit his mother.
I have a son.
14-year-olds are very volatile.
You don't want to leave your 14-year-old home alone, right?
And his mother felt the same way,
not because he'll be trying to prove that he's all right,
but he's a chubby little 14-year-old.
And he'd had polio.
So he had to walk that-- we in the Black community call
doo-wop walk.
It's one of those--
[LAUGHTER]
You know how they--