E-mail a friendChristopher Paul Curtis
original airdate January 11, 2005
Christopher Paul Curtis is an important voice in children's literature. His best-selling and highly acclaimed novel, The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963, won prestigious awards, including a Newbery Honor. Curtis was born and raised in Flint, MI, the setting of his novels. He credits his writing career to his wife and his job. He says his wife gave him faith and the repetitiveness of his assembly plant job gave him the discipline. His new book, Bucking the Sarge, is a story for middle-school students.
Christopher Paul Curtis
Tavis: Christopher Paul Curtis is a talented author whose earlier books include 'The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963' and 'Bud, Not Buddy.' I like that one. 'Bud, Not Buddy.' His latest book is 'Bucking the Sarge,' which has been named by the Washington Post as one of last year's 10 best books for young readers. Christopher, nice to have you on the program.
Christopher Paul Curtis: Thank you, Tavis. It's a pleasure to be here.
Tavis: Glad to have you here, man. You are from a place in Michigan called Flint, and every time I hear the name Flint now, I think of 2 people--you and...
Curtis: Michael Moore.
Tavis: Michael Moore. Filmmaker Michael Moore. So the city of Flint, something happened. Y'all went to hell in a handbasket. The city just--I love Flint, but the city kind of went down.
Curtis: General Motors pulled out.
Tavis: General Motors pulled out, but the citizenry is representing.
Curtis: Yes, yes. Thank you.
Tavis: Y'all spawned some good people out of Flint.
Curtis: Thank you.
Tavis: Did you enjoy growing up there?
Curtis: I did. It was a small town--relatively small town. I lived in an all-black neighborhood, grew up that way. It was--it was home to me.
Tavis: You have a great story, though. Before you started writing, you were doing something else. Care to share?
Curtis: I was doing quite a few other things. I actually--right out of high school, I started working in an automobile factory in Flint, which is kind of the route you go in Flint. And it was, you know, if you didn't have the grades or the desire to go to college, you'd go work in the factory, and you'd make really good money. So after high school I broke my mother's heart and went into the factory to work.
Tavis: Right. And you put on doors on cars.
Tavis: I put doors on the big Buicks--the Le Sabres and the 225s.
Tavis: The Deuce and 1/4. Ha!
Curtis: Deuce and 1/4.
Tavis: Not the 225! So you're putting doors on--you were putting doors on the car. I understand that you and your--I don't know if I should tell this story on television. Well, you don't work there now. But I always wondered when I read your background whether or not this was a violation of the union rules. 'Cause y'all had a nice little plan y'all worked out. So these doors are so heavy. The plan you and your partner worked out is that you'd put on doors for 30 minutes.
Curtis: Right.
Tavis: You'd take a 30-minute break while he put on doors. Y'all kind of, like, alternated.
Curtis: Right.
Tavis: Didn't y'all work, like, half a day doing that?
Curtis: It didn't feel like it. It felt like you worked more than half a day. It felt like, uh--but what it did was it gave you time to be off the line every half hour. And that's when I started writing. I started reading first, and then I found out that if I sat down and started writing, I forgot about being in the factory. And I hated the factory.
Tavis: Yeah. That's an amazing story, though. So it was during those 30-minute breaks where you really started putting pen to paper.
Curtis: That's when I started. I wasn't writing fiction at the time. I was a big reader, so I knew bad fiction when I read it, and I knew I was writing bad fiction. Mostly I was writing things like 'I hate my foreman's guts and I wish he'd die!' Something along those lines.
Tavis: Right. That wasn't gonna sell.
Curtis: No.
Tavis: At least they weren't gonna buy that.
Curtis: It might sell in Flint.
Tavis: It might sell in Flint. Yeah. So you learned to write on the assembly line, essentially.
Curtis: Right.
Tavis: You saved a bunch of money. You and your wife saved enough money for you to actually take a year off.
Curtis: Right.
Tavis: So you took a year off, and what happens in this year while you're off?
Curtis: I realized that I had to look at it as a job. I was going to try to write a book in this year, and I knew I had to look at it like I was going to work every day. So I was very careful about getting up every morning whether I wanted to or not. I'd go to the public library, sit in the children's section, and I'd write for 3 or 4 hours every day.
Tavis: What made you eventually figure out that what started out as really bad writing on the assembly line, uh, turned into something better, obviously, at some point. What made you figure out that you actually had what it took to get published and to do rather well?
Curtis: This is something I tell kids all the time when they ask me about writing. You have to be patient with yourself. I think writing's very different than almost any other kind of art because you don't really have prodigies in writing. There aren't very many 18-, 19-year-olds who are writing really good books. And I think it just took time for me to get to the point where I realized what I was writing was good.
Tavis: When did you know that, though? What let you know that what you were writing was not as bad as it was back in the day on the assembly line?
Curtis: You never know. You never believe it. I still don't believe that it's, uh-- I'll write something. I'll read it one minute, and the next minute I read it and I think it's terrible, and then I'll read it again, it seems good. You're very insecure about your writing, I think.
Tavis: So what is it, then, ultimately about your writing you think that connects with young readers? 'Cause clearly something is working here.
Curtis: I think it's humor. I look at things kind of through humorous eyes, and when I'm writing, it comes out very humorously. So I think that young people can pick up on that, and they grab the humor. If you can get them, then they'll get into the story, and then you can get historical things in there, too, where they can learn about--like the first book was about the--was basically--it had a little bit about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
Tavis: In Birmingham.
Curtis: Right. And it--if you can grab them first with the humor, then you can take them on any kind of a journey you want to take 'em on.
Tavis: One listening right now might be trying to figure out 'How does he juxtapose the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, 4 little girls lost their lives'--one who's not read your book--try to figure how you square that with your point about starting with humor. Ain't nothin' funny about this.
Curtis: No, there's nothing funny about that, but the book, I think, kind of evolves in the same way that children look at tragedy. It starts out--it's a family story at the beginning. Three-quarters of the book is a family story. Then there's a 13-year-old son who's sent to his grandmother's in Birmingham, Alabama, to be straightened out, and it touches on the bombing there, and then it comes back, so the bombing is--it's not really a civil rights story. It's a family story, and the humor is in the family. Of course, there's nothing funny about the bombing, but what I hope happens is that young readers and older readers develop some kind of empathy with the family, and then by the time it gets to that church and they wonder if their sister or their daughter were in there, they have some kind of closer feeling.
Tavis: Since we're doing your list of books here, after that came 'Bud, Not Buddy.'
Curtis: 'Bud, Not Buddy.'
Tavis: All right, and that's about...
Curtis: That's about a 10-year-old orphan in Flint, Michigan, again, and he's on a search for a man who he thinks is his father. That started-- I wanted to do a book on the factory that I was working-- Fisher Body. During the thirties, there was a sit-down strike where the workers took over the plant. Never read anything about it. I thought it was very interesting. Started to write that. Did a lot of research in the thirties, then went to a family reunion in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and people started to talk about my grandfather who, during the thirties, had a band called Herman Curtis and the Dusky Devastators of the Depression.
Tavis: Whoa! That's a lot going on there!
Curtis: So I had to put that in there. The story revolved around that.
Tavis: All right, and now, 'Bucking the Sarge', I loved this particular story, but I'll let you tell it, what this book is about.
Curtis: It's about 15-year-old Luther T. Farrell. Once again, we're back in Flint and Luther's mother owns rental properties, group homes.
Tavis: Luther's mother is the sarge.
Curtis: She is the sarge. He calls her the sarge 'cause she's so tough and she is Flint's biggest slumlord, scam artist. She's cheating everybody she can possibly cheat. She's raising him to take over the business. He doesn't want to do it. He wants to be a philosopher, and that causes problems between the two of them.
Tavis: Now, Luther, as I recall, is about 15 years old.
Curtis: 15 years old.
Tavis: How do you put yourself in the mind of a 15-year-old? The book is told basically from his perspective. How do you put yourself in the mind-set of one who's 15?
Curtis: I have no idea. You know, if you ask other people, they say it's 'cause I have the mind of a 15-year-old--which is an improvement over the other 2: I was 10 years old.
Tavis: Is that a challenge for you at all?
Curtis: No, not really. The challenge is in writing so that a 15-year-old is interesting enough, or a 10-year-old is interesting enough to carry a book, because on their own, they couldn't carry a book. A 10-year-old is not going to be able to have the kind of insights that would make you go the whole way with the book, so I think the hard part is to do it that way.
Tavis: Finally, since you are obviously a person of color, writing books for young people, no matter what their race might be, what do you find most often in the stuff that you read from other people's work that's missing in terms of engaging young readers of color?
Curtis: It's sad. When I was growing up, I wasn't a big reader of books, and a child had asked me at a school once why that was, and I couldn't figure out what it was, but then I realized, there weren't a lot of books for, by, or about black people. And that's not to say if you're black, you gotta read black books, but I think for a book to really grab you, there's gotta be something in it that really touches you, that's really close to home. There's just not a lot of books still, to this day, that are for, by, or about black people.
Tavis: So what's next after 'Bucking the Sarge'?
Curtis: There's one called 'Mr. Chicky's Funny Money.'
Tavis: That's where they discovered the gazillion dollar bill?
Curtis: Quadrillion.
Tavis: Quadrillion dollar bill.
Curtis: Quadrillion dollar bill, right, and the little boy doesn't know if it's real or not because it's a one with 15 zeros and, instead of having a picture of a dead president, it's got a picture of James Brown on it, so... He suspects that might not be real.
Tavis: Yeah. Ha ha! This book is 'Bucking the Sarge' by the Newbery Award-winning author Christopher Paul Curtis. It is, according to many critics, one of the 10 best books of the entire year of 2004. If that does not make you want to go out and buy it and read it, then I don't know what does, but anyway, 'Bucking the Sarge'. Nice to see you.
Curtis: Thank you very much, Tavis.
Tavis: All the best to you.
Curtis: Thank you.
Tavis: All right. When you go back to Flint and you see Michael, tell him I said hello.
Curtis: I'll do that.
Tavis: Do that. Up next on this program, actor Kevin Bacon. Stay with us.
Back to January 11, 2005