Guest post written by author Sharon G. Flake
Sharon G. Flake is the author of The Skin I’m In, which has sold over a million copies worldwide and has been translated into numerous languages. Since its publication, Flake has authored over a dozen books, winning multiple Coretta Scott King Honor Awards; ALA Notable and Top Ten Recommended Books citations, and an NAACP Image Award Nomination, among many accolades. She has been writing books from her home (and Panera’s) for over twenty years. Once In A Blue Moon is out July 11th 2023.
My father was a nerd. I know that now. He was a fairly quiet man. After work he could be found in my parents’ bedroom reading a newspaper until suppertime. Dad and Mom read three papers a week. Back then, they were as thick as a book. My father gobbled up information the way a hungry man devours food. History. Politics. Science. He loved it all. Television to him wasn’t simply for entertainment. It was for filling his mind with the wonders of the world. He watched shows about inventors, explorers, movie directors, bridges being built, Black history, European history, ancient history. Dad only made it to the eighth grade. Newspapers, radio, and television were his extended classroom. He had perfect recall so he retained every bit of information he consumed. No wonder he could name politicians—local, state, and regional—recite their voting records, their shortcomings, even their family lineage. On Sundays, among other things, our home was filled with political talk shows and discussions of politics. In another era, maybe he would have been a politician himself.
My father has always been my hero. Through his eyes, I got to see and know America. He loves her madly, though I think he loves Philadelphia a bit more. And just like a man who loves his bride, he understood her well. Perhaps the Jim Crow South taught him that. Our country had promise and potential that she had yet to fulfill; he’d taught us that in so many words. And when it came to Black people, she had dropped the ball more than a time or two, treating us poorly, to say the least. Our job was to keep an eye on her, and those who violated our rights in her name—to vote and never give up, he said to us in so many ways over the years. I am a good daughter. I do what my father tells me.
Dad is ninety-six now. His reading has dwindled to just one publication, Our Daily Bread. Sundays are still for political shows. He still tunes into the news three times daily. But he sleeps more than he used to. Watches the same cowboys repeatedly. We hate to admit that his memory isn’t as keen as it once was. But he is still the one we go to when the world turns upside down and we need to know the history of a region or seek reassurance that Black folks will make it through this storm or the next one.
My dad is the reason I wrote Once in a Blue Moon. For starters, I wanted to honor him. No one puts plaques on walls for men like him: men who did backbreaking jobs to put food on the table and keep the lights on. Men with little education who somehow managed to educate themselves and pass the love of learning on to another generation. So perhaps this book is a sort of plaque. My way of saying well done, Dad. You were not perfect, but you were perfect for us.
About ten years ago, I asked my father a question. What would he do if he could have done anything he wanted for a living. It’s a big question for a man born in the Jim Crow era, when opportunity and education were limited or nonexistent. He would have been an astronomer, he told me. I almost fell off the chair. Apparently in school in the south, he would stare at the sky and wonder what was going on up there. I guess it happened a lot because his teacher would call him on it. Not long after my conversation with Dad, I wrote a short story about a boy who was so taken with things above that he drew planets, stars, and galaxies onto butcher paper and buildings. “A Boy’s Duty” was published in an anthology called Fresh Ink. I consider it one of my best pieces of fiction writing.
When it came time for me to write a book in verse, I returned to Dad’s statement about astronomy. And thus I had another narrator—much younger that the one in Fresh Ink—who was fascinated with the goings-on of the universe. James Henry, the protagonist of Once in a Blue Moon, is quirky and curious, two things I imagine he had in common with my dad when he was a boy. And he is also smart, like Dad, a seeker with more than a few fears.
I named James Henry after my father, Henry, and his brother James, whom I have never met. After an accident near the ocean, James Henry becomes fearful of everything. Now he refuses to leave home except to use the outhouse. And he refuses to speak to anyone besides Gran and his twin, Hattie Mae.
Like my father, James Henry is an overthinker, brilliant, taken with learning new things. Not much of this novel is based on my father’s true self beyond that. But I will say Dad had his fears. Me too. Anxiety and I have been glued together since birth, I’d say. Like my father, I’m not sure I’d be the same person without it. But that is another story.
In writing this book, I checked in with Dad about a few things. The house he grew up in, for instance. It was just one room. The one in my novel is as close to that one as I could make it. The landscape around his birth home is too. There were train tracks near their place, and a highway, and a school. Yep, I incorporated those too. There was a dentist in the town where Dad grew up. According to my father, the dentist’s daughter liked him at some point, but that’s all I know about that. There was a woman named Miss Mami. She was white. Dad liked her, and that was enough for me. Did she have a wagon? A sister? Who knows? But the woman in my novel has a sister and a wagon. There are other things, like the norms of the day, that I checked with him about and did research on. Times weren’t easy for Black people in the Jim Crow South. “But we had a good family,” Dad told me just the other day, “and good neighbors. That is how we made it.”
James Henry and his sister have all the freedom in the world, it seems. To walk into their home is to step into other worlds, ones where planets, spaceships, shooting stars, and deep space are painted, drawn, plastered on every wall. They spend a great deal of time on the roof. Sitting in homemade rocket ships, they put on helmets and travel the universe. Hattie knows, though, that James Henry cannot hide forever. That he has to face the world and his fears one day. So she encourages him to return to where his troubles began—at the lighthouse under a blue moon. There will be villains and bullies on this journey, helping hands and smiling faces, Jim Crow and two old white widows with nerves of steel. And throughout, there is love. Gran’s love for the twins and their love for her. Hattie and James Henry’s love of exploration and family. Ma’s love of lighthouses and her family, as well as education for all. And finally there is Dad’s enduring love. If my father were not so quiet, if he had been more demonstrative, he would have expressed similar emotions to those James Henry’s father shares with him. But, given Dad’s generation, he showed love in other ways. By going to work, hardly missing a day in thirty-six years. When he and Mom took in and helped raised grandchildren, one of whom is now a doctor. When he changed shifts at work when another grand came to stay. By changing our diapers, getting us out of jams, giving us his last dime when he had to. And he shows it even now when he says, “Y’all sure are good to me.”
My book is a thank-you to him. A love note. A plaque. Not just from me, but from all his children, the beneficiaries of his knowledge and love. He wasn’t perfect. But he was—is—our dad. And he did a pretty good job at that.
