‘NEW KID’ ON A ROLL
“THE BEST THING EVER IS SHOWING THAT A BOOK FEATURING AFRICAN-AMERICAN CHARACTERS AS JUST NORMAL KIDS COULD BE WIDELY SUCCESSFUL. AND THAT’S WHAT I ALWAYS THOUGHT WOULD HAPPEN IF GIVEN A CHANCE.”
Paul Curtis.)
Craft learned of both wins in separate phone calls the day they were to be announced at the American Library Association’s January conference. Knowing he was in the running for the Newbery, he left his phone on hoping for an early morning call. When none came by 6:30, he gave up. Then minutes later the phone did ring.
“I picked it up and thought, “Please don’t let this be a credit card offer.’ I would have burst into tears,” he later told an interviewer. “Then the people in the background started screaming and I started screaming, then I screamed some more and they screamed more.”
The call for the King award came a half hour later. As joyful as he felt that day, Craft’s main reaction was to see the awards, especially the Newbery, as validating his vision for young people’s literature.
“The best thing ever is showing that a book featuring African-American characters as just normal kids could be widely successful. And that’s what I always thought would happen if given a chance,” he says.
He doesn’t see “New Kid” a crossover success and regards the term itself as suspect. “The book wasn’t just made for black people. You never hear of a book by a white author as crossover. I always wanted … to show white kids could read a book with a black character, just like boys could read a book about a female character. It shouldn’t be, ‘I’m not black so I can’t read that.’ I didn’t want people to have that kind of aversion.”
In fact, “New Kid” can be read as a primer on racial awareness and class difference. The Newbery announcement says its protagonist, “Jordan Banks can’t help seeing privilege when he transfers to Riverdale Academy Day School for seventh grade.”
The book is also semi-autobiographical. A lot of what Jordan Banks sees comes from Craft’s own experience or that of his two sons. Craft transferred to the elite Fieldston School in the Bronx in ninth grade, while his sons attended New Canaan Country School until leaving for high school.
The most direct overlap between Jordan and himself, Craft says, is Jordan’s interest in art and his commute by bus from Washington Heights. The ride is depicted in a two-page spread that breaks from the book’s usual colored paneled format. Instead, it is presented as a pencil drawing from Jordan’s sketchbook and shows him morphing from hooded tough at the start of the commute to non-threatening cypher by the time he gets to school. In a purely visual joke, a seat-mate holds a cup of coffee the size of a bucket.
Some of the details Craft attributes to his sons is Jordan presuming squash is a vegetable rather than a sport and puzzling over classmates wearing shorts in cold weather. Jordan also is confused by what now are called micro-aggressions, like a white parent presuming a black math teacher is a coach or teachers failing to remember black students’ names.
There are numerous references to disparity of wealth. At Christmas, Jordan’s father springs for the newest edition of a video basketball game, forcing Jordan to hide the deluxe version of the same game given him by a wealthy secret Santa classmate. The single, bleakest image in the entire book, bleeding from one page to another, shows Jordan’s father in a darkened room, sitting at a desk with a tipped over #1 Dad coffee mug.
Craft says that image is intended for adults, and that he sees both his own father and himself in it. “He feels like a loser. His son’s classmates go to Spain and Italy on vacation.” He says when his sons, now in college, were invited to a basketball game by classmates he might find out they’d been court-side at Madison Square Garden.
Craft’s own father was a postal worker who worked nights. In the book, he is director of a community center who quit a career in publishing. At one stage in his career Craft was editorial director of the Sports Illustrated for Kids website. He also has taught cartooning at the Norwalk’s George Washington Carver Center. “I thought it would be cool to have Jordan’s dad work there,” he says.
Anyone leafing through “New Kid” would be surprised to learn it has such a serious content. It is after all illustrated in a comic style for young readers. Impossible things happen as in one of Craft’s favorite panels where a girl’s hand puppet turns into a swamp monster.
“I was talking so much about heavy subjects like race and class, I also wanted parts where you hopefully laugh out loud.” Craft says. “Anything to take the edge off, so it wasn’t like I was coming at people and blaming them.”
A sequel to “New Kid” titled “Class Act” is due to be published in October. Craft says he isn’t worried about running out of material.
“Even as an author, there are schools where I’ve gone to do an assembly, only to have someone think I’m there to fix the copier. At book events, I’m talking to this guy about his book and I start talking about my books, and he’s like, ‘Oh, I thought you worked at the bar.’ ”