Margaret McMullan on the 20th Anniversary of HOW I FOUND THE STRONG

This spring my first young adult novel How I Found the Strong turns 20 years old.
 
When my agent, Jennie Dunham, sold How I Found the Strong to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, she had to explain to me what exactly a young adult novel was: a story with a young protagonist who is at the center of the plot.  Then, she immediately told me to forget what she had said.
 
“Don’t think about categories because what the editors liked about the book was that you didn’t condescend to the reader,” she said. It was great advice. Just tell the story in the best way you know. Take the reader through the experience.
 
How I Found the Strong is about Frank "Shanks" Russell, a ten-year old boy who watches his father and older brother join the Confederate Army in the spring of 1861. Shanks becomes the man of the house in Smith County, Mississippi. He helps his mother and their slave, Buck work their family farm until his father returns, disabled. In the summer of 1863, when local lynching parties threaten Buck, who can now read, Frank and his father help him escape North.
 
I am not so sure if How I Found the Strong would get published today, in a time when even Republican leaders won’t acknowledge that the Civil War was, in fact, about slavery. There are also violent passages about the war, a reference to a lynching, “language,” and the fact that I’m a white middle-aged woman writing from the point of view of a white boy from Mississippi.
 
Marketed to Middle School students aged 9-10 year old, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published How I Found the Strong in spring 2004. Penguin Random House acquired and published “Strong” as a mass market paperback with a new cover in spring 2006. All 144 pages fits into a back pocket. For $5.99, it’s cheap, too. It has sold over 25,000 copies. Teachers buy classroom sets. It still gets reviewed on Amazon and Goodreads. I still get requests to visit classrooms in person or by Zoom. I still get emails with questions from students.
 
“Aren’t you scared when you write?”
“Why would you write about the losers and not the winners?”
 
Young readers send me pictures of scenes they’ve drawn from the book. They suggest other story lines. They want to know what happened to Shanks, Irene, Buck and Little Bit, as though these fictional people had gone on to live real lives. They really want to know what happens next. These students and their curiosity led me to write two sequels, When I Crossed No-Bob and Sources of Light, which are also still in print.
 
It’s significant to have a 20 year-old book still in print and circulating in book stores, libraries, and classrooms. My husband calls “Strong” a little miracle. Young boys have especially taken to the book, which is gratifying because boys are typically on the low end of the reading scale. I wrote the book right around the time my son was learning to read.
 
But over and over, I get that question about fear. Aren’t you scared to see the things that Shanks saw? And I can’t help but ask myself: why put these students through war?
 
I have always been interested in how extraordinary historical events affect ordinary people. History, and certainly a good deal of southern history, can be upsetting. But, still, it’s crucial for young readers to know the specifics of history and why politicians and others get worked up about the past because it shapes the present.
 
How I Found the Strong is based on papers I found in a shoebox in my grandmother’s closet. Her great uncle, Frank Russell talked out his life to someone before he died, and that someone typed it into a manuscript, called “The Life and Times of Frank Russell,” a rough sketch of Frank's life in Smith County, Mississippi before, during, and after the Civil War.  
 
The part about Frank Russell's life that interested me the most, was what he did not talk about. When all the "menfolk" went off to war, he was left behind with all the women and children. The real Frank did not talk about that time, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how that might make a young boy feel -- to be left behind during a war of such high stakes -- and that is how I came to shape Shanks.
 
I also wrote all the Civil War stories and myths I grew up hearing. I was born in Newton, Mississippi, north of Soso, west of Chunky. When I was growing up, my grandfather talked about "the war" as though it had happened yesterday. He often took me to the Mount Zion Cemetery where there’s a marker honoring two boys in our family. Legend has it that when their father went off to war and they were supposed to stay behind, these two brothers aged fifteen and sixteen, joined the calvary and left home. "Yankees killed them at the Battle of Murphree's Borough in Tennessee," my grandfather used to tell me. I thought about those two boys so often, I felt they were my brothers and that they had died in my lifetime.
             
I read letters from Civil War soldiers, speeches, and newspaper articles from the 1800’s. I made hard tack. I listened to Civil War-era music. I went to Civil War reenactments and spent time wading through the Strong River in Mississippi, the river Buck must cross to escape. I found out just how rough Smith County was, and how, after the war, even though they were supposed to lay down their arms, Confederate soldiers brought home their guns, and for the first time most every family was armed. They also had access to new illegal distilleries. These same Confederate soldiers organized the Ku Klux Klan during this time. So, all over the South, shell-shocked soldiers, many of them missing limbs, returned home angry, broke, often drunk, and armed. Hardly fodder for a children’s story, right?
 
The year I was researching and writing about the Civil War, the United States declared war on Afghanistan, responding to the 9/11 attacks. I was teaching at the University of Evansville in Indiana and my students began enlisting. Most of them were 18. I couldn’t help but think of my character, Shanks.
 
Reading, writing, and educating yourself are not for the faint of heart. Still, I have yet to meet a reader who was damaged by a book. As most every English teacher and librarian knows, books open up the known and sometimes not-so-known world to students. If anything, students don’t read enough, sometimes because they are so busy watching Tik Tok or playing computer games filled with noise, sex, and violence.
 
How I Found the Strong has never been banned, but some parents questioned the violence and the language in the book. One Black mother in Owensboro, Kentucky protested the selection of How I Found the Strong as their One School, One Book selection at Burns Middle School days before I was scheduled to appear. The Literacy Committee, the school board, and the school’s principal had already approved the book in the summer of 2008. All 850 students in grades 6-8 had a copy.
 
What was the problem? Not the violence, but the use of the n-word.
 
I recall hesitating when I first typed the “n word” in How I Found the Strong, mainly because I was raised never to say or write the word. But the book is not about me, it’s about Shanks, and I needed him to hear that word so that he could respond and act. I also could not see writing a book about race and slavery in Mississippi without using the word. In my research, I read that by the 1800s, the n-word was pejorative.
 
Burns Middle School presented a series of options for students, having guidance counselors available to assist students with their feelings. Students could read the book in the classroom with preferential seating. They could read the book in an alternative setting with adults present. They could read an approved alternate book. Or students could come together with their copies of How I Found the Strong, and together, black out the n-word with Sharpies.
 
When I visited, the students were smart and engaged. At the end of my talk, one girl asked about how I researched the language of the times and I told her that I read diaries of soldiers and other primary sources. Later, I discovered that this girl’s mother was the mother who had protested the book. The debate was valuable for us all. In many ways, I feel I’ve grown up alongside Shanks.
 
My job as a writer is to take the reader through the experience, to make the reader see, hear, feel, smell, taste and experience moments from the past. In How I Found the Strong, Shanks sees the awful violence and murder of a young Black boy which later gives him courage and strength to help others. Cause and effect is the basis of plot.
 
“History is the witness of the times, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity,” Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote.
 
And memory, like history, is not all good. So it is important that we be precise in our memory and that we not erase the bad parts.
 
I don’t recall everything about writing the book, but I do remember writing Shank’s observation after the war ends, which still feels relevant today. “Our country fell apart, and for a time, so did we. But some of us are still left, and we are strong enough to put ourselves and our world back together.”
 
Happy birthday, Shanks.