LAKE PLACID — Children’s book author Lesa Cline-Ransome and her husband, illustrator James E. Ransome, will read aloud Friday, July 5, from their children’s book, “Before She Was Harriet,” at the 2 p.m. unveiling of the “Beacon of Hope,” the nationally recognized sculpture of Harriet Tubman, at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in Lake Placid.
Hosted by John Brown Lives!, the ceremony is free and open to the public.
THE NURSES’ DAUGHTER
As a little girl growing up in Malden, Mass., Cline-Ransome’s parents were both nurses.
“I grew up loving to read,” she said.
“I spent much of my time at the Malden Public Library with my mom. So, I grew up knowing that I loved words and stories. I knew that I wanted to be a writer. I was a person who was always kind of rooted in the past because I loved hearing the stories of older people, listening to my mother’s stories and my grandmother’s stories. As a person who was always seen as incredibly, incredibly nosy, I always asked way too many questions. One question too many. I’ve always been told I was nosy.”
THE HARRIET FACTOR
Cline-Ransome originally thought she wanted to be a journalist because she loved to ask questions, but she soon realized that wasn’t the style of writing that interested her. Much later, she realized writing for younger readers was more aligned with her personality.
“I do love looking at the trajectory of people’s lives and the way it intersects with history and how people manage to survive the truth of history, especially African Americans in this country,” she said.
In early ‘70s, there were very few Black families living in Malden, which is outside of Boston.
“The town was lovely, but the ways in which they taught history was that basically the history of African Americans was simply one of enslavement,” she said.
“It was only when I learned about Harriet Tubman that she kind of changed that narrative for me. The way they taught history, I felt they taught me to be ashamed of this history of African Americans in this country. Then, I learned about Harriet Tubman, who was a woman, strong and powerful. Through her own will and strength and resolve, she escaped and came back and helped others to escape. All of a sudden, I heard a very different story about resistance.”
FASHION SCRIBE
Cline-Ransome attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY to study fashion marketing, which she soon realized was the wrong major for her.
“I began taking every writing course that they offered and recognized that my true love was writing,” she said.
“I wound up combining those two things, fashion and writing. I became a fashion copywriter. I did that for many years in the fashion world in NYC.
“When I started my family, I went back to graduate school for education. James and I had gotten married. We met in college at Pratt Institute. He was majoring in illustration. He had done several picture books. I was at home. We had just started our family. All of my roads kind of converged into one. So, I had my educational background, my teaching experience, my love of writing, and my love of history, and my love of education. James was illustrating, so we decided to join forces and I began writing for children.”
Cline-Ransome’s first book was on Satchel Paige, the legendary Negro League and Major League pitcher.
PUBLISHING LANDSCAPE
When Cline-Ransome entered the children’s book fray, it was a very different time than now.
“I was fortunate to have an editor who was very, very patient, willing to work with me,” she said.
“The publishing world was just beginning to open up to more diverse voices and picture book biographies about people of color. I think I came in at just the right time.”
Her book on Paige was spurred from watching Ken Burns’ documentary, “Baseball.”
“They had a pretty large segment on the Negro Leagues,” she said.
“There was an editor who had also seen that documentary and was very interested in the story. They were interested in stories about people of color, but I would say that they had to be somewhat known names. Now, I think the way in which the landscape has changed is that they’re open to complete unknown names. They are interested in helping readers to become educated about people of color.”
REVERSE BIOGRAPHY
Before Cline-Ransome wrote, “Before She Became Harriet,” she had been thinking about her as a subject for a very long time.
“I wasn’t sure,” she said.
“There are so many books Harriet Tubman. I wasn’t quite sure how I could write that story differently than it had already been told. It was when James began reading a book about Harriet Tubman and discovered that she had all these other lives. That she had been a general, and that she had been a spy, and that she was a suffragist. He was telling me about this book as he was reading it. The idea began formulating in my mind that this could be a very different way into her story that hasn’t been told before. That’s when I really began thinking about it.”
During that time period, Cline-Ransome’s mother was in her early 90s and beginning a battle with cognitive decline.
“At her advanced age, she began talking a lot about who she was in her past,” she said.
“So it was easier for her access who she was in her much younger years. I began thinking about imagine telling a story from an older woman’s perspective thinking back on all that she was in her youth. I thought about all the lives that Harriet had lived that no one really knew about. Thinking about my mother, looking back on all that she was in her past, and combining those stories I thought about before she was Harriet, she was a suffragist and a general and a spy. Before she was all those things, she was still a young girl named Araminta.”
Cline-Ransome didn’t visit Tubman’s home place in Dorchester County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, but she traveled from the Hudson Valley to Auburn, where Tubman lived and is buried.
COLLABORATION
The husband-and-wife duo’s process is very similar to author and illustrators, who don’t know each other and are not married.
“The way in which we collaborate is that sometimes we talk about what we would like to work on together,” she said.
“Our interests often overlap in terms of historic figures, musical figures. We have done a lot of books about musicians together like Louis Armstrong and the jazz musician Sidney Bechet.”
Once a project is decided, it is pitched to an editor.
“I begin writing,” she said.
“I do the research. Often if I am traveling to some place, James will come with me. He will collect research knowing that he will be working on the project in the future.”
As Cline-Ransome is writing, she will read drafts of the story to him.
“Then, I work with my editor to edit, revise, copy editor. Then, the book is done from my perspective. Then, James begins illustrating probably two, three, sometimes four years later.”
Occasionally, Cline-Ransome will glance at what he’s working on in terms of illustrations.
“I trust him,” she said.
“I let him do his own thing. He may ask me questions. I’ll give him a little bit of feedback, but I have to trust him and let him do his own thing. and that’s it. Then, the book comes together at the end.
“The good thing is that what he understands is my intention for the book. Even if he is starting it years later, he knows what I am going for. He has the access to all of the research materials and he’s gone to the places that I have visited. So, there’s an advantage in that way.”