Sundee Frazier writes engrossing, funny children’s novels about families who embody the nation’s mosaic heritage
Jul 21, 2010, Vol: 17, No: 29
When the 2000 Census first allowed for people to check multiple boxes to describe their race, it signaled an era of increasing recognition of multiracial identities in our country. Now, we are living in the age of Barack Obama, our nation’s first black president who just happens to have a white mother from Kansas, and in U.S. cities such as Seattle, Sacramento and San Antonio, one in six babies is born multiracial, according to the Seattle-based Mavin Foundation, which since 1998 has educated the public on our nation’s durable multiracial identity.
Local author Sundee Frazier has written extensively on the subject of multiracial identity, both in her nonfiction works, such as “Check All That Apply: Finding Wholeness as a Multiracial Person” and in her award winning children’s novel “Brendan Buckley’s Universe and Everything in It.” Frazier’s own experience as a person of mixed race heritage has strongly impacted her work as an author. She was born to a black father and white mother who married in 1968, only one year after the Supreme Court lifted the laws that still banned interracial marriage in 16 U.S. states.
Frazier’s latest novel for children, “The Other Half of my Heart,” tells the story of Minni and Keira King, twin sisters from Port Townsend, Wash. who travel to their grandmother’s home in North Carolina to compete for the title of Miss Black Pearl Preteen of America. The fact that Minni was born appearing white like their father, while Keira looked black like their mother, leads the girls to confront complex issues of race, appearance and self-identity in a story that is both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply thought provoking for young and old readers alike.
Frazier recently took some time to discuss her work with Real Change; her writing process and her own experience as a mixed race person.
What was your inspiration for the characters of Minni and Keira?
Well, in terms of the concept of black and white twins, the idea came from an actual news item from the U.K. in about 2006. Twins were born, and one was being called black and the other white. And my editor’s actually the one who brought the news story to my attention and suggested I consider writing a story about what their lives might be like at 10 or 11. It’s just an interesting situation where you have a family with these twins that come out looking as different as black and white. I took on the challenge — I thought, “Well, I’m a biracial person. I know what it feels like to be both black and white.” And the characters Minni and Keira developed with their distinct personalities, because as much as they look different on the outside, they’re different on the inside as well.
And I’m probably more like Minni, who is the point of view character, the more white appearing one. She’s more shy and retiring and reserved, and she loves animals and is into reading books. I can really relate to her personality. But there’s a little bit of Keira in me as well. (laughs) She’s the more fiery, performance oriented one. As much as I say I don’t like to get up onstage, I’ve had some experiences with performing as well, so I could relate to Keira. And she certainly came out of another part of me, the more outgoing side of me. So I like to say that the twins reflect the twin nature of my own heart and personality.
What do you think the differences, and the similarities, between these twin sisters reveal about the boundaries of race in our society?
Well, first of all, I think that the sister situation reveals that the boundaries between races are not as defined as we like to think that they are, that the definitions that we use for black and white are very fluid and shifting.
The boundaries of who is black and who is white, certainly that’s something that I think about a lot as a biracial person. How we think of race is very much about physical appearance, and I think that the struggle that Minni’s going through in the book, as the white-appearing one is trying to figure out, ‘what does it mean for me as a white-appearing person to be black?’
I hope that it will challenge readers to consider that how we define people by looking at their outsides is not always true to who the person is on the inside, or how they perceive themselves or what their experiences are. Basically, looks can be deceiving. Looks can be very deceiving. I think that’s a major theme in the book. I don’t know, I’ll have to wait till people start telling me what they get out of the book.
The story begins in Port Townsend and follows the girls to Raleigh, N.C., where their experience of race is very different. Why did you choose to begin your story in the Pacific Northwest before transitioning to the South?
Well, I’m from the Pacific Northwest so my roots are here and even though I left for 20 years and traveled around the country and lived in different places, I was born in Seattle and raised in Washington until I was 17. So this is very much the soil. Culture comes from word cultura, which means soil, and my culture is Washington state. Port Townsend is an artist’s community and the mother in the story is an artist, so I can see a strong motivation for the mom to stay there, even though she knows that her black-appearing daughter is having some challenges. They’re very visible minorities in Port Townsend, but the artist community and the openness to diversity is something that keeps them there. So that’s why the story starts in Port Townsend, and because I wanted there to be a setting in which Keira, the black appearing one, is the one who feels like she is a minority, so that when they go to North Carolina, where they’re mostly in a black environment then the shoe’s on the other foot. Then Minni, the white appearing one, is suddenly propelled into this world where she now knows what it feels like to be in the minority, and she starts to have to wrestle with what her sister’s been dealing with all her life up in Washington State.
While reading the book I found myself laughing out loud more than a few times. What is the importance of humor within your work, and how does it relate to your exploration of what is often quite serious subject matter?
It’s so good to hear you say that, because I actually don’t think of myself as a funny person. But I’ve discovered, between “Brendan Buckley’s Universe” and this book – which, when the first review that came out, the first word of the review was “funny,” and it just kind of surprised me, like, really? Wow. People are finding it funny. But it pleased me because even though I’m not trying to be funny, there must be some way in which I know intuitively that the subject matter I’m dealing with could come across as preachy, and I don’t want to be preachy. I don’t want it to be too heavy and serious.
There’s something about the levity that – it’s sort of like that, “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” kind of approach. It’s not intentional on my part. But, maybe as an artist or an author, I’ve needed to create scenes that are light, and that have the laughable moments to be able to handle writing about such serious things, and painful things, quite honestly. This book, in particular, comes from a very personal place in my heart. I’ve had a lot of painful experiences being a mixed race person in our country that is so fixated on race and racial divisions. Being a person of two races has put me in some positions that have been fairly painful and so, I think the levity has helped me also to deal with it.
How did you decide that you wanted to write books for younger readers?
It was a very organic thing. I don’t think that I necessarily chose children’s writing as much as it chose me. I think that there’s something about the form, the genre, that just calls to me. I love being able to deal with serious subject matter, but having the kid’s perspective. I think children are very perceptive and truthful. They haven’t yet gained all of the baggage and they don’t know when they’re being impolite, they just say things as they see them …
They don’t have the filter.
Yeah. And I really like that about kids. I think there’s something about me as an adult where I’ve gotten to the place where I feel like I need to be polite, and writing for kids, you can shed that adult need to be polite and just say things like you see them. So I think writing for kids enables me to be truthful in a fun way. And I just always loved reading kids’ books growing up, I read a lot growing up. Even today as an adult I still love reading kids’ books even more than adult works.
Did you make a conscious choice to write about subjects that you felt were underrepresented in children’s literature?
I didn’t make a conscious choice, no. I’ve just been writing what comes out of my experience, basically. I think it just so happens that because of my experience as a mixed race person, I’m putting books out now about subjects that are also in the mainstream media because there’s this growing wave of mixed race people that are coming of age at the same time and making noise that, “Hey, our experience is a little bit different than being just one race or the other.” And with Barack Obama being elected as the president, that was in the media a lot, and so I think it’s just a nice dovetailing of me getting my books out there at the same time that this issue is getting more national, and even global intention.
I have to say in retrospect that even though I didn’t intentionally set out to write books that deal with biracial subject matter to fill a void, because I think there is a void or there has been a void, it is nice to know that I can be a part of creating resources for the next generation of children, of whom many are mixed race.
How has your own experience as a person of mixed race informed your work?
What I’ve tried to do is show some of the real experiences that mixed race people have in this society that is sort of race obsessed. And at the same time show kids who are just normal kids, and who are just growing up, like all kids grow up and they have their scrapes and they’re not necessarily race related.
They have their interests, and their family dynamics, and their challenges that are both race and non-race related, because that was really my experience. Being biracial has shaped and colored my experience completely, but I was also just a kid, like all the other kids. So I want to show both sides of that.
Could you describe your writing process?
Basically, I start off with the seed of an idea. With “The Other Half of my Heart” I had just the concept of twins being born black and white. Then it’s all about just generating as much material as I can. I just write and write. And it might be from memory, my own memories, things that I’ve imagined, things that I’ve heard happen to other people, but things that I think could happen to my main character as I envision him or her.
Then it’s about trying to find some kind of a form, some kind of beginning, middle and end so that I can pick and pull scenes from my writing and try to cobble it together into some kind of structure. I’m not a structured person, so that’s also a very challenging part of the process. I liken it to panning for gold or something. I create all this dirt, I create as much dirt as I can, and then I start panning, and trying to find the nuggets, the scenes that really pop out at me as having the most emotional resonance or deepest impact, and I pick those scenes out and then I try to put them into some kind of form.
The part I love is the revision, actually. I mean revision is hard too, it has it’s own challenges because you’ve worked so hard to craft these scenes. But, revision is good because it gives you something to work with. I tell people, the writer has one medium and that is words, so until you have words to do something with, you have nothing. It’s kind of like being a sculptor. A sculptor has to have clay before they can sculpt a piece. So for me that first draft process is like creating the clay, so that I have something then to sculpt.
Read an excerpt from “The Other Half of My Heart” and “Brendan Buckley’s Universe and Everything in It” at www.sundeefrazier.com.
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