Carmen Agra Deedy’s books for young readers have received numerous accolades, including a Pura Belpré Honor, a Jane Addams Honor, and an E.B. White Read-Aloud Honor. Born in Havana, Cuba, she immigrated to the U.S. with her family shortly after the Cuban Revolution, and currently lives in Georgia. Illustrator Raúl Colón is the recipient of the 2021 Eric Carle Honor, two Pura Belpré Awards, a gold and silver medal from the Society of Illustrators, and other awards. Born in New York City, as a child he moved with his parents to Caguas, Puerto Rico, and he has since returned to N.Y.C. We asked the duo to discuss their new picture book collaboration, The Peanut Man, inspired by Agra Deedy’s bittersweet memories of her immigration journey.
Carmen Agra Deedy: Hello, Raúl. It’s great to see you again.
Raúl Colón: Well, hello, Carmen. It’s great to see you, too, and to talk about one of my favorite things: books. So, first, I want to know about you and your influences and the stories that you tell, which are sometimes based on things that have actually happened to you, or stories you grew up with like “Martina the Beautiful Cockroach.” So why did The Peanut Man come up as a story for you?
Agra Deedy: I told The Peanut Man as an oral story for many years, primarily to school children. When I began telling stories in schools, it was just a way to introduce my own background to kids. But as I met with growing groups of immigrant and refugee children, I realized the story wasn’t about me at all—it was their story, too. And the children, including native ones, understood that need to find something that reconnected you to a lost home. It’s an old, old story. And whether the audience was comprised of children from Central and South America or Eastern Europe, or Asia––or Wisconsin––the story resonated with them, often profoundly so. It was a thread of loss that wove through the experiences of these children and connected them to one another.
More often than not, they wanted to share their own stories. I’ll never forget this very young storyteller from Russia who told everyone about his grandmother’s borscht. He told us all how much he hated borscht back home. But his grandmother hadn’t been able to come with them and now whenever his own mother made borscht, he loved it. Why? Because it was his grandmother’s soup and a bit of her was there with every spoonful. And that was what the peanut man meant to me. It was a beginning of a transition, of a deeper understanding of what had happened, and was happening to me, to my family. Home was there. But maybe, just maybe, it was also here.
Colón: How and when did you decide, “Okay, I think I can make a book out of this”?
Agra Deedy: I suppose for the reason any writer writes: to give the story permanence—a place for the story to live on, when I’m no longer around to tell it. My mom died last year. My father preceded her. When my sister became very ill, and it was clear she might not survive her illness, I felt this urgency to write about our journey together, the four of us. Seeing them in this picture book is deeply affecting even now.
With autobiographical stories, you never know if the illustrator is going to want much input. But you included a few things from our home, from the photos I sent you. My favorite spread of yours, Raúl, is the one of Papi and me listening to the baseball game. It was as I remembered it. That one really got to me. And that radio was a ringer for our old one, by the way.
Colón: I got that right?! I wasn’t sure how to do it at first because this is a real memory. I always think, “Should I ask Carmen where she was sitting, but I decided I was just going to guess from what you wrote. I thought, if it was me or the way I’ve seen my grandchildren, you know, they’re on the floor playing. I remember I used to listen to the games with my father on the radio. You weren’t watching it on TV, you were sitting next to the radio, so I imagined that’s the way that your dad must have listened to the game also. I’m glad I got that right.
Agra Deedy: What was the most difficult thing to draw?
Colón: The baseball stadium. I had to generalize as much as I could and look for pictures of the actual old stadium in Atlanta because it’s gone. I was trying to get it as close as I saw in the photographs. I didn’t put too much detail because I know how people are; you start getting calls or letters, “That’s not the way the park looked…. The seats weren’t there…. They were this color.”
Agra Deedy: I thought you did it on purpose, making the scene between the characters more significant by blurring the background. I love it. Speaking of characters, how did you choose the depiction of the peanut man at the ballpark? I mean, did he come from your imagination, or from research?
Colón: Yeah, I imagined other people I’ve seen in baseball stadiums. He was probably somebody who’s retired, who does this on the side. And I wanted him to have these big red cheeks or “look something like a Santa Claus, so that he contrasted with the original peanut man in the Cuba scenes.
Agra Deedy: They were quite different, in reality. And that contrast really stresses the fact that it is each man’s kindness to a small child, as well as his willingness to be silly, that makes them seem so alike. That makes each so... human.
Do you have a favorite spread or spot illustration that you enjoyed most?
Colón: I enjoyed the baseball scenes where you can see parts of Cuba peeking through—the beach and the sunset. I grew up in New York but also lived on a tropical island for a while as a kid. When I moved from the city, right away I could tell that the colors on the island were not the same colors I was seeing in the city. I mean we all have red, blue, and yellow, but they’re different. The light is different. The colors are different. So, I made sure that in The Peanut Man I was using the type of colors I would see on the tropical island
Agra Deedy: For what it’s worth, the color palette instantly transported me to my childhood in Cuba, which brings me to the spread where the baseball stadium washes into a dreamy, bittersweet memory of Cuba. It is the moment when I smell the bag of ballpark peanuts. You so perfectly captured the aching homesickness. There was no need for me to add one explanatory word. Bellisimo.
The Peanut Man by Carmen Agra Deedy, illus. by Raúl Colón. Peachtree/Quinlin, $18.99 Mar. 4 ISBN 978-1-68263-568-1
