Gwendolyn Wallace is a New York City–based researcher, storyteller, and children’s author. In her new picture book, The Light She Feels Inside (Sourcebooks Jabberwocky), illustrated by Olivia Duchess, released today, a girl named Maya is inspired by Black women throughout history to harness her inner light and change the world for the better. Here, Wallace reflects on the emotional clarity that can be gained from studying the past—full of both joy and pain—in all its complexity.
At three years old, I received my first timeout from my friend’s mom for “asking too many questions.” When I got home and told my mother what had happened, she told me that I should never apologize for being curious. But the damage was done. As I went through the next few years in my small, mostly white independent school, I made myself as small as possible. But in eighth grade, I found a copy of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in my school library. I read it and then immediately read it again. I believe that the book came to me at the perfect time in my life.
While I was thinking about how to frame this piece, a scene from the book came back to me. Near the middle of the book, Claudia, a nine-year-old dark-skinned Black girl, and the narrator of most of the story, describes Maureen Peal, a new classmate who is light-skinned. She comments, “Jealousy we understood and thought natural.... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.”
I know now that the Thing was the long history of racism, imperialism, and patriarchy. But at the time I read the book, it was life-changing (and dare I say, life-saving) to know that other Black girls also lived in the presence of this mysterious entity. I did not grow up having conversations about race or gender, but I knew the Thing. I felt it over my shoulder in the store with Mom when she would tell me to pull my hands out of my pockets. I felt it on my face as I navigated the racial dynamics of middle school crushes. I felt it in my classroom and on my bookshelf and when I was alone in my room at night staring at my ceiling. It was incredibly disorienting to live with the Thing I couldn’t understand. I was so incredibly angry at my invisible enemy all the time, on top of the teenage anger I was already feeling. To read that the Thing could be named and described, and that other people felt it, gave me the encouragement I needed to investigate it.
In the summer between middle school and high school, I devoured all the content I could about race and gender in American history. Questions I had led me to more questions. To give the Thing its true names did not make it bigger or scarier, but instead took away some of its power. Once I learned the basics of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement, it was a short step to trying to find out what Black women have done in the face of this history. When I got to high school, I was introduced to bell hooks, Ida B. Wells, Audre Lorde, and so many others. While I felt scared about the enormity of the systems that harmed me, I felt incredibly grateful to be part of a long legacy of resistance, creativity, and care. I grieve for the person I could have been if I had learned this history earlier.
I wrote my newest picture book, The Light She Feels Inside, in response to this mourning. The book follows a Black girl named Maya who doesn’t know what to do with her many different emotions about the world. But she meets a kind librarian who shows her what Black women throughout history have done with their big feelings, and how they used them to make a positive change in their communities. As I watched scenes from protests around the country in spring 2020, I felt a mix of emotions. I felt anger about systems of policing that are fed by Black death and our healthcare system that is indifferent to it. I felt the deep collective Black grief that comes with living a life defined by precarity. But I also felt hope. I felt excitement. For the first time in my life, I saw many people talking about what a world without police or prisons might look like. In people’s art and chants and zines and articles, I saw that world clearer than ever, and it was beautiful.
To work with these feelings, I turned to the nonfiction books that have most shaped my thinking about the world: Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, Some of Us Did Not Die by June Jordan, and Assata by Assata Shakur. I cannot put into words how it feels to be told that you are part of a long struggle to live free, that there are people like you who looked the Thing in the eyes and did what they could to weaken it. Their knowledge has made me braver, stronger, and louder. Sitting in the warmth of this emotion, I came up with the idea for The Light She Feels Inside. I wanted to write a book that honored where I came from, and reached across time to the next generation, saying, “I know you may be hurting, but look at our beautiful history. Look what we’ve done with our anger and hope.”
I, like many children, was taught that there were good emotions (happiness, excitement, curiosity) and bad emotions (anger, sadness, disappointment). Black children, who are often seen by adults in their lives as hyper-emotional or aggressive, are particularly taught to keep those bad emotions at bay. The Light She Feels Inside resists that binary thinking, instead asking, “How should we teach children about their emotions in our present moment?” When I look around, there is so much to be angry about. And I believe that anger and love come from the same place; it is my love for the world we have yet to see that fuels my anger at our current unjust systems. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison writes, “There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.” I want to give children the tools to lean into that, rather than fearing and leaning away. I want my books to give all children the skills to navigate this world and its history so that they can create a better one.
But mostly, I write because I want to see more little Black girls with big feelings asking “Why?” and getting answers. I can’t wait to see the world they dream up.
