The first thing Walter Dean Myers does when he arrives in town for a book signing is pull out the Yellow Pages and start searching for rare-book dealers. What began as an interest in finding images of African-American 
life in books and photographs has developed into a burgeoning number of children's books, written by Myers himself. His hobby has come full circle and is now a vocation. And while it is Myers who is showing children the heritage of African-Americans, it was children themselves who piqued his initial interest in collecting antique photographs.
While teaching writing to Jersey City grade-schoolers in the late 1980s, Myers asked his students to bring in photos of their grandparents as children, and was moved by their reactions. "The kids loved the photographs," he recalls. "They wanted to learn why their grandparents would wear those kinds of clothes, sh s, what kind of house they lived in. The kids took to them so warmly that I thought, `There's something here.' "
Their enthusiasm for the photographs led to the book Brown Angels (HarperCollins, 1993), designed like an antique photo album with Myers's original p try placed alongside photographs he had collected. To extend readers' experience of the book, Myers created a tour for the original pictures in their antique frames. The exhibit, which included some 120 pieces, opened at the Newark Public Library; from there, roughly half of the pieces toured to various cities across the country.
A History Through Images
Myers believes that it is important to convey the strength of African-Americans and their history through photographs. "Kids know that `Black is beautiful' is a slogan from the 1970s," he says, "but unless they see the images, they don't believe it." The sepia-toned photographs he collected for Brown Angels show African-American children from the past who were loved and celebrated; as Myers says, through this album, readers can "see an adorable child nicely dressed, nicely cared for."
In One More River to Cross: An African American Photograph Album (Harcourt, 1995), Myers moved from presenting images of children in the past to historical images of adults, from "black nuns to black Jews to black 
jockeys," Myers says. Unlike the majority of pictures showcased in Now Is Your Time: The African-American Struggle for Freedom (HarperCollins, 1991), which portrays more prominent African-Americans, the photos Myers collected for both Brown Angels and One More River to Cross show people who are not well known, in the midst of their everyday routines. "The value of seeing those photos," he adds, "is showing that a black person can be any old thing. Kids say they want to play in the NBA or rap because we haven't given them permission to consider anything else."
Myers's most recent book, At Her Majesty's Request: An African Princess in Victorian England (Scholastic, 1999), is perhaps the most direct result of his rounds with rare-book dealers, who Myers says comprise a tightly knit community. Having learned of Myers's hobby, a London dealer sent him notice of a packet of letters penned by Sarah Forbes Bonetta, an African princess. One of the major stumbling blocks to his purchase of the letters was that several had been written by Queen Victoria, and Myers had to get special clearance to take them out of the country.
Once he purchased the letters, Myers spent a great deal of time figuring out whether or not he could piece together the events that occurred between the lines, as it were. "Here's this fairly literate lady acting as if she has no care in the world in her letters to Mrs. Sch n [her guardian] or the Queen," Myers observes. "Yet as a young girl she was almost killed, and she knew that."
While going through his own extensive library for possible clues to Sarah's life, he serendipitously uncovered a book penned by Frederick E. Forbes, the captain who rescued the princess and brought her to Britain in 1850. And later, in one of the most interesting wrinkles of Myers's "wild goose chases," he discovered that Forbes had played a prominent role in another major event. While the author was involved in research for the movie Amistad, he discovered that Forbes was also involved in destroying the "barracoon" or internment camp where the slaves aboard the Amistad had been held, at the end of the 1841 trial (this never made it into the film, however).
His serpentine route to complete At Her Majesty's Request led Myers from Windsor Castle to the Internet, where he discovered a photo of the princess as part of an exhibition in Ontario. "[It's] one of the longest books I worked on," he says. Not only was the preparation for the book lengthy, but his fascination with its subject continues. In his last trip to London, Myers solved the mystery of the hotel where Sarah spent her final days. He says, "I'll be researching her for the rest of my life." Myers is on an autographing tour for the book March 22-27 in the Washington, D.C., area as well as Dallas and Chicago.
A More Inclusive History
In his books, Myers aims to give his readers a comprehensive picture of the past, one that includes, rather than omits, African-Americans. When he was in school, history lessons left him cold. "History books give you the standard, `Give me liberty or give me death,' " Myers says. "In school, you're taught that this is a valuable history. By extension, what you don't learn is not valuable." Myers wants to share with readers his discoveries of blacks who fought on both sides of the Revolutionary War, for instance, or the fact that at least one-fourth of the cowboys in the Old West were either black or Hispanic.
"Kids today will say, `We're not interested in black books,' " he says. "The reason is that so many [of them] are a history of oppression, in which blacks are portrayed as victims. Kids don't want to read that. They want to read about being triumphant."
When he was growing up, Myers wanted to be a writer, but didn't think it possible because he knew of no black writers. "[Ralph] Ellison and [James] Baldwin were just coming along, and we weren't taught about Zora Neale Hurston or the Harlem Renaissance," he recalls. Instead, he read books by Thomas Mann and Andre Gide. "I met Langston Hughes one day [in Harlem], sitting on the stoops, drinking beer, but I didn't think much of him. He didn't fit my stereotype of what serious writers should be. He wasn't writing about Venice," Myers says. "Then Baldwin wrote about my neighborhood; he gave me permission to write about my neighborhood."
Myers wants to do the same thing for today's readers. In his words, "I want to write books where a child says, `I'm going to feel good about myself.' " Whether in the photographs of beautiful children in Brown Angels or through the stories and images of diverse and courageous lives, Myers wants to give children permission to become whomever they want to be.
