For years, Lesa Cline-Ransome wrote picture books, exploring such disparate topics as maritime history, bacteriology, and clandestine schools where enslaved African Americans learned to read. Then, in 2018, she published Finding Langston, about a young Black boy who moves with his father from Alabama to Chicago in 1946 as part of the Great Migration. She followed that up in 2020 with Leaving Lymon, about a secondary character from that book, a Mississippi boy who bullies Langston mercilessly. Now, in Being Clem (Holiday House, Aug. 3), she returns again to the same Chicago neighborhood to tell the story of a third classmate, whose father, a Navy sailor, was killed in the Port Chicago disaster of 1944 that killed 320 seamen, mostly African American, who were loading munitions under unsafe conditions. Through the interlocking stories of these three Black boys, Cline-Ransome explores three distinct aspects of mid-20^th-century American history—and gives readers three indelible protagonists. We caught up with her via Zoom from her home in New York’s Hudson Valley to talk about this project. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Finding Langston began as another picture book, and now it’s a middle-grade trilogy. How did that happen?

I had read Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, the story of America’s Great Migration. I started trying to imagine what that would have felt like for a child leaving the South and coming north, and I thought, Oh, you know, that’d be a great picture book. [When] I shared it with my editor, Mary Cash at Holiday House, she said, “I think it’s kind of a too-long picture book, but it could be a very short middle-grade novel.” And I [said], “That’s interesting. I guess I could make it a shorter picture book. I’m a picture-book writer.” She said, “But suppose you’re a middle-grade writer.” I believe in embracing the yes in me. So I said, “Sure, I can do it.” I remember hanging up the phone and just weeping because I thought, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to write a middle-grade novel. I immediately reached out to my very dear friend Ann Burg, who is a middle-grade author, and she worked with me [as] I got the first chapter. After that, it took on a life of its own. It’s true that the characters begin to reveal themselves to you. I began to fall in love with Langston, and then I wanted to know more. Now I can’t even imagine, what was I afraid of?

I started getting a lot of emails from readers about the book, and Mary suggested writing a book about his bully, Lymon. I started thinking about [what I knew about Lymon]: He’s a bully, and he has difficulty reading. And I thought, Why would he have difficulty reading? At the same time I was reading Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, and she touched upon the Parchman State Penitentiary. That is how I began the story of Lymon, as a kid falling through the cracks whose father is in the penitentiary and whose very young mother is absent, so he’s being raised by grandparents.

After we finished the Lymon book, Mary said, “Now what about if we made it a trilogy?” People were very interested in Clem’s story. It gave me the opportunity to explore his friendship with Langston, which I enjoyed. And also to explore another period of history that’s often not talked about, the Port Chicago disaster.

I was wondering how you arrived at the Port Chicago disaster.

I was at a conference or some type of book event, and I was sitting across from the amazing Steve Sheinkin. I love every single one of his books, and I picked up The Port Chicago 50. And I thought, How do I not know this story? The timing seemed to be a period that could fit in with Langston’s story, and I thought, What if he had a friend whose father had died in the Port Chicago disaster? I put it in there not knowing that I would be exploring it more fully later on. When I began Being Clem, Steve was one of the first people I contacted to find out some details I needed to fill in. He was incredibly helpful.

Can you talk about Clem’s mother’s depression?

As a creative challenge, I wanted to draw a different picture of a mother than I had in the previous two books. But I also wanted to draw attention to a situation that I think is not addressed enough. This is a woman who is incredibly loving and maternal, and her world is really thrown for a loop. She doesn’t have much of a support system. There are financial challenges, and still she has to provide for these children. And she is particularly fragile. She sees herself as very mothering and protective, but her children have to mother and protect her in so many ways. I don’t think that we talk enough about the challenges that mothering presents, and the lack of support available to mothers, and how mental health issues are just not addressed, particularly in communities of color. I wanted to bring to the forefront that this is something she’s grappling with every single day. And not only is she grappling with it, her children are having to deal with her depression too, every single day.

How did you decide to make swimming the fear that Clem needed to overcome?

As I was exploring the Port Chicago disaster, I started thinking about what would his issue be. I started imagining how learning about his father’s death might have impacted him and the fears that might have instilled. A fear of water seemed natural. And he wouldn’t have that much exposure to water during that time period. There were so very few public swimming pools, pools in schools, [or] beaches that were accessible to people of color. And it also addresses a lot of the myths and stereotypes surrounding Blacks and swimming. You know, people say Black people tend not to swim like it’s some genetic deficit. And Black people drown more frequently—it’s obviously not because of a genetic deficit, it’s just that there’s a lack of access to swimming facilities for Blacks.

My son Malcolm had a really strong interest in swimming when he was little. His sister who’s just a year older, Maya, was a really strong swimmer. But he couldn’t seem to get the hang of it. Maya joined our local summer swim team when she was really young. And he really wanted to learn to swim, but he wasn’t a swimmer. He would sit on the sidelines and watch her swim. I signed him up for a swim class, and I’ve never seen him work as hard at anything as he did with swimming, just so he could make it onto this swim team. He worked so hard. He stayed with swimming until he graduated high school. He was the No. 1 male swimmer on the team. But every swim meet we went to over his entire swim career, he was still one of the only Black male swimmers, which tells you that even 60 years after Being Clem, access is still an issue.

Vicky Smith is a young readers’ editor.