Speaking as a Southern Picture Book Author: An Interview with Gail E. Haley

Gail Haley, 2017. Photo courtesy of Mehl Renner.

Gail E. Haley is a children’s author and illustrator, perhaps best known as the first illustrator to win both the Caldecott Medal and the Greenaway Medal for her works A Story, A Story (1970) and The Post Office Cat (1976) respectively. She is one of only two illustrators to win both prestigious awards. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1939, she grew up in Shuffle-town, a rural community on the outskirts of the city. After studying at the Richmond Professional Institute and the University of Virginia, Haley went on to self-publish her first work My Kingdom for a Dragon. She then lived and worked in the Caribbean, New York, and London before returning to North Carolina. Previously the writer in residence at Appalachian State University, her other works include adaptations of the traditional mountain stories known as the Jack Tales: Jack and the Bean Tree (1986), Jack and the Fire Dragon (1988), and Mountain Jack Tales (2002). Haley currently resides in the North Carolina mountains, where her most recent exhibition “Everyman Jack” was held at the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum.

VB:

I understand you grew up near Charlotte?

GH:

Well, I—we—lived in the country. I mean deep country, and, it wasn’t deep country, it was ten miles from Charlotte, but at that point Shuffletown was way out there. We had three acres, which my mother named Dogwood Plantation. She had the Tara complex, and she wanted me to be a movie star, so I had a perm when I was three years old, and then I had to go into town to take marimba lessons and tap dancing lessons.

VB:

How did your early life influence your decision to become an author/illustrator?

GH:

After my lessons I would go to the Charlotte Observer where my father was art director, and I watched people drawing and saw all the wonderful little machines that artists use. I knew that I wanted to write and illustrate children’s books from about eight years old because I saw people drawing and writing articles and then on Sunday it would be in the newspaper. So there was no problem in my mind about “hey, I know how to get things on paper.”

VB:

What was it like growing up in Shuffletown and Charlotte before integration?

GH:

I went around Charlotte quite a lot on buses by myself, Charlotte was a small town in those days, and I was struck by the fact that black people had to sit in the back of the bus. It’s hard for people to understand how bad it was really. It was such an attitude of oppression, and it was terrible. I would see a lot of old men who by and large wore inferior clothes, and there was just this attitude? And I was a little blonde girl so of course they were very polite to me. When I got older and I realized that black children couldn’t go to the public library I was just horrified, because that was my salvation growing up was the public library. And to think of a black child not being able to do that, I knew it was wrong. They say children aren’t able to comprehend social issues that young, but I was. I saw separate water fountains. We would go down to Georgia to see my grandmother and my aunt, and there were no superhighways, we were actually going through residential areas, and most of the black people would have shanties, and some of the shanties were pretty bad. And of course you have no running water. And it was just this whole attitude that people had, knowing that they were not real citizens. I mean they were just scared to death of offending a white person. And it was really horrible. You know that movie The Help, it was just like that, and I would hear all this stuff, and I didn’t want to...