Belle Teal (18 page)

Here are 25 fun facts about Ann M. Martin and her life:

1
. Ann was born on August 12, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey, during Hurricane Connie. She was the biggest baby in the hospital.

2
. When Ann was little, she thought foxes lived under her bed. Since she didn't think this was a good thing, she kept the overhead light on in her room all night.

3
. When the
Mayflower
landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, Ann's ancestors (on her mother's side) were on it!

4
. When Ann was eleven years old, she fell off of a ladder while climbing down from her treehouse, and had to have her spleen removed. (The spleen is a small organ that helps to clean the blood — luckily, you can live without it!) She had to stay in the hospital for a week.

5
. Ann became pen pals with one of the first readers ever to send her a fan letter, Kathy Ames. It was because of Kathy that Ann and Paula Danziger met. Paula and Ann became great friends and writing partners (
P.S. Longer Later Later
and
Snail Mail No More
).

6
. Ann loves scary books, and Stephen King is one of her favorite authors.

7
. Ann still gets very, very nervous when she has to talk in front of a crowd, even though she's been doing it for years!

8
. When Ann was just learning to sew, one of her first projects was a set of white, blue, and red curtains for her father's art studio. They hung in his studio for years until he retired.

9
. Until a couple of years ago, Ann wrote every one of her manuscripts in longhand. Now she's very comfortable working on her computer.

10
. At one time when Ann was growing up, the Martin family had
nine
cats! (Five of them were family cats, and then one had kittens.)

11
. Sadie, Ann's beagle mix/golden retriever puppy, is the first dog she has ever had.

12
. Ann's father is a well-known cartoonist whose works were published in
The New Yorker
(a famous literary magazine).

13
. When Ann was little, she had a special blanket that she named Mommy Blanket. All these years later, she still has it (although she swears she can fall asleep without it!).

14
. Ann and her best friend, Beth, loved to play a game called Secret Agents. They'd spy on people and pretend to be talking on walkie-talkie sets.

15
. On a train trip to California as a teenager, Ann read
Harriet the Spy.
She and her sister spied on the other passengers and took notes in a secret notebook.

16
. One summer, Ann and her friends set up a library in Ann's room with lots of books for the kids on her street to check out. They had due dates and late fines, too.

17
. Ann has always been an early riser. Her parents had to make a rule that she couldn't wake them up before 6:30
A.M.

18
. Ann
never
went to sleep-away camp. She got all her story ideas about camp from listening to her more adventurous friends!

19
. Ann spent many of her teenage summers vacationing on the Jersey shore with her friend Beth and their families. The girls swam, sunbathed, took walks, flirted with the lifeguards, and ate doughnuts at the jetty on the beach.

20
. Ann's favorite classes in junior high and high school were English and French. Her least favorite class was math. She always uses a calculator, and if she has to, she'll count on her fingers!

21
. Ann hates to wear lipstick. She says it feels funny on her lips, and that it smells bad!

22
. Ann's favorite old-time movies are
The Wizard of Oz
and
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

23
. One summer during college, Ann and a friend drove to Kentucky in a huge Chrysler named
Quasimodo
. Ann was so nervous driving this monster car, and she was very happy when they arrived home safe and sound!

24
. One of Ann's favorite childhood memories is watching
The Wizard of Oz
on her friend's color television set. These were very rare, so it was a real treat to see everything turn to color when Dorothy lands in Oz.

25
. Besides the famous Baby-sitters Club series, Ann is the author of a Newbery Honor Award-winning novel,
A Corner of the Universe,
as well as the novels
Belle Teal
,
Here Today,
and
Squirrel: The Autobiography of a Dog.

Q:
What inspired you to write
Belle Teal
?

A:
Belle Teal
started as a challenge by a former college professor to write a short story for a collection she was putting together. At the same time, I was asked by an editor at Scholastic to write an updated version of the fable “The Lion and the Mouse” for another story collection. The short story, the fable (the collection, by the way, was never published), and some family history finally came together as
Belle Teal.

Q:
Were there any deleted sections, or did you ever consider an alternate ending?

A:
I never considered an alternate ending. I very much liked the one with Belle Teal and her “family of women” walking out of the school in the snow, Belle Teal changed by her new insights into Vanessa. And while I did a fair amount of editing of
Belle Teal,
no sections were deleted; in fact, some were added to expand certain sections near the end of the book, in particular, those involving Little Boss and his father.

Q:
Belle Teal's family is made up of all women. Why did you decide to have Belle Teal grow up without her father?

A:
When I think of it, I never considered a family
with
a father for Belle Teal. I liked the idea of the three generations of women forming a family of their own, and of Belle Teal finding strength in this family, even though it was different from other families she knew.

Q:
There are several important themes found throughout the book. What is the one thing you hope the reader walks away with after reading it?

A:
The one thing I hope the reader walks away with is the one thing I hope the reader walks away with after reading many of my books, especially
Belle Teal, A Corner of the Universe,
and
Here Today,
and that is the idea that, as Atticus Finch tells Scout in
To Kill a Mockingbird,
you never really know a person until you've stood in his shoes and looked at things from his point of view. In
Belle Teal,
not only does HRH Vanessa need to be more open-minded about Belle Teal and her friends, but as it turns out, Belle Teal needed to be more open-minded about Vanessa. This general theme affects all of the more specific themes in the book: racism, bullying, abuse, and even Gran's battle with what we would now call Alzheimer's.

Q:
What do you think Belle Teal grew up to be?

A:
Belle Teal is smart, sensitive, protective of her friends, strong-minded, brave, and doesn't allow others' opinions to affect the way she thinks about things. I'd like to think that she grows up to be an activist or a champion of civil rights. She might also become a writer!

Q:
Belle Teal adores Miss Casey. Did you have a favorite teacher growing up?

A:
I had several favorite teachers, but the one who stands out in my mind, and who was probably most like Miss Casey, was Miss Kushel. She was my teacher in third grade, and like Miss Casey, she was young and creative. She encouraged my story writing (on the day President Kennedy was assassinated, my tall tale “Why the Grass Is Green” was published in our school newspaper,
The Littlebrook Gazette
). Also, Miss Kushel read aloud to our class, and she chose stories that we wouldn't have chosen to read to ourselves, the most memorable being by Pearl S. Buck.

Q:
What is a typical day of writing like for you?

A:
I'm an early riser. I usually get up between 5:00 and 5:30. I do my best writing in the morning, so I write until it's time to take my dog Sadie for a walk. Then I take a break for lunch and to run errands. In the afternoon I do other work, such as answering mail and letters, or reading galleys.

Q:
Belle Teal keeps a journal. Did you, or do you keep a journal?
 

A:
I have never been much of a journal- or diary-keeper, although I often suggest this activity to aspiring writers, as journals are a great source of story ideas. I kept a diary sporadically as a child and also as an adult. My mother kept a diary for herself, for my sister, and for me, though. She wrote in them meticulously. I have the ones she kept for me and for herself, and I have found them very helpful when writing these stories that are set in the 1960s.

Q:
Little Boss has a difficult relationship with his father, Big Boss. Towards the end of the book, Little Boss gets hurt and they eventually leave town without telling anyone. Why did you decide to leave what happens to these characters open-ended?

A:
If this storyline had been about the narrator or the main character of the book (in this case, Belle Teal), I wouldn't have left it open-ended. However, this was Belle Teal's story and I felt that, unfortunately, this was probably the most realistic ending — that Little Boss and his father would leave town, and Belle Teal truly might never know what happened to them. I also felt that Belle Teal would probably not forget this, and that wondering about Little Boss might affect who and what she becomes when she grows up.

Q:
Since a good portion of this story takes place around the holidays, would you mind sharing a fond holiday memory from your childhood?

A:
I have to admit that I LOVE the holidays — all holidays, but especially Thanksgiving and Christmas, which not only are times when families gather, but take place during the winter, my favorite season of the year. I love the short, dark days, when people cozy into their homes, when fires are lit, when the snow falls. I'm not sure I have one particular favorite holiday memory, but I will say that Christmas Eve is my absolute favorite day of the whole holiday season. I have always loved the sense of magic that I felt as a small child, and the excitement of what was to happen on the next day. On Christmas Eve my parents and sister and I often went to church to see the Nativity, then we would eat dinner at a restaurant in town, come home, and in front of the fire, read
The Night before Christmas
before hanging our stockings. As far as I was concerned, this was the best night of the year!

Q:
Did you dress up for Halloween as a child?

A:
I loved dressing up for Halloween, and I often made my own costumes. I think my favorite was the one I wore in sixth grade, when I made myself a leprechaun costume. Somewhere is a photo of me sitting on the floor in our rec room with yards of green fabric spread around me. I don't know what the end result was — I wasn't even using a pattern!

Q:
What do you like to do when you're not writing?

A:
I love “making things” and always have. My favorite activity is sewing. I make clothes for my nephew and godchildren. I also like knitting and other kinds of needlework, and “crafting,” especially making greeting cards. Of course, I also love to read, and I belong to a book club, which is great fun.

Q:
Did you consider yourself, or were you known as a good writer growing up?

A:
I loved writing when I was growing up, and I had many wonderful, encouraging teachers, especially Mr. Dougherty, who was my creative writing teacher for two years in middle school. I wrote lots of short stories, and also, during sixth grade, my friends and I wrote and published a newspaper for our neighbors. We collected news from them, wrote the articles, and made copies with sheets of carbon paper, which was boring and hard to do, but this was before Xerox machines and computers!

Belle Teal
takes place in a rural community during the 1960s. Some of the white parents and students in Belle's town don't want African-American children like Darryl attending their school. Disliking someone because of the color of his or her skin is an example of racial prejudice or discrimination. The practice of having “separate but equal” facilities for African Americans and white people had been in place in some parts of the country since the late 1800s. The laws making this possible, known as Jim Crow laws, forced African Americans to have completely separate or designated areas in places such as schools, restaurants, theaters, restrooms, railroad cars, buses, and parks. In many cases, the African-American facilities weren't nearly as nice or were in poor condition compared to the white facilities.

It wasn't until 1954 that the United States Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case
Brown vs. Board of Education
that segregation, or the separation of people because of race, in public schools was unconstitutional. An eight-year-old girl named Linda Brown hadn't been allowed to go to her local, all-white elementary school in Topeka, Kansas, because she was an African American. Thurgood Marshall, a lawyer for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) won the
Brown vs. Board of Education
case for the Browns, as well as twenty-seven similar cases. He led the battle against segregation and eventually became the first African-American Supreme Court Justice.

Public schools across the country began the process of desegregation, or integration, by having children from all races going to the same schools. In September of 1957, the Governor of Arkansas ordered the National Guard to surround Little Rock Central High School in order to prevent any African-American students from entering on the first day of school. A few weeks later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent one thousand troops from the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to uphold the law. Nine African-American students, later known as the Little Rock Nine, were escorted into school surrounded by a mob of police, protesters, and supporters. The troops stayed at the high school for the rest of the school year. Despite being abused and harassed by some of their fellow students, eight of the nine teenagers made it through to the end of the year. Luckily, a lot of white students accepted their new peers and supported the Little Rock Nine and their right to an education.