I didn’t say “Goodbye,” because Papa always said that goodbye sounded too much like forever. So I waved and said, “See you again soon.”
Smiling, Johnny Lee waved back and said, “You sho’ will.”
Life that year had been full of disappointments, tragedies, and goodbyes: my mama left, my aunt went back north, and innocent people like Emmett Till were killed. It was almost too much to bear. But there were little surprises and happy moments, too, like the unexpected visit from my daddy. Little pricks of light against the darkness. Whatever lay in store for me in the coming year, I knew that I could bear it, as long as I kept on looking for bits of hope, bits of light.
Author’s Note
HELLO, WONDERFUL READER!
By now you should know that my name is Linda Williams Jackson and that I am the author of Midnight Without a Moon and A Sky Full of Stars. Like my main character, Rose, who later becomes Rosa, I was born and raised mostly on cotton plantations in the Mississippi Delta. But unlike Rose, who fictitiously lived in one place all of her life, I lived on various cotton farms during my childhood. We even lived in one house that sat right in the middle of a cotton field just like Rose’s house in Midnight Without a Moon. And yes, we lived in what was once a sharecropper’s shack. We did have electricity, however, but we did not have indoor plumbing—no indoor bathroom and no sink in the kitchen. The house also lacked common modern-day amenities such as light switches, closets, and doorknobs. Yes, doorknobs! Imagine that! Nor did we have locks on the doors that led to the outside. Our doors were secured with a small piece of wood called a latch.
According to my oldest sister, I was born on a farm called Alfred Wells’s Place. (The farms, as I recall, were named for the person who owned or managed the land.) And according to my own foggy memory, my family lived on four different cotton farms or “places” during my early years. In January 1978, when I was eleven and a half years old, in the middle of a rare Mississippi snowstorm, we moved to town and never again lived on a cotton farm. Mickey Dattel’s Place was the last farm on which we lived. Yet, even after we moved, I spent the next three years wishing I could go back to country living. I was an extremely shy child, so I hated living in town where everyone could see me and know what was happening in my day-to-day life. During the summer of 1978—our first summer living in town—I didn’t leave the house at all for a whole month.
Now, one would think that living in a sharecropper’s shack on an old cotton plantation would be the worst fate a child of the 1970s could have. But even though times were hard (really hard), those were some of the best years of my life. They were my formative years, my coming-of-age years. And it was those years, or the essence of them, that I wanted to capture and bring back to life in Midnight Without a Moon and A Sky Full of Stars.
Although my life was very different from Rose’s, I am indeed the granddaughter of a sharecropper. Like Rose, I called my grandfather Papa. Papa’s character in Midnight Without a Moon is based loosely on stories I heard about my own grandfather, Thad Scott. Rose’s situation—being left behind in the South to be raised by her grandparents—comes from the real-life plight of many children growing up during the time African Americans were migrating from the South to the North. But Rose’s character is purely fictional, with a few sprinkles of my own life tossed in.
I have always wanted to write a story about my family’s life in the Mississippi Delta, but I didn’t know what I wanted to write about specifically. I didn’t know how to narrow the story down to a single plot.
Then one night while watching the news with my mother, we heard a reference to the Emmett Till murder. My mother, who at this time had begun to slightly slip into dementia, made the comment, “I sure believe Mr. So-and-So had something to do with killing that boy.” I can’t recall the exact name she used, but all of sudden, her words struck me. My mother had never spoken about Emmett Till before, so I had no clue she knew anything about his murder. She would have been twenty-seven years old at that time, but like it was for so many people, the tragedy must have been so shocking to her that she had refused to even mention it until she was in her late seventies. It was as if the dementia—the forgetting of things present—had brought back ghosts from the past.
Still wanting to write a book that somehow weaved in family stories, I began to wonder what life must have been like for my family in 1955. Also, as a writer, I wanted to write about the Emmett Till story because most of the books about it had been written by people who were not from Mississippi. As a Delta native, I wanted to provide readers a close look at that tragic, pivotal time in our nation’s history.
The great novelist Toni Morrison is attributed with saying, “If there’s a book that you want to read, and it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Midnight Without a Moon and A Sky Full of Stars are the books that I wanted to read, and since they had not been written, I wrote them myself.
Who would’ve thought those hard times growing up in the Mississippi Delta would one day help me fill the pages of two books? I hope you enjoyed reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.
With all my love,
Linda Williams Jackson
Acknowledgments
THANK YOU!
Elizabeth Bewley and Nicole Sclama. (My Exceptional Editors!)
Victoria Marini. (My Awesome Agent!)
Genetta Adair and Caroline Flory. (My Wonderful Writer Friends!)
All the fabulous folks at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books for Young Readers who made this book possible.
And God, through whom all things are possible!!!
MiddleGradeMania.com
About the Author
Photograph by Chloe Jackson
LINDA WILLIAMS JACKSON is the author of Midnight Without a Moon. She was born in the small town of Rosedale, Mississippi—the Delta City of Brotherly Love. She lives with her husband and children in Mississippi, where she enjoys writing stories about unassuming everyday characters in small-town settings.
Learn more at www.lindajacksonwrites.blogspot.com
Connect with HMH on Social Media
Follow us for book news, reviews, author updates, exclusive content, giveaways, and more.
A Sky Full of Stars Page 20
