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With Jax Freeman and the Phantom Shriek, Kwame Mbalia introduces not only a new middle-grade fantasy hero, but a new imprint for Hyperion/Disney: Freedom Fire, dedicated to “Black Joy, Black Resilience, Black Storytelling.” Kwame serves as Freedom Fire’s publisher, meaning, as he says below, “traveling around and shouting excitedly” about the imprint’s offerings.

Roger Sutton: You’re wearing two hats now, as a publisher and as an author. Did you have to accept your own novel?

Photo: Bryan Jones

Kwame Mbalia: Thankfully, no. We can be our own harshest critics, and I’m not that kind of publisher. I’m the one who gets to read all the books and then travel around and shout excitedly at people as to why they should purchase them and put them in their library.

RS: What would you say is your criteria for what a Freedom Fire book should be?

KM: One: there’s some sort of journey. Not necessarily a physical one from point A to point B, but an internal journey that the character goes on. The thing I love about middle grade is that there’s always an exploration, some realization that the world is bigger than we know. The intended audience of young readers are grappling with that very fact themselves. And these are books coming from the Black diaspora, with something that unifies us no matter how far apart we are. It goes beyond skin color. There is resilience, drive, passion, and this intangible joy. A Freedom Fire book has all those qualities, and yet at its core it’s a story about a kid who’s going on some sort of journey. Our books are about and by people from the Black diaspora. But that’s not a constraint.

RS: Right, that’s a lot.

KM: Everyone can enjoy these stories, right? You and I could sit down on opposite ends of the table and swap stories about where we’re from, what we’ve encountered, what we’ve gone through. We can enjoy that and appreciate each other’s stories. That’s what people are going to find when they crack open a Freedom Fire book. People might say, “Oh, are you saying this is only for Black people? Are you saying only Black people can tell these stories or read these stories?” That’s not what we’re saying. We want everybody to read these stories. We want everyone to share these stories. Grab a seat, and welcome to the table because we’re going to be telling these stories for a long time.

RS: I really appreciated that inclusion of the Irish kid in Jax Freeman and the Phantom Shriek, because here I am!

KM: Bull is one of my favorite characters. He is steadfast in his honesty, his ability to call you out. He’s what you look for in a friend: someone who is like you even when they don’t look or sound like you.

RS: Publishing has, of course, always been dominated by white people in this country — as has pretty much everything else — and I’m loving the expansion we are seeing in Black literature for young people. When I started in this field in the seventies, there were a lot of great books, but all we saw was a lot of gritty social realism. We got a couple of books from Virginia Hamilton such as The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl, which I could totally see as a Freedom Fire book today.

KM: That is somewhere on my shelf. I read that before I moved to this house. I need to find that book and give it to my kids.

RS: I remember it as being hard to get into, but once you do, you’re in her world. We’re seeing such great expansion of what it’s possible for a Black writer to do and be published for. Walter Dean Myers used to talk about how everyone wanted him to write about “oh, the horrors of slavery.” He felt pigeonholed. And now you have so much more freedom, don’t you think?

KM: My favorite book is Walter Dean Myers’s Slam! It was one of the first times I read a book that was about the hood and basketball. And yet it was so much more than that. Myers always wrote with such honesty in his characters that it didn’t feel like someone was talking about me, but somebody was talking with me, right?

RS: That’s a great observation.

KM:  I read that book at least once a year.

RS: And you were a kid when it was published in 1996?

KM: I was eleven, twelve years old. I was around thirteen when I saw it in my high school library and grabbed it. I was trying out for the basketball team, and it’s a book about a kid who’s talented at basketball but leaves to go to a different school. It’s about friendship and relationships and girlfriends. He touches on all these things that I was starting to poke around in, and he framed it in a way that it was familiar to me.

The interesting thing is that there were books out there by Black authors that touched on a wide variety of concepts. But they were self-published or produced by independent publishers. They were being sold out of trunks and at fairs. I know this because my father used to make a little extra money from vending at different fairs and festivals. I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We would travel that Midwestern circuit. We’d be in Milwaukee or Chicago, Racine, Sheboygan, and there would be authors who would have their little table set up. My parents — as much as they brought in books that had been traditionally published and had Coretta Scott King stickers on them — they also found indie authors publishing children’s books. It was important for them to have our bookshelves brimming with Black characters that looked like me and my siblings. So they had to hunt. We’ve caught up today in terms of the disparity of publishing. It’s great to see that the publishing industry is actively seeking out different types of books by Black authors. They’ve always been written; they haven’t always been widely published.

RS: When they were published, they were making it into smaller Black venues, but they were having trouble finding a larger audience.

KM: It’s easier today to do things such as self-publish, to get a distributor that has a direct-to-indie-publishing pipeline. Organizations such as We Need Diverse Books and other people championing diversity in publishing have made mainstream publishers slowly wake up to the fact that different cultures, races, ethnicities, religious backgrounds, genders have money, too, and they want to buy books. It’s an interesting concept, right? You can make money by opening yourself up and becoming diverse in your publishing. “Oh, yeah, we could still get rich selling beyond the traditional pathways.”

RS: The Tristan Strong books found an audience among white children and other children, along with Black children, right?

KM: Children are more open and empathetic. You see it when you watch a movie, for example. My brothers and I would watch a movie with a cool hero. Of course, we were like, “Oh, man, that’s me. I’m gonna be that hero.” It could be a six-legged Spanish-speaking unicorn. If the character is cool, we want to be that character and we’re open to the journey that character is going on. It’s less about, Do they look like me? It’s wonderful when you see a character that looks like you, that represents you because you feel, I speak like that. I wear my hair like that. I do that on Sunday mornings. It’s great and reassuring, but as children we’re open to finding the similarities beyond the physical and the superficial. That’s one of the reasons I love writing for children.

RS: I know that another one of your formative series was the Lord of the Rings trilogy by Tolkien. I was thinking about it as I read about Jax. I love the way that you inverted the Chosen One motif, because whenever people heard about Jax’s family, they’re all “Oh, God, no, not them again. They’re just trouble.” I thought that was pretty brilliant.

KM: I love Tolkien so much, though Tolkien had his issues as well. We can love something and critique it at the same time. With Jax Freeman, it was this idea that his family fouls up everything. If you’re a Freeman, you tiptoe around because you’re not sure what’s going to unfold, especially when magic is involved. It was great to have that be an obstacle Jax faces more than his skin color or his size. His weight — he's a big kid — has nothing to do with the problems he faces in his journey. It’s more, “Gosh, what did my great-uncle do? What has my family done now? What do I have to overcome?” With that sort of journey, it’s not immediately recognizable what you have to fix in order to advance or progress. I think it’s good for young people to recognize those types of problems where there is no easy solution. There is no talisman that we have to find that’s going to fix it. It’s just you and your actions that are going to transform how people view you and your family.

RS: How much do you know going into a book such as this one where there’s so much magic that to me it seems like magic grows out of magic in this book. How much is planned and how much is just coming to you as you go?

KM: I would love to take credit and say I had this all planned, all mapped out. That is not the case. I am a toddler with a keyboard when it comes to writing books. Lots and lots of revisions, lots of thinking, lots of going back and crying in the corner when I realize what I’ve done. How am I gonna work myself out of this? When you open a book, you don’t want to feel like the world started right there on page one. You want to feel like you are peeking into someone’s life just before it gets overturned with something fantastical. When I’m writing, me and the reader are seeing the tip of the iceberg, but there’s a whole, to mix metaphors, there’s a whole spider’s web of things that had to happen in order for Jax to make it to this page, whether it’s his family magic or his family mistakes, whether it’s the school, it’s foundation, whether it’s the trains and conjure stations, all of these things have to happen at some different origin point and there is an incredible series of fortunate or unfortunate events that happened in order to put Jax in this place right now. When I’m writing, I’m throwing stuff at the wall and then when I see what sticks, I try to make something pretty out of it.

RS: Did you feel like you were entering a world that was already created in a sense? One that had begun before you?

KM: Yes, because there’s this concept of conjure or root magic. We call it hoodoo. That inspired Jax; I didn’t come up with that. It’s been a spiritual practice for centuries. Accumulated via the indigenous people here, practices that enslaved Africans brought over with them when they were taken, mixed with local and European practices. There’s a deep history in the foundation of Jax, but I feel like I got just below the surface. Zora Neale Hurston collected a conjure tale in Florida about Uncle Monday, who was a folk character; you’re never quite sure if he’s an alligator, or if he’s a man who can transform into an alligator, but there’s always a gator associated with him. And I remember just thinking, Oh, it’d be really cool if a character from the book could have Uncle Monday as his muse or was the person who granted him powers. So when Jalen, a classmate, starts to transform while in a duel with Nina, his skin gets tough and his nails get long and he says, “Monday’s walkin’,” and he starts to transform with all of this power. I didn’t invent Uncle Monday; I didn’t come up with him. I am stepping into a world where these stories already exist and all I’m doing is adapting them.

RS: Like Tracey Baptiste’s book on Freedom Fire’s first list too.

KM: Exactly. All we’re doing is basically fan fiction. I am taking these already established characters and I’m moving them around so that they can have some sort of agency and some sort of obstacles to face, and I’m creating a story. That’s my role as the storyteller.

RS: And that was Tolkien’s role too. He didn’t invent dwarfs, right?

KM: No, he just invented the language. That’s all he did. The reason I love Tolkien is because I did one of those reading challenges in fourth grade. I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s twelve-hundred pages or something. And I won tickets to see Michael Jordan play my Bucks when they came to visit Milwaukee.

RS: That’s hard for a fourth grader.

KM: I loved it. That was me. I was a reader, right? And I know that there are other Black children out there who are readers. As a matter of fact, my daughter just finished reading Nyxia, which is a young adult science fiction novel by Scott Reintgen. She said, “I love space books, Dad. What else have you got?” I’m thinking, Okay, this is my moment to shine. I’m gonna go look through my collection to see what I have. But before I could say anything, I saw her sneaking out the door with my copy of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. People love science fiction,  children love science fiction, and Black children are not excluded from that. When I’m writing science fiction or fantasy, it is less about trying to make it cool or approachable for them because  the people who want to read it, they will find it and will read it. I’m trying to put them specifically into a situation that I used to envision myself being in. I remember reading My Teacher Is an Alien.

RS: Bruce Coville.

KM: I love that book. I used to think, Dude, if my teacher was an alien, what would I do? And I know other children are out there doing the same thing. If I encounter a werewolf, what am I supposed to do? A vampire? What I do is put those encounters into the areas where our Black children can imagine themselves. Like Walter Dean Myers did with Slam! I talk with them, not at them. I put them into those neighborhoods, into those families, into the backyards of those houses where a kid who looks like me or any kid could envision themselves having those adventures.

RS: I think that fantasy and science fiction also puts kids from all different cultures on equal footing when it comes to getting into a new world, right? It’s a democracy in that it’s assuming that you as the reader are visiting this planet or this alternate world, this alternate reality and it’s going to be different for everybody.

KM: The biggest obstacle that we have had to face with diversity in media is not the storytellers but the casting departments. The casting departments are the reason why the characters look the way they do, not because George Lucas didn’t put Black people in space. It’s because the casting department only cast white actors not only as the main characters but like supporting cast, background, audience members. No lines, just standing and mingling amongst themselves.

RS: People who looked like themselves.

KM: Right. That’s always been my biggest gripe, the reason that we didn’t see Superman encountering too many Black people. But the beauty of fantasy and science fiction is that in these worlds, you’re not allowed to take your biases with you. If you do that, you are the problem. The world isn’t the problem, right? In fantasy and science fiction we can imagine a world where bigotry and racism don’t exist. Characters are always going to have problems; there’s going to be jealousy because no one is perfect, but it won’t be because of skin color. The problems will be: “You can shoot fire magic, and I’ve been trying to do that for the last two years. That’s why I’m mad at you. I don’t care what you look like — you shoot fire magic and my power is that I can produce instant boiled noodles.” This is where the beef is. When I’m writing science fiction, I say that we have fixed all the problems we face today. There are new problems on the horizon: suns going supernova, not being able to transport enough food from this moon to that moon. Bigotry and prejudice are in the past. And in the books that I write, characters look back and say, “Can you believe we used to argue over whether men or women could serve on the same ship? Right now we’re dealing with aliens from the planet Zoobar, who smell like your grandmother’s homemade chocolate chip cookies. And I can’t concentrate when we’re having peace talks with them.” That’s the problem they’re facing, not gender biases. In fantasy and science fiction, we’re able to say everyone is on equal footing unless you have fire magic and instant boiled-noodle powers. In that case, I can’t save you.

RS: Well, if I were still a librarian and trying to get a kid into a book, if I say “Oh, and this character shoots fire magic” that’s the salient point.

KM: Right! That’s what they think is cool. Not that this character is white or this character is a girl. This character can shoot fire powers, right? And that’s the trouble they face. How do I get dressed in the morning without scorching my pants? That’s a problem everyone wants to tackle.

RS:  Do you see a lot of science fiction and fantasy in the Freedom Fire imprint, since that seems to be your particular groove?

KM:  I would love it. However, I’m glad that we are a team acquiring books because I don’t want to stock our imprint with just my favorites. I tell my nine-year-old there’s nothing wrong with reading the same thing over and over again, but you’re missing so much. There are so many wonderful stories you’re missing. We have contemporary fantasy such as Jax and Tracey Baptiste’s Moko Magic duology and Leah Johnson’s anthology, Black Girl Power.

RS: So a mix of realism and fantasy.

KM: Exactly. And we have Kaya Morgan, which will come out next spring. There’s no magic; it’s about a contemporary Black girl at Renfaire, which depending on where you grew up, could be a fantastical experience if you haven’t seen one.

There’s no particular genre that I lean toward for the imprint. It’s the story that these characters are going through, that journey that they’re taking. I’m so excited about the imprint, about the authors, and I love how when I talk about it with parents, teachers, librarians — with the people I call gatekeepers because most middle grade students can’t go out and buy their own books. They need someone to either go with them or to give them the money. So when I’m talking to the gatekeepers, I love it when their eyes light up about the potential. I love it when they say, “Oh, I know a student who is going to rave over this or who needs this. I can’t wait.” “I have a library that is desperately waiting for something like this.” That gets me enthused about the imprint, knowing that these stories are wanted and will find a home and a reader out there.

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