KEVIN YOUNG: (Reading) There was a boy named Emile who fell in love with a field. It was wide and blue. And if you could have seen it, so would have you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
That's award-winning poet Kevin Young reading from his children's book "Emile And The Field."
YOUNG: (Reading) He would whisper to it for hours, and it would bring him the yellowest flowers. The bumblebees would sing to him, never sting. Their words were honey, which fed him and led him to wander.
SIMON: "Emile And The Field" is about a little boy named Emile who spends every season playing in a field by his house. Usually, he has the whole place to himself. He likes it.
YOUNG: He's at first very troubled by the other kids who come by and play. And his father helps him understand that this is a place you can share and grow together with.
SIMON: Kevin Young is also director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. He originally wrote "Emile And The Field" years ago as a bedtime poem for his son.
YOUNG: I had written a few of these little Emile poems, and I love rhyme, though I don't often use it in the fullest sense. But a good, you know, what I call slant rhyme or off rhyme, I think, really speaks to how English can sound and the beauty and the song and the sounds of speaking. And so it takes that rhyme or a little off rhyme as a way to kind of - and those pauses - that's what I love in a poem. And to get to turn the page as part of your pause is really wonderful in a picture book.
SIMON: Kevin Young's son is a teenager now. He reads for himself. But that poem about Emile lives on now as this children's book, illustrated by Chioma Ebinama. For our series Picture This, Kevin Young and Chioma Ebinama tell the story of how "Emile And The Field" came to be.
CHIOMA EBINAMA: All of the illustrations are all hand painted on paper in watercolor. The book starts sort of in spring, and then summer and fall and winter. I made sure that all of the images were lush and vibrant and gave that sort of image of not just, like, the natural world, but also sort of that feeling of love and intoxication that one can have in a natural environment. So the palette is primarily, like, pinks and blues and turquoise and really sunny yellows and also drew from a lot of other visual inspirations that I have, like Miyazaki films, 15th-century medieval tapestries, just to name a few.
YOUNG: I love hearing those kind of classical inspirations, but I also would say classic children's books - you know, a little less old than the tapestries you mentioned, but I was thinking as much about the children's books I grew up with. I would say I was growing up during the start of when Black children's books were becoming more popular and more available. They have always been around. And, you know, going back to the '20s, when you have wonderful children's books, especially done by Carter G. Woodson and his company, and those kind of things that have been always there for Black print culture.
But to grow up with Ezra Jack Keats and Lucille Clifton and her "Everett Anderson" series, I sort of saw Emile as this figure who has other stories to tell. And then this was the first one. And so I loved seeing this little brown boy come to life. That was really important to me, that it was sort of unspoken but also understood that he could be this protagonist who loved nature and connected with nature, but that his Blackness would be assumed and part and parcel of who he was.
EBINAMA: Yes. I mean, Ezra Jack Keats was definitely also a huge influence, but also the fact that children's books were always my entryway into art making. I learned to draw by copying a lot of my favorite books as a kid. So thank you. I appreciate you saying that.
YOUNG: I also love the parts that I almost forget are in there, like this plane flying overhead or the skyscrapers in the distance. And it isn't simply just a nature book devoid of, you know, city life. I feel like there's a sense that this field is something precious because maybe it isn't all field around where Emile lives - and then that little black dog, of course. I remember getting the first pages, and I thought they were so wonderful, and especially - there was this great dog in there who isn't necessarily in the poem. But there he was. And it seemed like the dog had to be there. And I love that sort of playfulness and the companionship that Emile in the illustrations has with the dog, which he also has with this field.
EBINAMA: The dog is actually my dog, who I received as a gift from my partner right at the beginning of making these illustrations. So I was teaching her, like, potty training her at the same time that I was drawing. And this being my first picture book, I was really actually concerned about how to make Emile look consistent when the locations were changing so much.
YOUNG: Yeah.
EBINAMA: And I was like, if we include this dog, then you know that the character on the page is Emile on every page. So that's my dog, Luna.
YOUNG: Well, she's great. There was a kind of family quality to the book for me. Emile's my great-grandfather's name, but also, my son was fairly young and around Emile's age when I started writing it. And so I was reading a lot of kids books to him. You know, there's nothing better, I think, than being read to or reading to someone. It really connects you to this long storytelling tradition. And that's how poems are. You know, they are these intimate things you carry in your breath and you pass from one person to another, even if that person's long ago, not with us and you're reading it in a book. And there's something about that living quality that I think the illustrations capture and I hope the book as a whole does.
SIMON: Author and poet Kevin Young and illustrator Chioma Ebinama talking about their children's book, "Emile And The Field." Our series Picture This is produced by Samantha Balaban.
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