In tracking down the real story of a legendary hero of the Old West, Vaunda Micheaux Nelson also nabbed the Coretta Scott King Award.

Photograph by Wendy McEahern

When Vaunda Micheaux Nelson donned a black Stetson to become the biographer of Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves, she had no idea that her square-shooting book about an unsung African-American hero of the Old West would win over a posse of fans and earn her the prestigious 2010 Coretta Scott King (CSK) Author Award. Bad News for Outlaws (Lerner, 2009), a riveting and revealing picture-book biography dramatically illustrated by R. Gregory Christie, has turned out to be good news for Nelson, generating excitement among young readers and bringing to light an individual well worth knowing. Throughout her career, Nelson has worn a variety of professional hats, including teacher, newspaper reporter, and bookseller. She has spent the last 16 years as a youth services librarian and is also the author of several critically acclaimed books. While many of Nelson’s titles, including the “Mayfield” series and Possibles (1995, both Putnam), are based on family history, the author stepped away from writing about her own experiences with Almost to Freedom (Carolrhoda, 2003). Illustrated by CSK Honor Award–winner Colin Bootman, it is a fictionalized tale about the Underground Railroad narrated by an enslaved child’s cherished rag doll. Bad News crosses boldly into the realm of nonfiction, telling a meticulously researched and jaw-droppingly amazing true-life tale with the flavor, suspense, and drama of an Old West yarn. I chatted with the 56-year-old Nelson at the Rio Rancho Public Library, where she has worked since moving to New Mexico from Pennsylvania several years ago. She lives in Rio Rancho, just outside of Albuquerque, with her writer-husband and number-one editor, Drew, and two rambunctious cats, Punk and Charlie. You were at ALA’s midwinter meeting in Boston, where the winners of the CSK awards were announced. What was your reaction when you found out you had won? The morning of the press conference, my roommate [librarian Gail Nordstrom] and I decided that we were going to sit together at the awards announcement. At about 6:30, I went downstairs to attend a Martin Luther King celebration that was being held in the ballroom of our hotel. Just as I was walking into the event, I reached into my pocket to turn off my cell phone, and it rang. So I walked away from the door, and I said, “Hello, hello?” I wasn’t getting any reception. Then finally a voice came through saying, “This is Carole McCollough.” I knew that she was the chair of the [CSK award] jury. All these little things quickly fell into place in my head. It was right before the press conference, and I knew that’s when [the award committee] made the calls. As soon as she said her name, I started shaking, and I just got choked up. And she said, “We’re pleased to tell you that you’ve won the Coretta Scott King Author Award for Bad News for Outlaws.” What did you do? I knew that I couldn’t jump up and down and scream and run and tell people, because it’s supposed to be a secret. So I went into the event, thinking that maybe it would ground me a little. I tried to listen really hard but quickly realized that I wasn’t focused. When I went back upstairs, my roommate was getting ready to go. And I just said, “Gail, you can’t tell anybody, but the CSK committee just called me!” And we screamed and jumped up and down. Then I called my husband, Drew, and we jumped up and down over the phone. Then Gail and I put on our cool faces and went down to the press conference. And when Deb Taylor announced the winners, even though I knew, I guess hearing it and seeing the book come up [on the overhead screens] made it real. Everyone rushed me, and we were crying and screaming. Bad News for Outlaws has one of the best openings I’ve read in a long time: “Jim Webb’s luck was running muddy when Bass Reeves rode into town. Webb had stayed one jump ahead of the lawman for two years. He wasn’t about to be caught now.” I labored over that opening for quite a while because I wanted it to be really strong. One of the challenges of writing for young readers is that the really good stuff has a complex simplicity, a subtlety, a depth of feeling and meaning, an economy of language rarely seen in adult literature. It’s a challenge for me. When I sit down to write, that is what I reach for: I want it to be strong and meaningful and evoke feeling, but I don’t want to waste words. You have a poet’s heart. I guess I do. I love poetry. My dad taught me that. And I think in many ways my dad was the one who left me with that feeling of the power of language and how it can hurt and lift up, too, and that you have a choice about the language you use, not just in your writing but in the language you use when you talk to other people, and how what you say and how you say it can affect your relationship with that person in a positive or negative way. How did you discover Bass Reeves? In 2003, Drew taped a documentary about blacks in the West for me. As we were watching it together, there was this little teeny mention of Bass Reeves. I said, “Who’s that?” Drew knew a little bit about him, and what he told me was interesting. So I started to do some research whenever I could find the time. After about a year, I didn’t have mounds of information, but I had enough to make me feel there was a passion building for this guy. Why did you want kids to know about him? I kept remembering my own childhood and how much we loved the Old West, and I knew kids would eat him up because he is such a great, heroic person. He’s tough and fearless, honorable, brave. He couldn’t read, but he had such a tremendous memory that he overcame that obstacle in his work. His sense of duty and right and wrong were just incredibly strong. He was skilled with weapons, but he had a nonviolent attitude about his work and preferred not to use his guns. He was also skilled with regard to his clever use of disguises to catch criminals. And I knew kids would love that. I could see them thinking, “This is somebody that I’d like to be like.” I love the book’s narrative voice. How did you steep yourself in Western lingo? Well, I did use some research materials. And I also went online and printed out some lists of Western slang and Western talk that gave me some ideas. My husband was a good source, too. We both moved here from Pennsylvania, but he had a longing to come to the Southwest since way before we got married. He’s 6'4" and he said that when he came out here he realized it was the first time he felt like he could stand up straight, because of the openness—the big rocks and the mountains and the big sky. And he’s become like a cowboy now. I know that historian Art T. Burton was also a huge help with your research. I’ll tell you, if I wasn’t that passionate before I talked to him, he transferred his passion to me. His goal for years has been to get Bass’s name out there in the world. And throughout the project, if I had a question—because when you’re researching someone, especially someone who lived so long ago, the information is sometimes sketchy—I would send a message to Art or call him on the phone and say, “Look, this says this. This says that. Do you have a take on this? Have you learned anything else?” And he was very good at saying, “Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s been a question.” Of course you have to come to your own conclusions sometimes and use your own judgment. As I say in my author’s note, I did my best to tell the truth, as true as I possibly could. For one thing, Bass’s life needs no embellishment. The truth is so fantastic that I didn’t need to make anything up. When he received the finished book, Art called me up and said that he was pleased and impressed with the work I put into telling an accurate story. Would you have liked to come across Bass when you were a girl? We had an admiration for the Old West, and we pretended to be our favorite [heroes]—Wyatt Earp and Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger. But when I look back and think about Bass in that whole context of my life growing up, I realize that I longed for somebody like him. I couldn’t have verbalized it then. I don’t even know if I knew it, but if he’d been there, I think it might have made a difference in my view of myself. What was your childhood like, growing up in the small town of Elizabeth, PA, southeast of Pittsburgh, as the youngest of five children? I had a great childhood. I don’t think I spent a lot of time thinking about race and being different, even though my family was the first African-American family that went to our elementary school. This was in the ’50s and ’60s. Early on, I spent some time trying to blend in with my classmates. It wasn’t easy. I was tall, the only black child in my class, and my name was Vaunda Micheaux. I wanted to be Jane or Mary. Although I did get involved in some scuffles on the playground, mostly due to name-calling, I loved school. Though we had some issues, my parents were very strong and loving, and they gave us the strength to deal with that. And we had a lot of support at the school, too, despite some of the obstacles. Who did the reading aloud at your house? My mom mainly. I loved Uncle Wiggily stories. And she read things like Tom Sawyer, the Bobbsey Twins, the basic classics, because at the time there was not a whole lot of children’s literature out there. But my father loved poetry, and he would recite story poems from memory, like “Oh, Captain, My Captain” and “Paul Revere’s Ride.” He loved Langston Hughes, so he would share that with us. And he wrote poems himself—I didn’t know that a lot of the poems he shared with us as kids were his own. Many parents stop reading to their children after they start reading on their own. I will be eternally grateful that mine never did. They both loved literature and made it an integral part of our lives. Beginning with your first book, Always Gramma, in which a young girl describes her beloved grandmother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, much of your work has been greatly influenced by your family’s history. I tell kids that a lot of my writing is what I call “faction,” and then we talk about what’s fact and fiction. Much of my work is based on family history and experiences that I had as a child. But it’s not so much just telling about something that happened to me; it’s more about facing questions I still have about those times and exploring and trying to figure them out and find the answers. I hope when I finish a book that I’ve come to a different place myself. With every project—even books that are in drawers that never got published for whatever reason, or might become something later—I feel that I move forward in some way, I learn something new. So many of your books, including Who Will I Be, Lord?, which was published last year, are written with honesty and with a sense of self-acceptance. Do young people respond to that candor? I hope so. Kids generally can tell when a person isn’t being real—their instincts are often right on when it comes to sensing whether a person is somebody they feel comfortable with, or someone who for some reason they’re not buying it, you know? I try to be honest with what I’m doing. And in a way, some people can say, “Well, how can you talk about honesty when you’re writing fiction?” But there’s often more truth in fiction than in real life. And those are the books that very often resonate with young people and adults, and the reader can say, “Yeah. Yeah, I’ve felt that, too” or “That’s the way it is.” Because somehow you’ve said something universal. Do the kids who visit your library know that you’re an author? Most don’t. Most of our library kids know me as “Mrs. Nelson,” “the library lady,” or “song lady.” If it comes up, I acknowledge it. My colleague and friend Lori Snyder and other library staff are usually the ones to toot my horn. Lori said, “Why don’t we do a Wild West with Bass program?” And as part of it, I would read an excerpt from Bad News and talk a little bit about Bass. I have these badges and handcuffs that I share with the kids. We found a “Wanted” poster, where you could put your head through for a photograph, so we had that set up. And we ate corn bread and beans and cookies we called cow patties. So it was all things Western. Has the reality of winning the CSK Author Award sunk in yet? When I wake up in the morning, I feel this disbelief and joy that I won the Coretta Scott King Author Award! I mean, I have been on award committees myself. I know how difficult it can be to select a winner from all the wonderful books that are out there. I know what the odds are. And it’s just amazing to me that my book rose to the top. And the feeling, too, as a librarian who values the whole world and history of children’s literature, to know that my book is going to be part of children’s literature, the history of children’s literature forever—that’s an incredible thing for me to realize, for me to take in, and it’s very, very gratifying.