Vera B. Williams recalls: “I was a child with a lot to say. When people grew tired of my talking, I drew pictures. But then I had to tell about the pictures. Even with acting and dancing, I couldn’t get it all told.”

Williams turned out to have a lot to say later in life, too. She has written poetry, worked as a printmaker and painter, designed magazine covers, been a teacher, and played an active role on behalf of political and social causes of concern to her. As an author and illustrator for children, she has created picture books (as well as poetry and the autobiographical novel Scooter [1993]) of rare emotional depth, crafting stories that, unlike most of those to be found in contemporary picture books, do not take the material well-being of their heroes for granted. Because Williams’s recurring character, young Rosa, and her family and friends cannot have everything they want, they must decide what matters most to them. As they make their choices, we come to know them all the better — and ourselves as well. At the same time, Williams’s books never want for color and flashes of the street-smart, down-to-earth humor that also salts her conversation. Although at more than eighty years old she has long since put her roller skates on the shelf for good, Williams seems very close in spirit to the feisty ten-year-old who once went barreling helter-skelter down the Bronx, New York, streets of an eventful Depression-era childhood. A good twenty years after first meeting, we sat down to record this interview in her Greenwich Village apartment on November 9, 2009.

 

LEONARD S. MARCUS: Tell me about the time you met Eleanor Roosevelt.

VERA B. WILLIAMS: I must have been eight, which was in 1935. I met her at an exhibition that was held at the old Museum of Modern Art, which was in a townhouse down the block from where it now is. The occasion was an exhibit of WPA art from classes for adults and for children. My sister had a sculpted horse that she had made at the Bronx House, which was a settlement house where we took art classes, and I had a painting that I had made there called Yentas. In my memory Mrs. Roosevelt was coming around the room looking at everything, followed by Movietone News. I was standing by my painting and she stopped to admire what I had done. I had a conversation with her, told her how to pronounce yentas [which means “gossipy women” in Yiddish], and what the yentas were saying. I think she called it “Yen-TASS” at first! Mrs. Roosevelt was a very big hero in our family. We loved her. She belonged to us. We were grateful for her work on behalf of the WPA, which had meant so much to us growing up poor in the Bronx.

Q: Tell me about your parents. Did they encourage your love of art?

A: My mother was very interested in having us paint and draw. She was interested in education. She had opened a little nursery school in our apartment. My father wasn’t working, and so I thought it was because she needed to make some money that she started the school. But she was interested in progressive education.

Q: Did she have any training as a teacher?

A: No, she didn’t. She had gone to work after eighth grade. But she educated herself by attending the free lectures at Cooper Union and was part of that group of radical immigrant women who had made it their business to learn. Both my parents tended toward an anarchist view of life and education and were very devoted to the idea of culture for poor people, to what came to be called “Bread and Roses.”

Q: How did you happen to be born in Hollywood?

A: My parents were wanderers with poetic natures, and after World War I they set out on a cross-country trip in search of adventure. In the photographs they look like hippies, sitting in front of their tent in their big boots and headbands. Eventually they reached Los Angeles.

Q: What were you like as a child?

A: I was irrepressible, extremely talkative, and quite cute. I liked fun but I also had quite a developed sense of the tragic. I had some difficult things to put up with before I was even five. We moved a lot, and around the time I was four, my sister and I lived for about a year and a half in the Jewish Home for Children in San Francisco. My mother had a job at that time and my father was away, possibly in prison. I still don’t know for sure. My sister and I heard conflicting stories, and we didn’t have the sense to ask them directly.

Q: Were you enterprising like your character Rosa?

A: I took one of my first allowances, which must have been a nickel, and got on a bus whose route I had some vague idea about. This was after we had moved to the Bronx. I went by myself and stayed on for about as far as I thought I could walk back home from, as I didn’t have the return fare.

As part of the Victory Garden program, I got myself a little plot of land in Crotona Park where I could grow vegetables. I had a proprietary attitude toward New York City and its parks and museums: I believed they belonged to me. I was very inspired by Ruth Sawyer’s book Roller Skates, which I read over and over, and which I think is very much in the background of my book Scooter. I, too, roller-skated everywhere and appreciated the feeling of being free in New York.

Q: Did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up?

A: I wanted to be lots of things. I liked acting. I liked showing off. I first may have thought of becoming a painter after I became aware of Rosa Bonheur, who meant a great deal to me. My parents, who didn’t have money for books, did buy us V. M. Hillyer’s A Child’s History of Art. I was very taken with it.

As a result of the WPA show where I met Eleanor Roosevelt, my sister was approached by an art educator named Florence Cane, who had an art school on the twenty-fourth floor of one of the buildings in Rockefeller Center. My sister began taking art classes there every Saturday when she was ten. I would come with my parents on the Third Avenue El to pick her up, and would just stand there and prattle. One day Mrs. Cane asked me if I would like to take classes, too. I said yes and continued to go there all the way through high school. We never had to pay anything.

We had wonderful art supplies, and I did my first oil painting there and also pastels and watercolors and prints. We would start each class with modern dance movements, just to loosen ourselves up. If the teachers thought we were getting timid or too tight or derivative in our drawing, they would encourage us to scribble. We didn’t love Florence Cane, who was very formal and didn’t have a way with little children. But we knew she was good for us.

As a teenager, I went to the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. There I had a more traditional kind of training in drawing. As one of my projects, I made a children’s book, which I bound myself. I can still see it! It was called The Very Big Banana.

Q: Did the public library play a part in your childhood?

A: Oh, yes. We went to the New York Public Library’s Tremont Branch in the Bronx. That’s where I signed up. They gave you a pen and you had to dip it in ink and show that you could write your name on the blue line in a big ledger. You also had to show you could read by reading out loud a statement saying you agreed to take good care of the books. It all felt very grand. I liked The Poppyseed Cakes, all the fairy-tale books, and The Burgess Animal Book for Children by Thornton Burgess, in which I would trace the pictures. I liked Maud and Miska Petersham’s books — The Story of Paper, The Story of Oil. I enjoyed the combination of a story and something to do with how the world worked.

Q: Did you do well in school?

A: I did very well at anything I could do well without having to work at it too hard. I took remedial arithmetic, which I loved! They came and got you. They took you out of class and you went to this wonderful room and it was all very visual and full of colors. I did very well in remedial math. I loved everything that was imaginative and active. And I loved everything that had to do with words. From an early age I loved to write, and we wrote a composition every day at school.

Q: Looking back, what impact would you say the Depression had on your life?

A: I’m sure it had a lot to do with my father’s trouble. He had always had a sketchy work history anyway. The Depression was responsible for a certain weight that settled on my mother, who was not a natural worrier or a gloomy person. Even so she managed to have quite a lot of spirit and be active in the neighborhood to try to make things a little better. But the fear of poverty had an enormous impact on everybody.

Despite my family’s struggles, my parents were seriously involved in having a good life. My father sang very well. He liked to sing and dance. He liked to go for long walks. He swam. When we went walking with my father, we would walk across the Bronx, across the Harlem River to the George Washington Bridge, across the George Washington Bridge, and up the Palisades. Then we would take the Dyckman Street ferry and the trolley back to the Bronx. We went all over!

Q: Was it at the High School of Music and Art that you heard about Black Mountain College?

A: Probably. I went to Black Mountain, in Asheville, North Carolina, in the middle of World War II. We had only fifty-five students. Josef Albers headed the art department. Before the war, he had been assistant head of the Bauhaus in Germany. I studied drawing, painting, color, and design with Albers. It was a very good place for me. We learned to letter. We drew freehand Bodoni lettering, which we constructed by eye and drew by hand. This trained our eye and our measuring capacity. We made rectangles and drew 2’s and 3’s and 5’s. I loved that. We covered every bit of paper with drawings and exercises, because you didn’t just make a drawing and hang it on the wall. We were always experimenting, making more studies. We made newspapers in fake languages. We wrote backwards, did all sorts of graphic exercises as well as drawing from the model.

We had an old print shop with wooden type where I learned to set type. As one of my graduation projects, I designed and printed the posters, programs, and advertisements that were needed for the college. Inspired by the whiteness of the whale in Moby-Dick, I wrote an essay about the color black. It’s funny because, except for Scooter, all my books are highly colored and all my paintings as a child were highly colored, but I was interested in black and white at the time. I also made a children’s book called The Man Who Lost His Birthday.

At Black Mountain we had three areas of study: the arts, the liberal arts, and the daily arts. In the latter category, we repaired our own roads and ran our own farm. We grew corn, raised pigs, and milked the cows. I made butter and cheese and learned to work on a wood lathe. The students built the study building, which was a large contemporary structure. I installed the windows.

Q: Many years passed between the time you graduated from Black Mountain and the time you began making picture books. What were you doing during those years?

A: I had gotten married at Black Mountain. My husband was an architect and builder. I didn’t have to make a living and I was interested in many, many things: gardening, cooking, learning about wild mushrooms and plants. I studied etching at the Boston Museum School. Then I took a printmaking course at Pratt in New York. I did a lot of paintings and drawings and prints that were not for books.

After Black Mountain College a few of us started an intentional community of our own for people in the arts — the Gate Hill Co-op. I was twenty-three. If you lived in our community, you couldn’t own your own house. We owned everything in common. Every Saturday we did repair work together on the property. I laid the stone floor in my building. I laid the cork tiles and painted the walls. The composer John Cage was our next-door neighbor, and together he and I built this quite odd stone wall between his house and ours. Neither of us had built a wall before, and when we got about three-quarters of the way up, John had to go on tour and I had to give birth to my baby. I started a day-care center for our community. Later we started an elementary school, where I taught. It wasn’t a utopia by any means, but we tried to support each other’s art and it was a great place for little children.

I was very interested in politics, and for years I did the covers for Liberation magazine. I think I did some very innovative designs. Then I was divorced and moved to Ontario, Canada, where I became the cook for a group that was publishing an interesting magazine about elementary education. At that time I was also very interested in canoeing, and after a couple of years of that I took up with a man who was interested in canoeing, too. We decided to head West for a canoeing trip on the Little Nahanni River, which is in the Northwest Territories, in remote wilderness terrain that you have to fly into. The more I thought about it, the scareder and scareder I got. I’m adventurous, but I’m not a daredevil! Finally I had to admit that I was not up for the trip, and so we went down the Yukon River instead. Many of my experiences ended up in Three Days on a River in a Red Canoe (1981). That marriage ended, too, and after a while I found a houseboat in Vancouver to live in that happened to have a built-in drawing board, and I thought, This is the life for me!

Around that time I got in touch with Remy Charlip, who was an old friend from Black Mountain and by then a well-known picture-book artist. Remy showed me a picture-book manuscript he had co-written with Lilian Moore and didn’t have time to illustrate. He asked if I would like to illustrate it. I said I yes, and the book that resulted is called Hooray for Me! (1975). Remy designed the book and I learned a lot from him. Then I illustrated a picture book by Barbara Brenner called Ostrich Feathers (1978) and then I did my own first book, It’s a Gingerbread House! Bake It! Build It! Eat It! (1978).

Q: Why a book about gingerbread?

A: When I had the school at the Gate Hill Co-op we made fantastic gingerbread houses with the children. Then one year the American Craft Museum in New York was planning an international breads and cakes exhibition and invited us to make a piece for the show. The museum also needed a commemorative cookie for their black-tie fundraising affair, so I made it for them out of gingerbread. I was really into gingerbread! When it came Christmastime that year I wrote a nostalgic little story, never intending to publish it. But then an agent I had met offered to show my work to publishers.

Greenwillow Books looked at my story and said that if they could make a gingerbread house from my directions they would publish the book, and they did.

Q: Did you see making picture books as being connected, in a more general way, to the baking and building and canoeing and other activities you had been spending your time on up until then?

A: I’ve been very lucky in life in that I haven’t experienced a great deal of separation between the things I do. I’ve been able to bake and cook and hike and have children and raise them and start schools and do politics and have love affairs and embroider and draw and paint and write poetry — and all of it seems connected to me. From early on, I was really devoted to the idea that it would be all connected. I think I’m like my parents in that regard. But I was also lucky because many people have that as an aim but can’t do it because their economic situation is too difficult, or for some other reason.

Q: Did you look at other authors’ picture books once you began writing and illustrating your own?

A: No, because I had taken such a long time to come around to it — I was forty-six and still living on my houseboat and writing lots of poetry at that time — that I felt I already knew how I wanted my books to look. Of course, I had to struggle to make them look that way. They didn’t just come out.

Q: How would you describe what it was that you wanted?

A: There’s a certain hands-on quality that I have wanted to preserve in my illustrations, but I would say there’s quite a range to my work, depending on the graphic necessities of the story. Three Days on a River in a Red Canoe, and even more so Stringbean’s Trip to the Shining Sea (1988), has a scrapbook quality that I wanted. The Chair books took a lot from my childhood paintings, except that they have a much more sophisticated sense of color. I’ve never been a real painter. Mine is a suit-the-need kind of graphic art in which I employ a lot of imagination, with built-in leaps from what you see to what you can then make out of it yourself. I don’t draw from life and I don’t draw from photographs. I just draw and draw and draw until it comes out the way I want. The thing I’m most interested in doing as an illustrator is to make emotion visible. Even with the details in the borders and with the furnishings in a scene, I have tried to render an environment that while not impoverished is also not well heeled, and in which affection and a sense of history are conveyed, without it being cute or cottage-y. The chair in the Chair books is a metaphorical chair. People ask me if I have a chair like that one. I don’t and I wouldn’t. My taste runs more toward Bauhaus furniture! What I have wanted in my illustrations is for the chair, the teapot, the shoes — everything — to signify, to convey a certain emotion and sense of reality.

Q: There’s always an emotional intensity in the faces you draw — even in the faces of the little children in “More, More, More,” Said the Baby (1990).

A: To illustrate that book, I drew a great deal, and ultimately I drew the final images on a high-quality red tracing paper. I then cut out the figures with manicuring scissors and glued them in place. I wanted the paint in that book to look like children’s paint. When young children are painting they become mesmerized by the color. They’re not really making a picture. They’re playing with the color. I wanted to paint like that, too. I wanted a book that looked like it was painted. I’m very proud of it because I feel it wedded two different parts of my art experience. It owes a lot to my Albers training in that I played with color in the same way we did in our color studies at Black Mountain, putting together certain colors that are very close in light value in order to produce a certain effect. I also did the hand-lettering, which I had learned to do from Albers. At the same time, I used a very free method of painting and drawing. So it is both very well organized and quite spontaneous looking.

Of course I was also able to incorporate my ideas about how the world should be freely populated with people of different colors. I didn’t design it that way initially. I was besotted with love for my first grandchild, who is Little Guy in the book, and it was all going to be about him. But as I continued to work, I realized that the book would be very limited if I made it all about a very blond little boy. So I redesigned it, giving the three parts of the story to three sets of characters. My “ideological” idea had the side benefit of giving the book a much wider graphic scope. At the last minute we added the subtitle 3 Love Stories.

Q: Did you choose Rosa as the name for the girl in several of your books as a way of calling to mind the expression “Bread and Roses”?

A: I’m not sure why I chose that name. I myself was almost named Rosa, after Rosa Luxemburg, but my mother had objected, saying, “Let the child make her own name,” so I became “Vera” instead. I love roses, and the rose, of course, is the flower of love. The “Bread and Roses” idea is very dear to me. But I can’t really say why.

Q: Did you set out to do A Chair for My Mother (1982) and its sequels in part because you felt a need for picture books that were not about middle-class people living comfortable lives?

A: I did choose to do that, and I felt that it was an important choice. But A Chair for My Mother is also an expression of my life experience at the moment I was making it. I had finally come to a point in my life where I needed to make a living. My jar was empty! So the book is about Rosa’s story and my story, too. I started those books during the peak years of the feminist movement, when there was increased awareness of the situation of single-parent families. But the emotional core of the book is simply love, and the chair and the jar are also about love.

Q: It’s about values, too, isn’t it — about making choices when you have to make choices?

A: I gave a talk at a private girls’ school once, and one of the girls said of Something Special for Me (1983), “Why didn’t they just buy everything they wanted?” A teacher said to me afterward, “That is one of the reasons we wanted you to come!”

Q: You mentioned the appeal of scrapbooks. Even Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart (2001) ends with a kind of family album of pictures.

A: In the case of that book, I hadn’t wanted any illustrations at first. But the text was too short to be a book on its own, and that’s how it evolved. Stringbean and the Canoe book are definitely scrapbooks.

Q: Isn’t there an implied invitation to children to make scrapbooks of their experiences?

A: Yes. Many experiences besides my own travels lay behind the making of those books. When I was a child taking art classes at the Bronx House we made a post office one summer, with a wicket for buying and selling stamps. I carved the cancellation mark from linoleum, got a bad cut, and was rushed to Bronx Hospital! It was all very dramatic. We sent cards and letters throughout the building. I loved it. Years later Remy showed me a collection of sky postcards that he and another artist had made, and I spent time at the New York Public Library looking at old picture postcards in the library’s picture collection. Also, I had a little tin box in which were saved all the postcards that I had sent to my mother during my trip to the Yukon. And finally, one of our family’s prized possessions was an old photo album that was full of Kodak pictures of my parents’ cross-country trip. I had always loved those photos, and so I wanted my travel books to look like albums, too.

Q: In A Chair for Always (2009), Rosa calls the chair a “lucky chair.” The last words of Stringbean’s Trip are “Good luck,” and you’ve written a book called Lucky Song. Luck seems to be a very important word — and concept — for you.

A: Along with certain talents, the fairies, when they came when I was born, brought me luck. I feel that I have been a very lucky person. Is there a four-leaf clover in Stringbean’s book?

Q: Yes, it’s in the illustration on the back cover.

A: The girl in Lucky Song is a little Eve. I wanted her to stand for an Every Child who would get what she wanted in the sense that she would get what she needed. I feel very strongly that, if little children would be given what they really need in the way of love and adventures, then we would have a lot more happiness in the world. I wrote Lucky Song around the time that my grandson Hudson was born, and I thought of it as a kind of gift to toddlers. I’ve had children tell me, “Oh, she’s so spoiled. She gets everything she wants.” I think that’s sad, because what does she want? She doesn’t want anything extravagant. She wants to climb. She wants to fly a kite. She wants her mother to look. She wants to eat. She wants to sleep. She wants a song. It’s nothing more than what everyone should have in life. The word luck had to be in the title because for many children, to get even half of those things is lucky. I was lucky. My children were lucky. So, I guess I would have to say I’m a fortunate soul, right?