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For the McKissacks, black is boundless.

Article Excerpt
Carter Woodson would be pleased as punch.

The "father of black history" was famously dour, but he was also known to light up at word of some victory for the cause--healthy ticket sales for a Negro History Week event, respectful mention in the press.

What would he make, then, of a pair of African American authors with 120 or more books to their names at the end of 2006, the great majority to do with black history and life? The figure is inexact because Patricia and Fredrick McKissack are too busy to keep count. On the docket for 2007 are three new entries, one scheduled for each publishing season: A Friendship for Today, in the winter; Away West, in the spring; The All-I'll-Ever-Want Christmas Doll, in the fall. Three periods, three settings, three kinds of book. Three longtime editors, too, providing both security and freedom.

The McKissacks do think big. "We're Kennedy products," Pat McKissack has said--idealists and optimists.

The two were childhood friends in Nashville, under segregation, and attended Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State University (now Tennessee State University) during the heady civil rights years. Married upon graduation, they moved to St. Louis, had three boys, two of them twins, and settled into careers--Pat as a teacher of junior high and college English, Fred as a civil engineer and contractor.

In the country at large: recoil and retrenchment. The assassinations of Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X, coupled with the bitter divisions of the Vietnam War, had quashed the hopes of earlier years. "Just as blacks experienced white resistance to equality during Reconstruction, there was another backlash to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s," Pat McKissack notes in her SATA profile. "By 1980 blacks were once again on the defense, trying to safeguard their and their children's rights."

One way to win hearts and minds was by writing, Pat's ambition since childhood. "Fred encouraged me to follow my dream and write full time," she wrote in her 1997 autobiography for children, Can You Imagine?, and repeats without prompting. "He even offered to help." In 1981 the McKissacks set up All-Writing Services to generate income from writing proposals, reports, and other business documents "while the children's books were developing." With similar foresight,...

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