BETWEEN US BAXTERS, by Bethany Hegedus

ABOUT BETWEEN US BAXTERS
It’s hard to be a "Black Sheep Baxter," at least for 12-year-old Polly. From a poor white family, Polly’s best friend, Timbre Ann Biggs, is black, making them the only "salt-and-pepper" friends in town. Her mom keeps secrets, her dad turns to the "devil’s drink," and her rich, mean Meemaw makes Sunday dinners a chore. But in that fall of 1959, life in quiet Holcolm County starts to heat up. One by one, thriving colored businesses burn to the ground. When someone throws a note wrapped around a brick through the window of Biggs Repair, Polly worries that Timbre Ann will be blinded by the color of her skin and forget they were ever as close as Polly’s mom and Timbre Ann’s Aunt Henri have always been. When a tragic fire brings everything to a head, the spotlight falls on Polly’s family. Sensitively painting a vivid portrait of the Jim Crow South, Polly’s inspiring story captures the defiant spirit of youth in an oppressive small town, just as the seeds of the Civil Rights Movement begin to sprout.

ABOUT BETHANY
Bethany Hegedus has spent time above and below the Mason-Dixon Line. While she currently makes her home in the New York area, she spent her formative years in Georgia. Bethany cares deeply about kids, having once been a high school teacher and also a youth advocate. She serves as a mentor in the PEN Prison Writing Program and holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is co-editor of the Children’s and YA section of the literary magazine, Hunger Mountain. Between Us Baxters is her first young adult novel.

BTW- Bethany is my debut sister with Westside, and I adore her. She's had RAVE reviews from Booklist and School Journal Library and is an amazing speaker! Her book is perfect for schools. Now. For the questions!

How did you come up with the fab idea for BETWEEN US BAXTERS and how long did it take you to write it?

I was impacted greatly by my time teaching in the South. I taught at a high school in the mid-nineties where the Klan was still active this hit me hard. I have long been a studier of the Civil Rights Movement and when I moved from Georgia to New York City the story began to spill out of me. I started writing it when I first started writing, about 8 years ago. Then it was titled: Night Whispers, and had a completely different storyline. Timbre Ann was a boy—Damascus. Mama was dead. And Dadddy, oh that dear Daddy was quite the bad, bad man.

The storyline came from the character of Polly. She is different in Between Us Baxters than she is in Night Whispers, but she remained spunky, determined, and very, very flawed. To me the book is about her, and her obstacles in loving who she deems is her family; blood or chosen.

Such great stuff!!! So, writing for pre-teens must bring back a lot of memories... tell us about something traumatizing and/or embarrassing that happened to you when you were young?

Oh, goodness! So much. Baxters bridges that preteen gap so as a preteen…so at that age my most total mortification came when I got my first period in the middle of gym class. Our uniforms were white shorts, blue tops. We were square dancing (how is that a sport?) but we were, and my partner—A BOY—had to tell me I had something on my shorts. Scarred for life!

OH NO!! Nightmare stuff. But hey...you survived, right!!! So...what would be the worst thing that could happen to Polly?

Polly’s story is riddled with bad things happening: being ridiculed for wearing her best friend, Timbre Ann’s—a black girl’s—hand-me-downs; spraining her ankle; witnessing a series of fires breaking out; and her friendship with Timbre Ann deteriorating. The worst thing that could happen to Polly does…and she has to see her part as well as others in it.

Poor Polly. If someone close to you wanted to write a book, like a child or a loved one, what would you tell them?

Go for it! Plumb your imagination. Do the work. Study. Revise. Rewrite. Throw pages away. Don’t give up and don’t take “No” for an answer. Keep telling yourself YES and everything else will fall into place. Sounds corny…but believe it into being.

Good advice. Okay, lastly... what do you think Polly will do for a living when she's "grown up"?

Oh, love this! I can see Polly as a teacher, a lawyer, a writer, a nurse. Whatever she becomes after leaving the pages of Between Us Baxters I believe she can handle.

So that's it! A must read. Thanks for stopping by Bethany!

Between Us Baxters by Bethany Hegedus
Westside Books, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-934813-02-7