“I grew up in a house full of music—my father was a musical arranger, my mother was a singer, and I was a budding pianist who began studying at the age of six,” recalls author Doreen Rappaport. Her love for music propelled her through Performing Arts High School in New York City, a degree in music from Brandeis University, more music study in France, and teaching and writing about music in the 1960s. It was during that decade, the author says, that “the power and courage of the civil rights movement brought my interest to activism and telling stories—stories that had never been told before, stories I had never heard.”
All of these elements—activism, stories, and music—come together in No More! Stories and Songs of Slave Resistance, a riveting anthology compiled by Doreen Rappaport and stirringly illustrated by Shane W. Evans. “As a child, from my father I learned about and treasured the ‘Negro’ spirituals, as they were called in those days,” the author says. “I valued them as unique music created by enslaved Africans and as a defiant way of unifying slaves and protecting them from the oppressive white world. Thinking about using this music in No More! led me to read autobiographies, letters, interviews, and poems written by black Americans. Gradually the shape of the book emerged as an interweaving of many different voices.” The book, which covers a period ranging from the beginnings of slavery in the American colonies to the Emancipation, is the first in a three-part series about the black experience in America.
Free At Last! Stories and Songs of Emancipation, the second book in the trilogy, fuses vignettes, spirituals, work songs, blues lyrics, poems, narratives, and Shane W. Evans’s masterful artwork into a compelling account of the experience of black Americans in the South from the Emancipation Proclamation through the dawn of the ivil rights era. Despite the optimistic title, this lesser-known era is “one of the most shameful periods in American history,” says Doreen Rappaport. “This book traces the courageous struggle of black Americans to re-create family life and economic independence in the face of overwhelming danger and uncertainty.”
Doreen Rappaport has written many books of fiction and nonfiction for young readers, specializing in thoroughly researched multicultural history, historical fiction, retellings of folktales and myths, and stories of those she calls the “not-yet-celebrated.” Among her recent books is Martin’s Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., illustrated by Bryan Collier, which received a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Honor Award for illustration. Doreen Rappaport divides her time between New York City and a rural village in upstate New York.
“It is my goal to paint beautiful images,” says illustrator Shane W. Evans. “Yet the subjects I depict are not always beautiful.” Such was the case for him when working on Doreen Rappaport’s No More! Stories and Songs of Slave Resistance, a powerful anthology that, he says, “allowed me a more personal look into one of the darkest moments in American history.”
A graduate of Syracuse University, Shane W. Evans has illustrated several children’s books, on which he has worked with the likes of basketball greats Shaquille O’Neal and Magic Johnson. He also illustrated Osceola: Memories of a Sharecropper’s Daughter, by Osceola Mays and Alan Govenar, which was honored as both a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Book and an Orbis Pictus Honor Book for nonfiction. “Every time I put paint to brush, brush to canvas, it is a journey,” he notes. “Some journeys are pleasant; some not so pleasant. All are life lessons.” He says that his work on No More! “was a true labor of love. For me, No More! represents a history even deeper than the history taught to me as a young child. It gave me the opportunity to share in and appreciate the struggle of enslaved African Americans.”
Shane W. Evans has collaborated with Doreen Rappaport on two other books, one covering the African American experience from the time of the Emancipation to the dawn of the civil rights era, Free At Last! Stories and Songs of Emancipation, and the third in the trilogy, Nobody Gonna Turn Me ‘Round, about the civil rights era. Free At Last! also presented a trial to the artist. “As in No More!, I was faced with the challenge of making beautiful images out of images that are not always beautiful,” explains Shane W. Evans. “There are dark moments in American history—our story—that need to be told, need to be known, and very importantly, need to be seen. It has been a welcome challenge and honor to tell these stories in pictures.” Shane W. Evans’ artistic style, which was called “exquisitely soulful,” by Child magazine, was clearly up to the task.
When he is not illustrating children’s books, Shane W. Evans enjoys working in photography and other graphic arts and exploring furniture design. Shane W. Evans currently lives in Missouri.