Kay Mills

One book may grow out of another. Once you feel comfortable with the back story of an era or a subject, take advantage of the chance to use that background again.

My editor and I worked together again on "Something for My Children: The History and People of Head Start" about the program for poor children. It grew directly out of the Hamer biography. Head Start in Mississippi was initially controlled at the grass roots because the political establishment wanted little to do with the federal money coming into the state. It was a complicated fight (one that Julian Bond told me made his head spin after reading about it in the Hamer book). Senators James Eastland and John Stennis were trying to oust one of the key groups involved once they realized that the program was not only helping poor children but helping their parents and communities get better organized.

In trying to sort out the conflicting groups for the Hamer book, I discovered that no one outside of Head Start had ever written its history. Since I had written for many years about schools, this was right up my alley. I already knew about Mississippi and the civil rights era. Head Start had many facets—rural systems in the Deep South, urban programs, and Head Start for groups such as migrant farm workers and American Indians and immigrants from Latin America and Africa. Head Start also worked with infants and toddlers, with children who suffered from asthma and often missed school, and with children who had behavior problems. It worked through community organizations, non-profit agencies, and school systems. I decided to go to various types of programs around the country and solicited advice from people and programs I trusted about which those should be. I was playing reporter again.

But unlike a biography, this could not be a chronological book, except for some sections at the beginning. I needed a different organizing tool to tell the story. I decided to put myself into the book, hard as this was for me as a journalist to do, because I wanted to see for myself how children in the program changed over the course of the school year. To do that, I needed a program close to home in Southern California. I struck out the first time because the Head Start group I approached decided after I had courted it for some time that it didn’t want a journalist on the scene.

Then I asked Congresswoman Maxine Waters, whom I had covered for many years, if she knew of a program in her district that might let me be a fly on the wall. That conversation occurred late one week when Waters was home in L.A. By the following Monday, I was sitting in the office of the Training and Research Foundation, which ran a number of Head Start centers in Watts, South Gate, and elsewhere in the inner city.

I visited a number of centers at first, then zeroed in on one that had an enrollment half black, half Latino, and two dedicated principal teachers. It was a block from the Watts Towers. I went often and I sat at the little tables with the children, I helped them wash their hands, and I shared their lunch hour with them. I was there for Halloween and before Thanksgiving, and into the following year. I saw children come out of their shells and I saw some of the issues with which the teachers had to deal.

Even with all that I saw, I still needed a friend to remind me that while I knew what the neighborhood looked like, I should not assume my readers did. I added more description of the streets as well as the centers. I inserted these Los Angeles vignettes between the longer chapters about the varied Head Start programs from the Indian reservation in Montana to the rural areas of Alabama and Mississippi. I used the pronoun “I.” And I think it worked. By the time I finished this book, I felt more confident in myself as an authority on this subject—not THE authority, mind you, but as a person entitled to express some opinions in a book based on what I had learned.

I wasn’t sure the whole concept would work. But I kept a quote from the actress Mary Steenburgen near my computer: “It’s scary,” she admitted, but “if you don’t do things that scare you now and then, it’s like you’re set, molded, gelled.”

To be continued