The Lady Hermes

It's strange that two biographies I wrote on two people who are American founding fathers, each in his own way, would appear in the same year, same month, by the same publisher. 

BIG GEORGE was to be published in fall of 2008 by Harcourt.  OPEN THE DOOR TO LIBERTY was to be published in January 2009, in time for Black History Month.  But because of the bizarre condition lately of book publishing Harcourt ended up being acquired by Houghton and the two became one.  I had a long history with Harcourt, and none with Houghton.

Everyone knows who George Washington is, but few people recognize the name of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the father of his country. There were three great revolutions in the 18th century, and each one impacted world history. The American Revolution, The French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. 

Although September 16 is actually Mexican Independence Day, many Americans seem to think May 5 or Cinco de Mayo is. This year the world owes the people of Mexico apologies and compassion for being the most devastated by the new strain of flu now spreading to other parts of the world.

So I decided to do an homage to my favorite of the Mexican muralists, Jose Clemente Orozco. Here he is painting his mural of Father Hidalgo, who liberated Mexico from Spain. The mural is in the city hall of Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco, where there is also a statue to Jalisco's favorite son. Few know that Orozco made his art in spite of being almost blind, and lost one hand as a young man.

We should all try getting up on a scaffolding holding a can of paint on a stump at the end of our arm, while peering through bottle glass eyeglasses to make his walls sing. But he did!

Here's a picture of my grandson Nigel at the President Obama inauguration, taken by his mother, Lizzy Rockwell.

He looks cold, doesn't he? I figure he'll always remember how cold George Washington and his less well-layered troops were that first winter in Valley Forge.

Some books take a mighty long time between the flash of an idea and the finished book.  If I count the first moment of the idea, ”Big George” (January 1, 2009, Harcourt/Houghton) has been 10 years in the coming.  Or more.

I live in Revolutionary War country, and one day I offered to take my grandson, Nigel, who was five or six at the time, to a house George Washington may or may not have stopped in – or at least one General Israel Putnam, our local hero, had.  He told me he wasn’t interested in things “ancient like George Washington,” adding that I probably was because I was so ancient.  I didn’t dare admit to him that I never had been very interested in George Washington myself.  As far as I knew, there was nothing to know about him except that he was “The Father of Our Country” and the face on the dollar bill.  He simply WAS and that was enough.  That day I began reading up on him.

To find out about the remarkable and surprising man I discovered, you’ll have to read “Big George; How a Shy Boy Became President Washington.”  The story took seven years from the first words typed by me to being the handsome book illustrated by Matt Phelan and published January 1, 2009.  

I'm amused that people who see the cover art by my daughter Lizzy Rockwell for our most recent collaboration, "Presidents' Day" assume that the boy and girl on the cover (dressed as Abraham Lincoln and George Washington) are intended to be Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Not so. The book was written and illustrated and delivered to the publisher long before we knew that our first major African-American contender for president would be running against our most formidable woman candidate in the Democrat primaries.