Derrick Barnes is ready to introduce the world to Henson Blayze.

It’s been a long time coming. The award-winning children’s author first conceived of the character in 2012, while writing a manuscript called “Germantown Hero,” about a young superhero who must rescue his kidnapped parents.

“I liked him a lot,” Barnes recalls. “He was an amalgamation of my four sons—funny, kind of brash. We couldn’t land a deal for that manuscript, but I liked him so much, I put him in a separate file.”

In the years following, Barnes had an extraordinary run of success, becoming the first author ever to win two Kirkus Prizes, for his picture books Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut (2017) and I Am Every Good Thing (2020), both illustrated by Gordon C. James. But young Henson was never far from his mind.

“There was a rash of unarmed Black boys and men killed by police officers,” Barnes says. “[Twelve-year-old] Tamir Rice was the one that set it off for me. And I had run across [Jerry Spinelli’s novel] Maniac Magee, and I wanted to mesh the two [stories]. I wondered what this story would be like if it was told in the South with a Black boy protagonist, somebody like Henson Blayze. So I pulled him back out and plugged him into this fictional town of Great Mountain, Mississippi.”

In The Incredibly Human Henson Blayze (Viking, September 23), the title character is a 13-year-old eighth grader who’s so good at football that he plays safety for his town’s high school team, all while working in the vineyard owned by his father, Deacon Jonathon Blayze, and nursing a crush on dreamy young activist Freida St. Louis.

During the team’s first game, Henson learns that his younger friend Menkah Jupiter has been viciously assaulted by two state troopers. He leaves the game to watch over the boy in the hospital, angering the white townspeople who claimed to love him but now attack him with vile racist slurs.

Barnes talked about The Incredibly Human Henson Blayze, which is a finalist for the Kirkus Prize this year,” via Zoom from his home in Charlotte, North Carolina. The book is a finalist for this year’s Kirkus Prize, with the opportunity to collect a record third trophy.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What made you decide to set this book in the Mississippi Delta?

My family originated in Clarksdale, Mississippi. We used to take the Greyhound bus from Kansas City, Missouri, down to Mississippi almost every summer. We were like hundreds of Black families that were part of the Great Migration, trying to evade white violence and lynchings and poverty. My family ended up in Kansas City, while other families ended up in Philadelphia and Chicago and Detroit. I just wanted to take it back to my roots.

How did you decide to have Henson be a football player?

I’m a Midwest boy. Jeans, boots, pickup trucks, shoveling snow, barbecue, and football are just interwoven into the culture there. I’m a big Kansas City Chiefs fan, and all of my boys have played football except for my youngest son. I have a son that’s a Division I football player [at the University of Texas at El Paso]. I’m also a sports fan that listens to sports radio, and I’ve been doing a lot of research on how America views Black male athletes. I've heard so many fans call in and refer to Black male athletes as “beasts” and “monsters.” They only see them as athletes and not as real people.

[Former San Francisco 49er] Colin Kaepernick got blackballed from playing a sport that he had been studying pretty much his whole life because he was opposing police brutality and he decided to kneel. It cost him his career because [the NFL] did not see this peaceful protest or this well-educated man making a stand, saying that America is mistreating people that look like him.

That’s something that we all should pay attention to and act on. It doesn't matter what you look like or what part of town you come from; if any of us are being mistreated, that goes against everything that this country says it stands for. That was another influence for this book, the way America is fascinated with the Black body when it comes to performance, entertainment, and sports. Having four sons that have played sports but are also scholars, I want them to understand that they have much more value than just what this country has assigned them. You don’t have to just play football.

Even before he angers the town, Henson is dehumanized by people who call him the “Pick-Six Savage” and compare him to a monster grown in a lab. What do you think is behind this refusal to see him as a human being even when people are “praising” him?

I think there’s a cultural disconnect. This country has done a great job throughout history of keeping a portion of our population in the dark about the history of slavery and white supremacy and how those things have affected all of us, not just Black people. If you live in a predominantly white rural environment, you’re not learning about [Tulsa’s] Black Wall Street or Reconstruction or the [1898 massacre in] Wilmington, North Carolina. That’s why some of these books are being banned in this country, because they don’t want white children to develop empathy toward these situations, because then you won’t have a whole population of uninformed voters anymore.

We are one nation, and we have to look out for each other, but because of this big gap of information, the only thing you have to go by when it comes to people of other ethnicities are these stereotypes. I’ve had friends who grew up in predominantly white environments, and once they went to college and had an opportunity to be around people of different ethnicities and had these conversations, they found out that we have a lot more in common than we’ve been taught.

Was it important to you to include “incredibly human” in the title to emphasize Henson’s humanity?

When I really started studying African American history and reading books outside of school, I always wondered about the people who have made it their life’s mission to erase us from American history and how frustrating it must be to them that we are still here. Everything that you can think of has been done to minimize the existence of Black people in this country, but we are still here. We were enslaved for over 250 years, we had 150 years of Jim Crow, and we were able to fight for our humanity and equal rights, and we are still here. That is a fascinating story when you talk about the small percentage of enslaved Africans that were brought here in 1619, and we are still here.

At the end of the day, no matter how fascinating any of us human beings are, everybody wants to be treated with kindness. Everybody wants their humanity recognized. No matter how amazing Henson is, he is still somebody’s son. He still gets nervous when he’s around Freida St. Louis. He still feels a softness in his heart when Menkah comes around. I just wanted to create the most loving and kind boy, almost to a fault, that I possibly could, no matter how talented or blessed he is.

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer. 

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