In the opening scene of Robin Farmer’s debut young adult novel, “Malcolm and Me,” Roberta Forest is in a class at the Catholic school she attends. The teacher, a nun, asks how Thomas Jefferson signed the Declaration of Independence when, at the time, he held slaves. Roberta’s answer? Jefferson was a hypocrite.
"Malcolm and Me" by Robin Farmer debuts Nov. 17, 2020.
The year is 1973, and the nun responds to Roberta by telling her to get on a boat and go back to Africa. A fight ensues, and Roberta is suspended.
Although the incident opens a work of fiction, it actually happened to an 11-year-old Farmer. “I thought what I was saying was the correct thing,” she says. “I wasn’t trying to be a show pony or a smartass.”
Not long after being suspended, Farmer entered and won a first-place prize in Right On! magazine’s first national Black Awareness contest, an event that also gets borrowed for the book. The essay revolved around the impact of reading “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” a book, Farmer says, “that infused me with a sense of pride and made me feel like I could be a writer one day.”
Although Farmer has spent much of her adult life as a writer, including 21 years as a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, she had not considered writing about her fight with the nun. “It felt shameful to me,” she says.
Robin Farmer
Then, when Farmer was turning 40 and applying for a journalism fellowship with the University of Michigan, she wrote about the experience in an essay. Unearthing that traumatic event stirred something in her, and she continued to reflect on her experiences as a Black Catholic teen — “a minority within a minority,” as she puts it — leading her to write a screenplay based on those experiences.
When Farmer finished the screenplay, she sent it in a cold email to the agent of actress Keke Palmer, whom Farmer had recently seen in the film “Akeelah and the Bee.” The agent was interested but, after six months, concluded that it wasn’t the right fit. “At that point, I decided I’d just make it into a novel and then make it into a movie,” Farmer says.
She worked through the novel for over a decade, at one point throwing away the entire manuscript to start over again. She had just read Heidi Durrow’s “The Girl Who Fell From the Sky” and had a realization: “I needed to dig deeper,” Farmer says.
She continued to work on the book at home and during residencies, including two at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in California; one of those workshops was led by Durrow herself. More recently, Farmer worked on her manuscript during a residency with the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and at the Rowland Writers Retreat.
The opportunity to publish “Malcolm and Me” emerged when she won the She Writes Press and SparkPress Toward Equality in Publishing contest and was awarded a publishing package with the hybrid publisher. She Writes Press planned to publish the book in June 2021, but they moved publication up to November of this year when they realized how timely the project was. “Black Lives Matter, police corruption, corruption in the White House — these are all the issues my young protagonist faces in the ’70s,” Farmer says.
Although Farmer could have addressed these issues in a memoir or nonfiction account, she felt strongly compelled to fictionalize her experiences for a young adult audience. “Adolescence is a crucial age for identity, for figuring out who you are,” she says. She hopes the book will leave readers with the power of forgiveness and the importance of defending truth.
“This was a story that wouldn’t quit me,” she says. “I couldn’t leave it alone.”
