THE READING ROOM: Mavis Staples Bridges All Ages, All Audiences With Children’s Book

Inspiring soul and gospel singer, civil rights activist, Bob Dylan’s crush: Mavis Staples can now add children’s book author to her resume. Partnering with award-winning children’s book author Carolyn Boston Weatherford (Unspeakable; Moses) and illustrator Steffi Walthall (Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round), Staples tells a moving tale of her life, her family, her music, and her civil rights work in Bridges Instead of Walls: The Story of Mavis Staples.

In rhythmic, poetic sentences, Staples traces her family’s life from Mississippi, where her father Roebuck “Pops” Staples sang in the church choir and played blues guitar in juke joints, to Chicago, where Mavis was born. Like the book itself, each two-page spread takes its title from a song that Mavis sang, either with her family in the The Staple Singers or as a solo artist. In the spread “If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again,” Staples writes: “Pint-sized Mavis, then just seven years old, was a baritone even back then. She had a voice as deep as a valley and a temper hotter than a volcano.” In this little chapter we learn that Staples’ Aunt Katie taught her to sing the chapter’s title song. After the family group developed their harmonies, Aunt Katie invited them to sing in her church, where Staples stood on a chair to reach the microphone. The singers sang the only two songs they had practiced, but the congregation was so enthusiastic about the group’s performance that they asked for an encore. According to Staples: “Pops figured they’d better learn more songs — in a hurry,” since they had been invited to sing at a different church the following Sunday.

Mavis Staples at Bluesfest in 2019 (photo by Steve Ford)

Walthall’s stunning illustrations featuring oversize human characters set against a background of musical notes floating through the air bring to vibrant life the vivacious nature of each part of the story, reiterating the power of music to bring people together and to foster change.

In the chapter “Use What You Got,” Staples writes about wanting to become a nurse when she graduated from high school. She reports that Pops told her, “You’re already a nurse. When you sing, you’re healing people.”

Staples shouts out to her influences in song in the four-page chapter titled, of course, “Nobody Can Make It on Their Own.” Building the house where these mentors live, she writes about these singers and musicians in terms of cornerstones, foundations, windows, and pillars. The cornerstone, she recalls, was Chicago’s South Side, home to “scores of Black churches” and blues musicians with “names as vibrant as their lyrics: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Big Bill Broonzy.” Pops’ “electric guitar trembling in a blues key, and his firm hand and heart …” was her foundation. “For Mavis, the window was the one framing a windblown Lena Horne as she crooned ‘Stormy Weather’ in the film of the same name.” Finally, Mavis’ pillar was Mahalia Jackson, “who reigned over gospel’s golden age.”

In the title chapter, Staples sums up the inescapable role of music in her and her family’s life: “For Mavis and her family music was … A bridge from the Baptist church to Carnegie Hall, a bridge between gospel and folk music that forged a bond between Mavis and Bob Dylan.” Music was a bridge, she rhapsodizes, that “carried a skinny, knock-kneed girl from Chicago’s Dirty Thirties to the world.”

In the final chapter, “Respect Yourself,” Staples croons “The Gospel according to Mavis,” which urges “Put your heart in anything you do, keep the faith” and concludes with a visionary quatrain:

I’m the messenger
I just can’t give up
While the struggle’s still alive
We’ve got more work to do.

The book concludes with a timeline of the highlights of Staples’ life as well as lists of “recommended listening” of The Staple Singers’ albums and “recommended viewing” of films, including the 2015 documentary Mavis!.

Although Bridges Instead of Walls: The Story of Mavis Staples is aimed at grades 3-5, it’s a vivid introduction to Mavis Staples’ development as a musician and her passion for building bridges through her music. Anybody who loves Mavis Staples will love this book, at any age.

Bridges Instead of Walls: The Story of Mavis Staples was published July 9 by Rocky Pond Books/Penguin Random House