Thread by @djolder

Hey hey hey!! DACTYL HILL SQUAD BOOK 2: FREEDOM FIRE drops Tuesday!! 🦕🦖✨💥💜🦖😎⭐️
Pre-order links are here: kids.scholastic.com/kids/book/free…
And you can read an excerpt here: kids.scholastic.com/content/dam/sc…

you have probably already heard the spiel about pre-orders mattering and I'm here to tell you: they do. Please do pre-order DACTYL HILL SQUAD 2 for that young person in your life or for you or both. Those numbers matter, both to me and to the publishers.

Amazing cover art by the amazing @nilaffle

DACTYL HILL SQUAD is about a Cuban girl named Magdalys who finds out she can communicate with dinos using her mind, but at its core, the project has always been about a different kind of archeology from the dinosaur kind: unearthing lost histories of heroic people of color

researching the Civil War period, it is staggering to realize how many amazing stories there are of folks fighting for freedom that white supremacy has kept out of the mainstream history books. The simplification of history in the name of a single narrative is so real. So harmful

Book 1 deals particularly with organizing that happened in New York connected to the Underground Railroad. The Squad falls in with a real life group called The Vigilance Committee that protected folks from being sold into slavery.

Folks like David Ruggles, who organized the Vigilance Committee and should be every American history book mentioning that era.

In book 2, Magdalys and her friends have headed south to find her brother, who was wounded during a battle. In Tennessee, they fall in with the Louisiana Native Guard, a Black regiment from New Orleans (shown here during the assault on Port Hudson)

there were about 180,000 Black Civil War soldiers, some recently freed, others born free, but their story in the popular imagination has been reduced to a movie about Mathew Broderick. It's maddening.

Black Civil War soldiers also show up in Birth of a Nation, and you can imagine how that goes. I think of that and Glory as kind of the two bookends of representation on the subject in Hollywood. A mess.

One soldier, George Washington Williams, went on to become a famous historian and wrote "A History of Negro Troops In The War Of The Rebellion" fordhampress.com/9780823233854/…

Williams also helped catalyze the international movement against King Leopold's horrific rubber empire in the Congo

(and is played by Samuel Jackson in Tarzan but I digress...)

Anyway, a lot of the characters in Dactyl Hill are named after soldiers from the Native Guard and Louisiana 9th, even if they're not based on them point for point. Many of them died in combat, like Big Jack Jackson, who TNC writes about beautifully here: theatlantic.com/national/archi…

Anyway, Dactyl Hill Squad is fantasy, and in this version of the world, Big Jack Jackson wasn't killed at Miliken's Bend, he goes on to fight and win many more battles and lives an amazing life.

I had a dream once, years ago. In a huge, sun-filled room, everyone I knew was dancing together. Some of us were making up the steps, some were following long held patterns in time with each other. It was so beautiful. Young and old, living and dead, we were all there together.

It was simple, but it still gets me choked up some thinking about it.

At the time, I was an organizer, and things weren't going well. The (white) people working on gender violence didn't want to deal with race, the (male) people organizing around race wouldn't talk about gender. A whole mess. I was burning out. A lot of us were.

and when I woke up, I knew the dream was about organizing. Organizing is a dance. It lives at the crossroads of the future and past. It's a dance we do with our ancestors and generations yet to come. It's both improvised and choreographed.

Sometimes we fuss about the steps, can't remember or change them. Make up new ones. But we figure it out, one way or another. We make the road by walking, as the poet Antonio Machado wrote.

And writing is that too, in a way. It's always struck me that writing is an act of conjuring, of raising the dead, looking to the past to change the future. Organizing. Dancing.

Sometimes we write the pasts we wish had been in an effort to bend the future in that direction, daydreaming about freedom and survival, what it means to struggle and the many definitions of peace.

we write to conjure another world, a better world, the one that Arundhati Roy reminded us is waiting, that she can hear breathing on a quiet day.

There's a moment in Dactyl Hill 2 that's really about that dream of dancing and organizing and surviving, and @nilaffle captured its essence so perfectly with this illustration

The kids are re-enacting the events of book 1 for their new friends in the Louisiana Native Guard. That's Big Jack Jackson playing a T-Rex beneath Mapper, and Sabeen is playing Magdalys, who's watching with total embarrassment and a little bit of pride.

The future (generations) and past come together, celebrate, tell stories, learn old steps and make up new ones, walk away changed. We the writers and readers are there too, taking part in our own spectral way. that's the power of story.

one more pic you gotta see, just a detail, but this action shot by @nilaffle is just too great to not give a glimpse of. That's Amaya with the carbine, Magdalys steering. The guy on gatling is Corporal Cailloux. Not to be messed with.

Also the paperback of the first DACTYL HILL SQAUD is out now so if you need to catch up before 2 drops on Tuesday, here's where you can get it: kids.scholastic.com/kids/book/dact…

Interesting sidenote: Richard Gatling was a pro-Union, (which is to say not treasonous) southerner (NC) who was horrified to learn how many soldiers died of disease during the war (way more than in combat), invented the gun with the idea of ending wars with it (lol ok)

it wasn't used a whole lot during the Civil War itself cuz it had only just been invented, but almost exclusively by the North because Richard was like fuck those traitors my guy.

wow I got thru a whole thread on my middle grade books without swearing only to blow it in the endpages dammit

DACTYL HILL SQUAD has a 4.6/5 rating on DOGO aka the only review site that matters since it's actual kids writing the reviews ayoooo dogobooks.com/dactyl-hill-sq…

TODAY HAS BEEN AMAZING. Thank you for all the Dactyl Hill Squad Freedom Fire love!! These kids in Wisconsin gave me the best release day gift of all by being sooooo excited about this series 😭😭😭😭😭

that little guy next to me—I asked what killed the most people during the Civil War and he jumped up all excited and yelled "DISEASE!!!" lmaooo I fell out lololol he was right tho

later I asked what was happening in Mexico during the US Civil War, he goes "Um the French Mexican War?" Yoooo...plenty adults don't know that. The teachers hadn't realized he knew all that. The whole group was incredible. I had so much fun I just hung out with em for a while lol

same kid also saw the blurb on DACTYL HILL and went "OMG @JackieWoodson liked your book??" hahahahah smart kid

(btw all the kids whose pics I post have given clearance to be posted)

These animated cover gifs are too cool