In the mid 1990’s, I began research for a pic­ture book biog­ra­phy of ground-break­ing African Amer­i­can pilot, Bessie Cole­man. The book, illus­trat­ed by E.B. Lewis was even­tu­al­ly released by Orchard Books in 2002, to much acclaim. What does Talkin’ About Bessie have to do with Stronger Than? Dur­ing the research, I learned that Bessie’s father was Choctaw. Almost imme­di­ate­ly, I began devel­op­ing a sto­ry about a Black Choctaw char­ac­ter, named Dante. The sto­ry I wrote about him, then titled Dante and the Dream Catch­er, end­ed up buried in my file cab­i­net, all but for­got­ten. Then, in 2021, while sort­ing through old files, I redis­cov­ered the story.

In the span of time that had passed, the impor­tance of own sto­ries had becomes estab­lished, and the notion of a Black author writ­ing a sto­ry that cen­tered a folk­tale of Native Amer­i­can ori­gin — name­ly The Dream Catch­er — was no longer clear-cut. Not wish­ing to over­step, I reached out to my friend, Musco­gee author Cyn­thia Leitich Smith, for advice.

“Cyn,” I wrote, do I even get to tell this sto­ry, now? Or should I just archive this man­u­script?” Cyn asked me to send the sto­ry to her. Once she’d read it, she came back with a cou­ple of ideas about the best way to move for­ward. One of Cyn’s sug­ges­tions excit­ed me: con­sid­er col­lab­o­rat­ing with a Choctaw author. I did­n’t know if it would work, but I was intrigued.

Cyn had a mentee in mind, mid­dle grade author, Sta­cy Wells. Sta­cy had­n’t pub­lished a pic­ture book, but Cyn felt the expe­ri­ence of work­ing on one with me would be instruc­tive. From my per­spec­tive, Sta­cy’s involve­ment would allow me to pull in Choctaw lan­guage and spe­cif­ic tribal/cultural ref­er­ences that I might not, oth­er­wise, have knowl­edge of or direct access to. A col­lab­o­ra­tion could be a win-win.

Our indi­vid­ual jobs were clear­ly drawn. I would focus on writ­ing the sto­ry, and Sta­cy would focus on the back-matter.

Dur­ing the process of revi­sion, I noticed that there were a pletho­ra of sto­ries about dream catch­ers. At the same time, I became increas­ing­ly aware that there were few sto­ries star­ring Black Indige­nous char­ac­ters in the mar­ket­place, peri­od. A sto­ry cen­ter­ing that par­tic­u­lar inter­sec­tion­al peo­ple group was far more impor­tant than anoth­er sto­ry about a dream catch­er. Upon that real­iza­tion, I decid­ed to shift the sto­ry, entirely.

Dante and the Dream-catch­er became Stronger Than, a sto­ry in which Dan­te’s moth­er respond­ed to his fear of night­mares by intro­duc­ing him to ances­tors on both sides of his fam­i­ly, one a sur­vivor of the Trail of Tears, and the oth­er a sur­vivor of the Tul­sa Race Mas­sacre. As Dante sought out these sto­ries on his own, at the local library, he under­stood that he came from peo­ple who were stronger than his night­mares — who were stronger than any­thing. He had every rea­son to sleep peace­ful­ly, with­out fear. And for the first time in a long time, Dante did.

This new sto­ry direc­tion filled me with pas­sion and I got busy with the revi­sion. As I leaned into it, I asked Sta­cy for Choctaw words and phras­es I might weave into the telling, and the names of her own ances­tors that I might bor­row for the new Choctaw ances­tor in the sto­ry. Along the way, we dis­cussed nuances regard­ing the his­to­ries of Native Peo­ples and African Amer­i­cans. In the exchange, I also sug­gest­ed details for her to explore in the back mat­ter she was writ­ing. In this way, I touched her back-mat­ter and she touched my sto­ry. As such, when asked how I want­ed the book to be cred­it­ed, my answer was 50–50. By Nik­ki Grimes with Sta­cy Wells did­n’t feel quite right, to me.