Dinah Johnson: Greetings, this is Diane Johnson. I was married to Tom Feelings who died in 2003. One of the honors of his life was receiving the Coretta Scott King Award for The Middle Passage. Tom worked on this book for over 20 years because the topic of slavery was very difficult for him. He used to explain that he had to come up for air sometimes and work on joyful projects before returning to the hull of the ship with his enslaved ancestors.

Technically, The Middle Passage is a masterpiece. It took a lot of skill for Tom to work with pen and ink and tempera on rice paper for the original drawings which were then photographed for the book. Famed historian, John Henrik Clarke, wrote an introduction to The Middle Passage, but essentially it is the story of the slave trade told through images. This way a person of any age or speaker of any language can understand what happened to Africans uprooted from homes and taken to the Americas.

Once, when Tom was signing books, he overheard a little boy ask his mother what The Middle Passage is about. His response to her answer was simply, "That's not fair." This is just one example of the many ways that Tom witnessed young people showing their insight and intelligence and humanity. Tom believed that children can make our world what it should be for everybody.