The Mighty Miss Malone Study Guide

Christopher Paul Curits grew up in a middle-class Black family in Flint, Michigan. Although his father was a doctor, he gave up his medical practice and became a factory worker and union organizer when his patients were no longer able to pay him. Curtis’s mother stayed at home to raise her children—Curtis and his four siblings—when they were small. Later, she became a teacher in the Flint Public School system. Both of Curtis’s parents were active in the Civil Rights Movement and brought their children with them to marches and meetings. In junior high school, Curits became the first Black student elected to his integrated school’s student council. Although Curits initially planned to pursue a degree in political science at the University of Michigan-Flint, he dropped out after his first year and took a fulltime job at a General Motors automobile plant. However, he took college classes in the evening part-time and completed his degree in 2000. Although Curtis wrote on the side throughout his earlier working life, he took a full year off in the early 1990s to focus on it more deeply, during which he drafted what would become his first novel, The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, which was published in 1995. This book, which was nominated for Coretta Scott King Award, the Newberry Award, and the Jane Addams Peace Award Honor in 1996, launched Curtis’s professional writing career. To date, he has published nine novels for young adults, most of which focus on the Black experience in 19th- and 20th-century America and Canada. He has been married twice and has four adult children. He is the first person to have won both a Newberry and a Coretta Scott King Award.

The Mighty Miss Malone is set in 1936-1937, near the end of the Great Depression. This period of serious, global financial crisis began in 1929 when the United States stock market destabilized what was then the world’s largest economy. The period was characterized by high unemployment, drastically reduced economic production and trade, and bank failures. Herbert Hoover, who was president during the stock market crash, did too little, too late to address the problems. His successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, ushered in the New Deal, a series of programs designed to create jobs and get the American economy back on its feet, during the early-mid 1930s. Two sporting events dominate the novel’s early chapters: a baseball game between the Gary Iron-Head Dogs and the Chicky-Bar Giants of Grand Rapids, Michigan—both real teams in the Negro American League, which operated from the late 1930s through the 1960s. As Black athletes were progressively excluded from American baseball in the late 19th century, they began organizing their own teams and leagues all around the country. During the 1920s and 1930s, these Black baseball leagues were at the height of their popularity, occasionally competing against White teams and drawing crowds of all races. The book also discusses the first of two boxing matches between then-undefeated Black American boxer Joe Louis and heavyweight world champion and German citizen, Max Schmeling. People on both sides saw this as a contest not just of two boxing titans, but between American democracy and German fascism and between Black and White races. Accordingly, Hitler and the Nazi party cast Schmeling’s victory (achieved only in the 12th round) as a victory for the Nazi Party’s genocidal version of White supremacy.

Christopher Paul Curits wrote The Mighty Miss Malone as a follow-up to his award-winning 1999 novel, Bud, Not Buddy. Bud is set during the Great Depression, and it follows the adventures of a Black adolescent navigating life during that difficult era. Bud runs away from his foster family, ends up in the same Flint encampment as Deza, and rides the rails in search of work and his father. For a southern and rural perspective on the era, readers can turn to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, a young-adult novel published by Mildred D. Taylor in 1977 that describes a period in the life of the Logans, a Black family living in rural Mississippi during the Jim Crow era. All three of these books (each written in the late 20th or early 21st centuries) center Black protagonists, which was uncommon in American literature prior to the 20th century. In the novel, a teacher gives Deza two books written by and centering Black people. One is The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), a retelling of the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts as a social commentary on race relations and capitalism in the United States. It was written by sociologist and civil rights leader W. E. B. DuBois. The second, Quicksand, follows the life of a mixed-race woman as she tries to navigate racial politics in the United States and abroad. Published in 1928, it was written by Nella Larsen, a mixed-race woman who was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance.