Rob Edwards, the writer and producer, and Robert Smalls, the iconic freedom fighter and legislator, share more than a first name. They share a sense of mischief, imagination, and defiance.
Smalls displayed his guile and courage in the midst of chattel slavery and the Civil War. In 1862, he daringly stole and commandeered the Planter, a Confederate ship, which he navigated past Confederate forts and later surrendered to the Union Navy. Smalls and 15 other enslaved people sailed to freedom, and he was later assigned as the ship’s pilot.
Edwards’ cleverness, albeit with lower stakes, manifested itself during his childhood. “I’ll get myself in trouble here, but [as a kid], you might open my textbook and see a comic book, Spider-Man or something like that,” he admits with a laugh during a phone interview.
Why We Wrote This
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Can a new graphic novel help cement the legacy of Robert Smalls? The little-known Civil War figure caught the attention of a Hollywood writer and producer, who says that telling Smalls’ story could “change lives.”
The writer’s journey to convey Smalls’ story in graphic novel form took him to multiple comic book conventions and led him to form his own superteam with illustrators and researchers. What resulted is “Defiant: The Story of Robert Smalls,” a collaboration between Stranger Comics and Legion M. The publisher’s goal is to elevate Smalls “to his rightful place” next to other 19th-century heroes such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.
The Monitor spoke with Mr. Edwards ahead of the June 10 publication of the first installment of the “Defiant” trilogy. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s the importance of telling Robert Smalls’ story correctly and with depth?
When I started to do my deep dive into Robert Smalls’ life, there were a lot of really great biographies, but none of them were attacking it from the angle that I wanted to [pursue]. Also, I wanted to meet people where they are, and for me, the audience or people that would be most affected, in my view, would be teenagers. The way to meet those kids is through comic books, or a graphic novel.
Also, I wanted to tell the story in three parts. The man lived several lives. The first part was the taking of the Planter, wondering what kind of person would do this and create [the story] of such an exceptional human being. He was pinned down between the Confederate Navy and Union Navy and somehow survived it. The second volume is his life as an entrepreneur and speaker. The third is his life in Congress. He ran for five terms and he’s the reason we have a public school system, so his legislation lives on forever.
What separates Robert Smalls’ story from other stories of that time period?
Dave Baxter, a high school friend of mine who was working with Legion M, introduced me to the story of Robert Smalls, and I consider myself a pretty well-read guy. I was like, “OK, this is a remarkable story that needs to be told in a remarkable way.” A lot of times, with stories like these, the slave narratives are kind of brutal, what I call the “whip on back” kind of storytelling. Everybody kind of tunes out the actual story, and you don’t really get a sense of what the person was about and how big their accomplishments were. In the case of Robert Smalls, the planning of his escape was amazing. He outsmarted the entire Confederate Navy. What he did after that was amazing. I knew we needed to tell the biggest version of this story because it would change lives.
How significant is Robert Smalls to this political moment?
It starts with the end of the Civil War, the coming of Jim Crow, the Daughters of the American Revolution and these attempts to whitewash our path. But the bruise is still there. It starts with people saying “DEI is bad,” and then the legal repercussions of racism – that’s “bad.” You start with a place where most people agree that teaching a second grader about slavery probably isn’t the best idea, going from that to saying that any story about any Black person in history is “wokeness.”
How we convey these stories is important. How do we pass that information on? Through songs, through quiltmaking? Through comics? Ultimately, the important thing is to get the story out. It’s also the reason why making a movie is really important, and getting multiple versions. Dr. Myisha Eatmon, a Harvard professor who helped us with research, is working with us on a student guide that young people will read.
You worked previously with “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” a show famous for its sense of mischief and imagination. How have you been so adept at finding that balance and making it an essential part of your work?
I would add “Princess and the Frog” and “Captain America” to that mix as well. “Fresh Prince” was about [the idea] there’s not just one type of Black folk. We meet in the middle, and sometimes, growing pains are hard. “Princess and the Frog” was about a Black woman and a man from an exotic land – one poor, one rich, one hardworking, one not so much. And they meet in the middle. They were human beings. “Captain America,” thematically, is about the burden that’s placed on all of us. His superpower isn’t what makes him a superhero. He does everything the hard way, and he can’t make a mistake. I always remember what my father would tell me. He’s like, you know, you have to be twice as good. That’s the [burden].
There’s this great story about how to train an elephant. You take a six-foot spike, drive it into the ground, and you chain the elephant to it. The elephant struggles and it realizes it can’t do anything. The next day, you replace it with a three-foot spike, and the elephant looks at the spike and decides that no matter what it does, it’s never going to get that spike out of the ground.
We can’t do that. We have to look at every day like it’s a one-foot spike, and that we’re only constricted by our beliefs and what we think we can achieve.
Robert Smalls was born a slave, but never had a slave mindset. He made the world around him conform to the reality that he saw.
