Doing the Next Needed Thing

Ida Lewis was a teenager when she looked out from her family’s lighthouse on a fall afternoon in 1858 and saw a sailboat going sideways in the harbor at Newport, Rhode Island.

Four wealthy boys from a local private school had taken the boat out for a joyride. One of them had climbed the mast and the whole thing tipped over. They were now six hundred feet from shore, and in trouble.

Ida ran from the house without bothering to put on her shoes or coat, and threw the ties off the family rowboat. By the time she reached the boys, they were panicked and spluttering, but she managed — somehow — to haul each one to safety. Her mother dried their clothes and put hot drinks in their hands. The boys didn’t tell anyone they’d been pulled out of the water by a girl, a secret they kept for forty more years.

Ida became a national celebrity at 27, after she and her younger brother rowed out into a snowstorm and saved two soldiers from Fort Adams whose boat had overturned. A reporter from the New York Tribune was on a train to Newport within days to conduct an interview. Harper’s Weekly put her on its cover. The papers called her the Bravest Woman in America. Ulysses S. Grant rowed out himself to tip his hat to her, and Susan B. Anthony and William Tecumseh Sherman both made the trip too. One summer three thousand strangers turned up at her rocks in a single month.

Ida had been keeping the Lime Rock light since she was fifteen, when her father had a stroke and she took over the job that kept her family fed. She had been ferrying her younger siblings across the harbor to school every morning, in any weather. And she would still be pulling people from that water in her sixties, in the same cold harbor she had grown up watching.

Ida Lewis died in October 1911 of a stroke, after collapsing one night while she was filling the lamp. Fourteen hundred people came to view her body, the bells of Newport tolling in her honor, with one of the boys she rescued serving as pallbearer. Rhode Island eventually renamed her island Ida Lewis Rock, and the lighthouse service renamed her lighthouse for her too — the only lighthouse in the country, before or since, named for its keeper.

Most American children will never hear about her.

That’s part of why I wrote We Are Mighty, which is out today from Knopf. It’s a picture book for children, with illustrations by Susanna Chapman that I think are extraordinary.

There’s a teacher named Virginia Randolph, who showed up to a one-room schoolhouse outside Richmond, found a building no one had cared for and a lane thick with mud, and rather than wait for the county to fix it, drove back into town, bought gravel with her own money, and raked it across the driveway herself. “Just do the next needed thing,” she said, a sentence and a sentiment that runs through the book.

Julius Rosenwald, the head of Sears, Roebuck & Co., partnered with Booker T. Washington to build nearly five thousand schools across the American South. Maya Angelou went to one. So did John Lewis and Medgar Evers. And one of those Rosenwald schools, it turns out, was the brick building that eventually replaced Virginia Randolph’s one-room schoolhouse — a connection between two of the people in this book that I had not known about going in.

Norman Mineta met Alan Simpson through the barbed-wire fence around the Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming. Norm was a Japanese American boy living inside the wire. Alan was a white Boy Scout from a town nearby, visiting with his troop. More than forty years later, they sat together in Congress and passed the bill that formally apologized to Japanese Americans for the camps. They were close friends for the rest of their lives, and yet, they almost never agreed politically.

Susanna and I cared about accuracy in ways that might not be obvious to every reader. The lighthouse on Ida’s spread is a good example. Lime Rock is a tiny rocky island just off Newport, and the lighthouse there is not the tall freestanding tower most people picture when they hear the word. When Ida was a teenager it was just a small light attached to the side of her family’s home; the government replaced it later. When Susanna was working on the spread, we tracked down the original blueprints so she could paint it correctly — the shape of the dwelling, the placement of the lamp, the rocks Ida launched her rowboat from when she was a child herself. Most children will not notice, but we wanted to get it right anyway.

What I hope children will see in these pages is that they don’t have to be famous, or save the entire world before dinner. I hope they learn to recognize the next needed thing: a friend needs help, a classroom needs care, a rule is unfair, a person has been forgotten, a question needs to be asked, a truth needs to be told, a letter deserves an answer.

I wrote We Are Mighty because children need better stories than “important people are born important.” They deserve history that tells the truth and still leaves room for hope. They deserve to know that power is not only held in offices, titles, monuments, or laws. Power is also in the hands of the person who teaches, rows, writes, testifies, builds, visits, questions, befriends, repairs, and refuses.

And I wrote it because I think adults need that reminder, too.

We Are Mighty is available now. Buy it for a child you love, a classroom that needs it, a library, a grandchild, a niece or nephew, or the kid who already asks a thousand questions. Especially buy it for the child who needs to know that being small has never meant being powerless.