Editor's Note: Scenes from the book and relevant terminology are written as described by Jay Coles.
Imagine you are a black teenager living in the hood, and you go to a party to look out for your brother, who is a suspected drug dealer. Your brother goes missing at the party, and you have to venture out to find him, only to discover he was shot dead by police. This is the premise for Ball State student Jay Coles’s fictional book, “Tyler Johnson Was Here.”
The book, originally a letter he wrote to his dad, started as Coles’s personal story of growing up in the hood. When Trayvon Martin, a black teen, was gunned down by a Floridian neighborhood watchman in 2012, Coles went back to the letter and turned it into a book.
“I felt like the media and a lot of society really treated Martin like a thug because he was black and because he wore a hoodie, and I remember being really angry about that,” Coles said. “I was like, I gotta tell that story.”
This story isn’t a rare one: in 2016, more than 250 black people were killed by police, according to a study by The Guardian.
But Coles didn’t just write the book to describe everyday life for a black person in the hood.
“I’m writing it just to give a window to people who don’t really know why we say black lives matter,” Coles said.
“The flipside of that is I’m also trying to have a mirror for kids who are like Tyler, who are like Trayvon Martin, who are like me, who live in these communities where they see this kind of thing going on way too often and feel hurt and upset, and feel like they aren’t heard. I kind of just wanted to say, ‘Yeah, you’re heard.’”
After five years of work on the book and a long series of rejections from agents and publishers, Coles sent his manuscript to Lauren Abramo, who saw promise in Coles and became his agent in January.
“There was so much natural talent on the page from the first version of the manuscript that I read, but every author needs the eyes of others to really take things to the next level,” Abramo said.
His editor, Kheryn Callender, believed his book was too long and needed some revisions before publishing. So Coles significantly revised the book — nearly cutting it in half — changing the tone and removing characters.
“‘Tyler Johnson Was Here’ wasn’t necessarily too long in terms of page count, it was more that I took a look at the themes of the book, and felt that there were some conflicts, characters, or events that didn’t always go along with those themes, and so felt disconnected from the story,” Callender said.
Coles even changed the title from “The Heart of Our Darkness” to “A Night Devoid of Stars” to the final title, “Tyler Johnson Was Here.” He said marketing and genre played a big part in changing the title.
The book was originally titled “The Heart of Our Darkness” because it’s an acronym; the first letter of each word spells out the word hood, which is where the story is centered both figuratively and physically.
The crew decided to change the first title because it was too close to the title of Joseph Conrad’s classic novella "Heart of Darkness."
Next, Coles chose “A Night Devoid of Stars” because it’s a direct Martin Luther King Jr. quote, and King is the main character's hero. Callender and Abramo felt that title was too reflective of science fiction or fantasy, so they changed it to “Tyler Johnson Was Here.”
Coles will begin a publicity tour in the spring to promote his book and he is currently working on a new book.
“Tyler Johnson Was Here” is available for preorder at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Indybooks and iBooks. Coles is unsure if it will be released in the Ball State bookstore, but because the bookstore is a Barnes and Noble affiliate, it is likely the book will be available for purchase there.
Contact Hannah Gunnell with comments at hrgunnell@bsu.edu.
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