SAN FRANCISCO — When Bay Area educator Jennifer Payne began imagining the young immigrant at the center of her new picture book, the idea took shape far from a classroom.
Payne and her husband were eating at an Italian restaurant whose owner, she said, told them about a grandfather who had immigrated from Naples and opened a restaurant in New York’s Little Italy. Later that night, walking beside the East River, she heard boats at the docks and lines creaking against them.
“The sounds I heard from the docks and the lines creaking on the boats led me to think about what little Paulie might have heard as he took his first steps in America,” Payne told SF News Today in written responses.
That idea became Sounds of America, a 32-page children’s book published by Brown Books Kids and illustrated by Babi Wrobel. This weekend, Payne says the fictional Paulie will make a San Francisco appearance of his own: the character has been invited onto a float in the Italian Heritage Parade on Sunday, Oct. 11.
The parade starts at 12:30 p.m. at Jefferson and Powell streets in Fisherman’s Wharf, travels through North Beach on Columbus Avenue and ends at Washington Square. Admission is free. SF News Today’s Italian Heritage Parade guide has the route, street closures and Muni changes for a day that also overlaps with Fleet Week.
A child hears a new country one sound at a time
Sounds of America follows Paulie as he arrives by ship from Italy and makes his way through New York toward his papà and nonno. Instead of treating the city’s noise as background, Payne turns each sound into a word about what Paulie is learning about his new home.
In the review copy provided to SF News Today, waves welcome him. Ropes at the dock become hope. Other scenes connect city sounds to courage, respect, opportunity, freedom, diversity, understanding, unity and resilience. The final sound resolves into something simpler: home.
Payne said she is not Italian, but that she and her husband were drawn to the family traditions they encountered on their first trip to Italy more than 20 years ago. When she decided to write about a young immigrant, she said, an Italian child felt like a natural choice.
The Little Italy setting also gives the book an immediate San Francisco echo for Payne. She pointed to North Beach, Chinatown and Japantown — distinct cultural neighborhoods close to one another — as part of what she values about the Bay Area.
“San Francisco’s vibrant Italian culture would make my character, Paulie, feel right at home!” she said.
Why a teacher built the story around sound
Payne has spent more than 25 years in education and co-founded Victory Garden Kids, a Bay Area tutoring and academic-resource center. She said one lesson kept resurfacing in her classrooms and tutoring work: children who are struggling can become skilled at hiding it from their peers.
“When children have buy-in and agency in their own learning process, they are more likely to keep trying, even when things get tough,” Payne said.
For Payne, that means giving children tools for how to think rather than only telling them what to think, while adjusting instruction to the needs of the individual child. She calls that individualized lens a “kid-filter.”
The sound-heavy design of the book is an extension of that teaching approach. Payne said she tries to give learners more than one way into a concept — visual, oral and tactile when possible — and worked with Wrobel so the onomatopoeic words would appear to jump from the illustrations.
She wants young readers, she said, to “feel” the splash of the water and the mud under Paulie’s boots — using the senses to connect sounds to words and words to a story.
The book’s final pages point parents toward Payne’s literacy method and a companion project, Level Up Victorious Reading. Payne said she is finishing her dissertation for a PhD in Literacy and plans to release a parent-focused workbook in the spring, with step-by-step reading lessons designed for use at home.
From East Coast festivals to North Beach
The San Francisco parade follows a run of East Coast appearances tied to the book. Payne read to children at the Hoboken Italian Festival, appeared around the Feast of San Gennaro in New York and participated in events at Books of Wonder. Brown Books also supplied photographs from a New York ABC7 Eyewitness News appearance.
One encounter stayed with her. Payne said a Lower East Side restaurant owner described arriving in the United States in the early 1990s and being welcomed by another Italian restaurateur during his first Feast of San Gennaro. He later opened his own restaurant and keeps a painting of St. Gennaro there.
“To me, he is my Paulie as a grown-up,” Payne said, describing the story as an example of the resilience, hope and community she wanted the book to carry.
What Payne is planning on the West Coast
Payne said she raised her children and taught for years near Sacramento before opening her learning center in the Bay Area. She is now planning West Coast bookstore visits and wants to get copies of Sounds of America into school libraries for use alongside literacy, history and social-emotional learning.
Her immediate stop, though, is North Beach.
Payne said Paulie has been invited to appear on a float in Sunday’s Italian Heritage Parade. The parade organizer’s public page confirms the Oct. 11 date, 12:30 p.m. start, free admission and Fisherman’s Wharf-to-Washington Square route; it does not publicly list individual float entries, so SF News Today is attributing Paulie’s participation to Payne.
“I am so excited to share Sounds of America with families and educators in my own community,” Payne said. “Most of all though, I'm excited to hear about children and their grown-ups reading together and feeling like they are a part of Paulie’s story.”