Nappy Hair- Carolivia Herron

Herron, Cavolivia, Nappy Hair. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Nappy Hair is a picture book written in a unique style of writing known as Call and Response. This call and response story tells the story of a young girl, Brenda, and her Uncle Mordecai’s view of how she got her “nappy hair”. The book talks about this young girl and how proud she should be of her hair because it comes from “the lord” and her ancestors from Africa, and how “one nap of her hair is the only perfect circle in nature”.

This style of call and response is an authentic African American story telling technique in which the characters in the story respond to the narrator of the story. Uncle Mordecai is the narrator in this story and throughout the book the author uses different styles of text to show that another character is speaking in response to Uncle Mordecai. For example in this passage the standard text is Uncle Mordecai and the other text is the response by other characters in the book:

“Brenda, you sure do got some nappy hair on your head, don’t you?
Well.
It’s your hair, Brenda, take the cake,
Yep.
And come back and get the plate.
Don’t Cha know.”

Call and response technique of story telling is an African American traditional way of telling stories and this adds authenticity to the text and the story as told by Carolivia Herron. Herron uses another grammatical form of AAL in her writing as she writes, “ain’t going to be nothing they come up with going to straighten this chile’s hair”. In this passage the author also makes use of AAL in the way in which she uses multiple negation in her passage through the phrase “ain’t going to be nothing”. Multiple negation is also a AAL grammatical style which adds authenticity to the text itself.

The illustrations in this book are done in a cartoon style and depict an African American family and specifically Brenda with her nappy hair. Each character in the book is African American as depicted in the illustrations, including the angels in heaven. Brenda is the character with the nappy hair and her expressions in each illustration depict her happiness and how proud she is of her hair showing through the illustrations that she is proud of herself and her hair. The illustrations depict a multi generational family, all dressing in various clothing some traditional and some modern, and they all have different styles of hair which is an important emphasis of the book and a detail the illustrator considered in his illustrations.

The different techniques of AAL used in the text by the author of Call and Response and multiple negation are grammatical forms of AAL that add authenticity to the text itself. This authenticity in the way the book is written and the accurate use of AAL throughout the text and the illustrations makes this book a piece of diverse literature. Herron also uses the word “nappy” a traditionally negative word used to describe African American people’s hair, in a positive light throughout the book, which counteracts the typical negative stereotypical view of the word “nappy”. For these reasons I believe that Nappy Hair is a unique book that would be piece of diverse literature that could be used in many ways to inform others about African American culture and to ignite discussion about things such as call and response techniques, AAL, and even ideas about nappy hair.