When I was 10 years old and bored during math, I drew a map on my left arm in blue ink by plotting my freckles, a small bruise, a sprinkling of moles and a scar. My arm country was long and narrow. I drew little triangle trees for a forest, a squiggly river to divide east and west, and a house where I could live. When Mrs. Stern saw that I was writing on myself instead of finishing my subtraction, she scolded me. I cried big fat tears that watered my arm’s forest, made the river rise and blurred the compass rose. I didn’t know how to explain to Mrs. Stern that the body is a map we’re fated to follow.
FREEDOM BRAIDS (Lantana, 32 pp., $18.99, ages 5 to 9), written by Monique Duncan, illustrated by Oboh Moses and inspired by the enslaved African women in Colombia who escaped from the plantations and created “palenques” (free communities), tells the story of young Nemy as she follows the map of her braids to freedom — guided by Big Mother, who cuts sugar cane all day and weaves stories at night. Duncan’s heartfelt lines break like poetry as secret messages are embedded in Nemy’s cornrows. Warnings, roads to travel, rivers to cross are plaited, twisted and knotted, reminding us how weighty the history of hairstyle can be.
Moses’ digitally rendered art — in night tones lit up at times by fiery yellows or brightly bruised purples and blues — regenerates pain as a glow that leads Nemy to “a new dawn.” On the penultimate two-page spread, Nemy’s braided hair and the winding terrain of her escape route mirror each other in an illustration that feels both haunted and hopeful. The seeds that are hidden in the hair, “to be planted on free soil,” are never visually depicted, but they are felt as an invisible nucleus, a faint heartbeat that grows stronger as each page is turned. Nemy’s story leaves us to consider what a miracle it is that a body can grow the strands of her own survival, and what ingenuity it takes to comb and style a path to freedom.
While its bright gouache illustrations evoke the swirled coordinates of the fairy tale, THE MAGIC CALLALOO (Candlewick, 32 pp., $18.99, ages 3 to 7), written by Trish Cooke and illustrated by Sophie Bass, is also firmly rooted in the history of enslaved Africans braiding escape routes into their hair. At the center of a village is a magic plant called the callaloo, a spiritual ancestor of the rampion Rapunzel’s mother ate to satisfy her cravings but paid for with her daughter’s freedom. Shaped liked gigantic, swollen teardrops, each green callaloo leaf grants a single wish until a wicked man (with a head the same shape as the leaves he eats) wishes the plant belongs only to him — a wish that comes true. But as most fairy tales remind us, greed starves magic, so all that’s left of the plant is a brittle stalk, a dry shred of hope. This last leaf, though, grants Mister and Missis their wish to have a child (after they cut through barbed wire, and fight fire-breathing dragons and snakes, to pluck it). They name their child Lou after the callaloo that satisfied their longing and fed their hunger for a child. Unlike Rapunzel’s hair, which is let down for others to climb, Lou’s “shiny coils and curls” grow out “far and wide, reaching to the sun,” because she grows the way the callaloo grows. She grows like the enchanted leaf that gave her breath.
Though Lou’s circumstances get dimmer and dimmer after the wicked man abducts her in a small gray sack, the bright illustrations never fade. Even the wicked man’s ruins sparkle as Lou, surrounded by cheerful animals, is held captive and forced to care for what the wicked man desired and then neglected. And although she is saved by the “wise old woman” who claims, “I am No One from Nowhere in Particular,” it is Lou who goes through “the partings in the trees, like the ones in her hair,” and traces her fingers “over the rows on her head” to find her way home. The tear that restores the blinded prince’s sight in the Grimm Brothers’ “Rapunzel,” and sparks a happily-ever-after, is recast here as a tiny seed (the same shape as a teardrop) that falls from Lou’s hair and takes root so that a new callaloo plant can grow.
The twists and turns of Cooke’s brilliant storytelling feel as dexterous as the wise woman’s fingers braiding Lou’s hair. Each line has the possibility of a seed. And each seed has the possibility of rooting to a place as faraway as it is close. The first time I opened the book, I could have sworn I saw the speck of a seed caught in the spine. I tried to shake it out as one might shake a mysterious tree for unknown fruit. I closed the book. I opened it again. The seed was gone, but something almost forgotten took root again.
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