FELIX:Hi, my name is Felix, and I’m 10 years old. Over hundreds of years, the United Kingdom has been home to lots of brilliant authors and lots of brilliant books. But only a very small amount of published authors are black, and in books for young people characters arerarely black. My grandmother has loved reading all her life, but noticed this problem. When she was growing up she never read about people who looked like her and she was made fun of for her frizzy hair. So she wrote a book that was published in 2004 called Princess Katrina and the Hair Charmer.
TINA:Hello! Come in.
When I was your age, growing up black with white foster parents in a small North Yorkshire town back in the 60s had its challenges. I mean, when I went to school, I was only one of two black children. That was a strange time. I was very noticeable, people noticed me. But the thing that people seemed to notice most of all was my hair more than anything. They stared at it and they wanted to touch it. And then, of course, a lot of kids would say pretty mean things. My white foster mother, she really struggled with it and I absorbed all of this stress that she would feel around it. And I started to think that I had this beast that I would have to somehow learn to tame. And I think, in a way, what I did was escape into reading. From as young as I can remember, I used to go to the old library in Ripon. I would try and get out as many books as I could, even from being like seven or eight years old. So I was always an eager reader and I would sometimes find myself walking through the streets of Ripon, trying to imagine myself as one of those princesses in the fairy tales that I loved to read. And I would think about it, but I’d think, well, that could never be me, because whenever you saw those princesses, they had this gorgeous, sleek, blonde, long, what I used to call grade-A princess, hair. And of course, I didn’t have hair like that. In fact, my little afro had no swishability about it at all. So if I was going to be saved from dragons and be courted by princes, I really had the wrong hair for it.
FELIX:So this is the new library?
TINA:That’s right. This is the new library. And I have to say that I was here when it opened.
FELIX:Really?
TINA:I was. And the Prince of Wales opened it and I was working with the press on that day. So I’m part of the development of this library.
My book, Princess Katrina, was my way of addressing the balance for the wiry haired, kinky haired girls and giving them their ownprincess who celebrates the strength and beauty of her natural afro curls. Thankfully, there has been a big increase in black authors and black characters in children’s books since I was a little girl back in the 60s. But, you know, we’ve still got a long way to go.
FELIX:I’m so glad I got to talk to my grandma and learn more about her history. Lots of black writers in Britain will have life experiences like hers, and it made me think about how much I love reading and how important it is to see characters that look like me. I like to think my grandma’s book has helped encourage the increase in black characters and authors, but there’s still not enough outthere. We need to change that.
