Written by Esau McCaulley
Illustrated by LaTonya Jackson
Published by IVP Kids
Best for Elementary, ages 4-10
Winner of the Jerry Pinkney Children's Book Award
Click to purchase from IVP
Click to purchase from Amazon

My children are three of the few white kids who attend the predominately Black school located in the predominately Black neighborhood we live in. We think about race often. However, it isn’t difficult for my kids and I to find books, movies, teachers, pastors, and city leaders reflecting our skin tones, eye colors, and hair textures. There is plenty of representation reminding us that our presence is seen, welcomed, and celebrated in the world.

For many people of color, this kind of representation has not been their reading (entertainment, schooling, churching, voting, etc.) experience. How could it be when 95% of the fiction written from 1950 to 2018 was written by white authors?*

Which is why it’s a necessary delight when the world is gifted a book like Josey Johnson’s Hair and the Holy Spirit. For within its pages, author Esau McCaulley gives children a story reflecting the diversity of the world far better than what the previous seventy-five years of fiction has done.

The book follows young Josey as she spends the day with her dad, getting her hair braided at Monique’s Beauty Shop and picking out a new dress for Pentecost Sunday. While out with Dad, she tells him it’s hard to be different from all the kids in her class and the characters in the movies she sees. Her dad steps in, encouraging her through the biblical framework of Pentecost to know that our differences are to be celebrated as part of God’s plan for His creation.

Although Dr. McCaulley tailored this book to remind children of color that they are special too, reading this book with my kids was a privilege. On one level, it was an opportunity to talk about what it’s like for their classmates to take care of their braids, pigtails, afros, and fades. And on a deeper level, it was an opportunity to remind ourselves that we should be compassionate toward our neighbors’ different experiences moving throughout the world. We are a church whose gospel is for people of all nations; whose brothers and sisters are called to both rejoice with and mourn alongside each other.

Not to be forgotten are the beautiful illustrations by LaTonya Jackson. Each page captures works of art displaying a wide array of colors and scenes: some at Josey’s house, Monique’s salon, an art museum, and a church of many colors on Pentecost.

I’m grateful for a book like Josey Johnson’s Hair and the Holy Spirit, encouraging those who’ve ever been forced to doubt this biblical truth: God made people unique in skin color, hair texture, eye color, sizes and shapes and abilities because He is gloriously creative.

*Article: “Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing” (shared by Prasanta Verma in her class Diversity, Demographics, and Audience)