The little girl in the story isn't named because Redd wanted her experience to feel universal. Myers used a wide range of colors and brushstrokes - she says it helped that she had a reference point "right in my living room." "If you look at families, we're not all the same color. "One of the problems I have seen in children's books that express diversity in the past is how everyone looks the same. Myers paid extra attention to the texture of her paintings - she had to illustrate the little girl's tight curls, the dad's waves, the brother's twists. "I had a hard time really accepting I had to wear a bonnet compared to all my friends," she says. Nneka Myers illustrated the story - and remembers that she didn't love her bonnet much either, when she was little. As the girl explains: "In my family, when the sun goes down, our hair goes up!" In Bedtime Bonnet, a little girl enlists her whole family to help her find her lost bonnet before she goes to sleep. "I didn't want my daughter growing up with that same shame."īut Redd couldn't find a book that celebrated black nighttime hair routines, so she wrote it herself. "If the doorbell rang, I would immediately take it off - I didn't want anybody to know it existed," she recalls. It's a "ubiquitous black experience that I grew up with, my mom grew up with, all my friends grew up with," Redd says - and yet it's one that she felt ashamed of as a kid. When Nancy Redd's daughter was three years old, she started wearing a bonnet to bed.
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