The Magic Callaloo

With its origins in the fairy tale, Rapunzel, Trish Cooke has fashioned a neo-folktale inspired by stories of enslaved Africans who made patterns in their cornrowed hair, using them as maps to help them escape to freedom.

It’s set far away and long ago in a small village where grows a magical wishing callaloo plant that satisfies the needs of all the villagers. In this village lives a selfish man who wants the plant for himself, so having uprooted it one night uses it to wish for ever more things. Around his land he puts a barbed-wire fence inside which he stays stuffing himself and growing ever fatter and lazier until all that remains of the plant is a single leaf.

Meanwhile back in the village a couple are devastated at the loss of the plant, which they hoped could have provided them with their dearest wish – a child.  One evening a wise old woman stops by informing the husband of the callaloo’s whereabouts and the couple decide to search for it. They eventually locate the plant, the wife consumes the last leaf and they both wish for a child. In due time, joy of joys, a baby is born and they name her Lou. She grows into a beautiful, curly locked girl and her parents decide to tell her the story of her origin. This prompts Lou to make up and sing a magic callaloo song, which troubles her father. Then one day who should pass through but the plant thief. On hearing the song, he snatches Lou, takes her to his home where he keeps her prisoner, making her do all the work.  As a consequence Lou grows ever more miserable.

Years pass with her parents constantly missing their daughter and vice versa until who should come along but the wise woman who had helped her father.  Lou explains the cause of her sadness and the wise old woman devises a clever plan to reunite the family using the plaited patterns she lovingly twists into the girl’s tresses. Lou however isn’t all that returns from whence it came in this superbly woven story, which is magnificently embroidered by Sophie Bass’s illustrations of dragons, wild and domesticated creatures, and fantastical plants – a veritable feast for the eyes executed in a kaleidoscope of colours.