Nathaniel Talking was published by Black Butterfly Children’s Books in 1988, with illustrations by Jan Spivey Gilchrist, and won the Coretta Scott King Award for illustration. The collection gives voice to nine-year-old Nathaniel B. Free, who tells us about his life in a series of poems that move between rap, twelve-bar blues, and free verse — each poem a window into his world of family, friends, school, and the grief he carries for his recently dead mother.
The formal range is remarkable for a children’s book. “Nathaniel’s Rap” opens the collection with a bouncing, self-confident rhythm that immediately establishes the character’s voice. The blues poems — “My Daddy” and “Watching the World Go By” — use the twelve-bar structure authentically, not as pastiche but as a living form. The free verse poems handle more complex emotions: grief, memory, the feeling of being connected to ancestors one has never met.
Greenfield’s innovation was to take Black musical forms seriously as poetic structures for children — not as entertainment or decoration but as the authentic vessels of emotional expression. Nathaniel’s voice is utterly convincing: a real child’s voice, with a real child’s mixture of bravado and vulnerability, humor and sadness. The book demonstrated that children’s poetry could be formally ambitious without sacrificing accessibility.
Collecting Nathaniel Talking
First edition (Black Butterfly Children’s Books, New York, 1988): Hardcover with dust jacket, illustrations by Jan Spivey Gilchrist. Coretta Scott King Award winner.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$75
- Later printings: $5–$15