If you want to know what Black men think, head to the barbershop, says Plymouth writer’s book

Black barbershops are communities. They’re places where a form of therapy happens, where new music trends take off, where social justice movements take root, where disagreements get ironed out. Also, hair gets cut.

Plymouth educator Keenan Jones wanted to make sure all of those things come through in his debut picture book, “Saturday Morning at the ‘Shop,” which is out next Tuesday. The unnamed protagonist (let’s call him Keenan, since that’s who he is) gets dropped off at a barbershop by his mom. The boy — who appears to be of middle-school age — spends the day there, communing with barbers and customers in small interactions that add up to something big: learning to be a man.

Jones began thinking about the importance of his barbershop, the Chiseler Barber Shop in Brooklyn Park, when he couldn’t go there during the COVID-19 pandemic. He had been wanting to write a book for kids for years but it was the pandemic, and the murder of George Floyd, that helped him settle on a theme.

“I’m coming up with ideas: Is it about social justice? Is it a basketball story? And the barbershops were shut down, so, no one could go to the barbershop, where we talked about these things,” said Jones. “So I’m hairy and all of that. Then, the shops opened back up and I went in and was like, ‘Wow. I missed this feeling, this community with other Black men and boys in fellowship.’ I sat in a chair and [the book] came to me right there in that chair.”

Jones thinks the writing came together so quickly because he’s been living the story for four decades. The book’s simple language has a musical quality, using repetition to create a rhythm that Jones says comes from growing up a fan of the music that defined his youth in the ‘80s and ‘90s: “As I’m finding my voice, we call it ‘lyrical language,’ which is almost a mashup, like spoken word in a sense. I’m using a lot of figurative language, but it comes out that way because I’m a child of hip-hop.”

In “Saturday Morning,” the boy does get his hair cut but he also takes in photos of heroes such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali, listens to music created by men who drop in on the shop, plays with friends, checks out the threads of other visitors, watches sports on TV and learns some new jokes — all at a shop called Charlie’s.

“The barbershop, some call it the Black man’s sanctuary,” said Jones, 41, who teaches middle-school English at Wayzata Central. “A lot of barbershops are starting to partner with mental health providers. They are being trained to almost be mental health providers — not technically, of course, but getting some skills they can use.”

One important element of the barbershop, and “Saturday Morning at the ‘Shop,” is that Charlie’s is a place where multiple generations gather.

“If I had a son, he would go to the barbershop with me,” said Jones (he and his wife have three daughters). “He’d start not only getting his hair cut but also getting into community with other Black boys and men, the same way my daughters go to the Black beauty shop. They go in to be around Black women and learn how to move as a Black woman.”

Styles may have changed since Jones was a kid with a Bobby Brown box cut but his book is set in the present because the basics stay the same in barbershops, which remain “safe spaces” for the exchange of ideas.

“The elders speak; the young ‘uns listen. Even when I was a teenager, if there was a popular basketball coach and he sits in a chair, telling a story about the state of athletes, I’m learning because I’m an athlete, too. I’m learning as he’s speaking,” said Jones, who played basketball for University of Minnesota Duluth until a back injury ended his career.

Ever since he was a spelling bee-winning kid in the Chicago area, Jones has tinkered with writing but his career was jump-started by a Mirrors & Windows fellowship (for Indigenous writers and writers of color) at the Loft Literary Center. That gave him some tools he needed to work toward publishing “Saturday Morning at the ‘Shop,” which landed at Simon & Schuster imprint Beach Lane Books after a mini-bidding war in 2022.

Jones is working on another picture book about Black community and still heading in to Chiseler, where he and owner John Vinson have settled on a style for Jones’ hair, a reminder that even though community is an important part of barbershops, so is cutting hair.

“Oh, man. At one point in time, my father didn’t want to spend the money. Sometimes, he would say, ‘I’m going to give you a haircut,’” recalled Jones. “I don’t know if I want to say this but I guess I’m going to say this: When I grew up you would get roasted at school if you had a bad cut. Someone would start talking about your hairline and stuff. It was bad.”

Speaking of critics, one of the most important readers of “Saturday Morning at the ‘Shop” is Vinson, who looks a lot like the main barber in the book even though illustrator Ken Daley never met him.

Vinson has the book that began taking shape in his barber chair. And, although he’s generally not a big reader, Vinson said, “It is a very good book.”

Saturday Morning at the ‘Shop

By: Keenan Jones, illustrated by Ken Daley.

Publisher: Beach Lane, 32 pages, $18.99.

Events: 11 a.m. Jan. 11, Strive Bookstore, 901 Nicollet Mall, Mpls., noon-3 p.m. Jan. 25, Barnes & Noble Ridgehaven Mall, 13131 Ridgedale Drive, Minnetonka.