By Eisa Ulen

When my son was only two days old, Cousin Jimmy joined the many family and friends who came to visit him in the hospital. Jimmy danced down the corridor, smiling, and sat to hold the baby, to marvel over his little fingers and tiny toes.

Jimmy is an actor, and my husband, Ralph, is a filmmaker, so it was quite natural to me that these two artists would freestyle a rhyme over the baby’s head. They sang out a way to honor our son, whom my husband and I named Ralph Everett Hooper Richardson III.

“They call me Hoop in the ‘hood,” Ralph and Jimmy rapped, loud enough for anyone pushing a mobile bassinet through the halls outside my hospital room to hear. “They call me Ralph in the house.”

I loved it.

Looking back, I realize they freestyled their way right into a legacy of African-centered celebrations, joyous praisesongs that most certainly stretch through our joined family line. Over the generations, our people danced, soul-clapped, and sang a Welcome Life whenever a new baby came into this world. With a talking drum, a whirl of village dust stirred by Black dancing feet, a softly sung lullaby, Africans made music to recognize the miracle of birth. With a banjo or fiddle, a whirl of plantation dust, a field shout, African Americans did the same precious thing. And what better place than New York City to add Hip Hop, our generation’s contribution to the continuum of black movement art and black sound?

I look forward to playing the video of that day for my growing son to see and understand. As he coos and oohs his way through pre-verbal communication with us, Hoop engages and responds to the diverse people who surround him.

We speak Standard English to him all day long, and he, in his 3-month-old way, talks back. I read him a story every day, and look forward to hearing his first words, am bracing for Da Da before Mamma, because D is easier to form than M. When he gets fussy, I sing the A,B,C song, and it calms him just enough for me to finish changing his diaper before burping or nursing him back to real contentment.

But, with all this focus on standard language acquisition, I will never deny my child the wealth of black language styles that is his inheritance.

When I was a child, I always knew when my parents were on a business call and when they were just chatting (“jiving” back then) with friends. They code-switched, flipped the script, depending on their relationship with the person on the other end. They inherited this code-switching ability from their parents. Hoop’s great-grandmother earned a Master’s in education and was a member of just about every black social organization in Philadelphia. His great-grandfather worked for the United Nations. His other great-grandmother owned and operated the business her father established in the early 1900s, when his wife, Hoop’s great great-grandmother, became the first black woman to teach in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, schools.

My Pop Pop, Hoop’s great-grandfather, was a Capital Hill correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier during the golden age of the black press. As another cousin likes to say, “We an educated people.”

And that’s not a typo.

There is no anxiety about language in our family. We know the standard form. Indeed, my grandmothers insisted on correct grammar, and we all speak it. Well. But they also knew how to have fun, to relax in themselves, in the bosom of blackness, and be.

In the spirit of their excellence, there will be no TV for Hoop until after age 2, so we play much music for our son. He hears blues, jazz, alternative, pop, soul, funk, rock, and disco, too. What would these musical traditions be (and I mean be) without black folk, without black folk’s language? And, of course, he hears Hip Hop. Because we want our Fort Greene boy to know that when he hears the call, “Where Brooklyn At? Where Brooklyn At?” he should let those basslines pump his heart and respond, “Hoop’s in the ‘hood! Ralph’s in the house!”

The rhyme he heard the first couple days of his life tickled me right in that spot where I love black word. My husband and dear cousin made merry by twisting standard language around their tongues and working out a fresh way to speak my baby’s name. Black Folk Speak, Black English, as my fellow academics often call it, distinguishes and celebrates our history, our community, our people. That day in the maternity ward, the language of our people was employed in a most significant way: It distinguished and celebrated my son.

Eisa Ulen Richardson, a writer working and living in Brooklyn, N.Y., is the author of Crystelle Mourning

www.EisaUlen.com