Journal 6- Lilyan Eldadah

Dr. Hepcat

Dr. Hepcat was an African American expert on “jive talk”. He is now Reverend A. L. Durst a minister, however, he used to be Dr. Hepcat. He started his career by announcing at Negro baseball games in his jive talk. He then went on to be a Negro radio station. The jive talk that Dr. Hepcat communicated with was mainly an African American language and made him especially popular with them. A theme that was in the story was being proud of your culture. Dr. Hepcat became an expert on this jive talk for Africans, he was proud to be representing his culture so well.

One thing that I will take away from Holding On is to live life the way I want to be living life. Another thing that I will take away from Holding On is to be who I want to be, regardless of what the community will think. Yes, I know that there may be some limitations from both of those ideas, but I believe to an extent that everyone can be the person they want to be, doing what he/she wants to be doing. Throughout the book, although some of the people in the profiles were judged from the outside community, they held onto what and how they wanted to be living their life, and prevailed without any regrets. For instance the women collecting bells and the man herding sheep, could be seen by the community as boring and strange but if you look more into their lives, like the authors did, you can see that it is actually really fascinating! I am glad we got to read this interesting book, and experience a new writing techniques.