BLACK ICE

by Lorene Cary ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 25, 1991

A thoughtful coming-of-age memoir by a young black woman admitted on scholarship in the 70's to the wealthy, elite, and overwhelmingly white world of St. Paul's School in New Hampshire. Cary's white teachers and schoolmates were, in general, strenuously liberal, so she experienced only a few racial insults, mostly ones born of naivetÉ or insensitivity (""I always kind of wondered if, like, black guys and white guys were, like different,"" one girl, giggling, confided). This lack of any overt prejudice to react against turned Cary and the other black students at St. Paul's in on their own self-doubt and made them act out in ways that perplexed them (Cary pilfered change and jewelry from schoolmates' rooms; another student was caught shoplifting). The central metaphor here lies in a tale told by Cary's West Indian great-grandfather, about an island woman who nightly left her husband's bed to slide out of her skin, leaving it draped over a chair, and fly around in the darkness, returning to her skin at dawn. One night her husband salted the skin, and when his wife tried to slip back into it, it burned her. Cary's quest in this book is for a way to fly without betraying or being betrayed by her skin. She is bearing a burdensome freight: not only her own ambitions but the expectations of her family and her sense of obligation ""to play my part in that mammoth enterprise--the integration, the moral transformation, no less, of America."" The day-to-day account of boarding-school life is overly detailed, but an earthy humor, some fine lyrical writing, and the insights Cary offers into what it is like to be bright, black, and female in today's America amply reward the reader's perseverance.

Pub Date: March 25, 1991

ISBN: 0679737456

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1991

Categories: NONFICTION