KINKY GAZPACHO

Thin-on-ideas memoir by an African-American journalist who grew up in Milwaukee but discovered her authentic black self through her experiences in Spain.

An upper-middle-class suburban Midwesterner, Tharps was accused in school of “talking White” and not “acting like a real Black person was supposed to.” Though she was popular and made friends easily, she was keenly aware of slurs and latent prejudice. By seventh grade, Tharps was sure Spain was going to be her salvation. “I wasn’t just studying Spanish because I had to learn a language,” she writes. “I wanted access into another world when this one got to be too much.” Yet when she followed her sister into American Field Service (AFS), an exchange program that allowed her to spend a summer abroad, she opted to explore her African roots in Casablanca. (Apparently no one told her Moroccans are Arabs.) Elitist Smith College was another odd choice for finding her “Blacker side”; ignored at the first meeting of the Black Students’ Alliance, she left in tears. Resolved to become a “multiculturalist,” Tharps finally got to Spain for her junior year abroad in Salamanca, where she was referred to as la morena and received numerous marriage proposals. After a series of goofy, unsuitable Spanish boyfriends, she met Manuel in a German class; he visited her in Milwaukee, and they later got married. Tharps embarked on a career as a journalist and moved to New York; she and Manuel had two sons. Her memoir records moments of harassment while traveling into Spain wearing dreadlocks (“a big black moving target”) and her troubling visit to Manuel’s birthplace, Cádiz, which in the days of the Atlantic trade had been a transfer point for slaves, some of whom remained in bondage in Andalusia. Though Tharps comes to recognize how her own cultural identity (“Kinky”) intersects with the Spanish (“Gazpacho”), the journey she chronicles isn’t exactly heavy on intellectual insights.

A giddily conversational account of finding racial peace within.