A revelatory exploration of the meaning of blackness.
A family’s story reflects African Americans’ struggle for survival.
Driven by a need to understand her own identity, cultural critic Jerkins mounted an investigation into her family’s tangled history, recounting in this candid memoir the surprising discoveries that emerged from her emotional journey. Like many African Americans, her ancestors fled the South—and oppression from the Ku Klux Klan and police—some settling in the Northeast, others in California, disrupting their ties to their cultural and spiritual heritage. “No one spoke about the past—the goal was to move forward and never look back,” she writes.” This silence, though, frustrated Jerkins, leading to a search “to excavate the connective tissue that complicates but unites us as a people, and to piece together the story of how I came to be by going back and looking beyond myself.” Traveling to Georgia, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Los Angeles, she traced her lineage, seeking answers to questions that had bothered her throughout her life: Why, for example, was she taught to be afraid of water? Why did her family believe in conjuring, spells, and hoodoo? And, critical to her sense of self, why was she so light skinned, a trait that raised others’ curiosity, as if a child with lighter skin than her parents “was an aberration in the natural order of things.” Everything she learned underscored the power of white supremacy in the U.S. She found out that although the Jerkins family grew up near water, it was not necessarily a conduit to freedom but, more ominously, a place where blacks were drowned. On the lush resort island of Hilton Head, she realized that “beautiful landscapes masked black carnage.” From a historian, she was dismayed to learn the prevalence of black slave owners: “In 1830, in twenty-four states…there were 3,775 black owners of 12,760 slaves.” Although her search sometimes proved unsettling, in the end, Jerkins was able to “tease out the interwoven threads of who I am as a black woman.”
A revelatory exploration of the meaning of blackness.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-287304-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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