Dream and fracture -- The definitions of siddity -- What is best -- Permission to be excused -- Jingle bells, damnit -- Deep country -- Creatures in the garden -- Happy birthday -- Pecan trees and various miscellanea -- An altered story -- Brother-man magic -- We sing your praises high -- Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, goddamnit -- In this spot -- Feminism, womanism, or whatever -- This bitter earth -- You made me love you -- Don't let me lose this dream -- A change is gonna come -- Do right woman, do right man -- The debate -- Founder's Day -- The dirty thirty -- Reunion -- I'm hungry -- All extraordinary human beings -- Nguzo Saba -- For you to love -- The night I fell in love -- Till my baby comes home -- My sensitivity gets in the way -- A house is not a home -- The other side of the world -- Keeping the tune -- Whatever gets you over -- I need my own car -- Shower and pray -- You can be proud -- Which negroes do you know? -- Mammies, or, How they show out in Harlem -- Umoja, youngblood -- The peculiar institution -- Plural first person -- The Thrilla in Manila -- Witness my hand -- My Black female time -- Who remembers this? -- Any more white folks -- Mama's Bible -- Like Agatha Christie -- Not hasty -- Every strength -- The voices of children. Family tree -- Song. Song. Song. Song. Song. Song. Song. Song.
"The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called 'double Consciousness,' a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois's words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans-the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers-Ailey carries Du Bois's Problem on her shoulders. Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother's family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that's made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women-her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries-that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead. To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family's past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors-Indigenous, Black, and white-in the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story-and the song-of America itself." --book jacket.
Adult Brodart.
006294293X 9780062942937
bl2021018003
African American families--Georgia--Fiction. African American women--Fiction. African Americans--Genealogy--Fiction. African Americans--Race identity--Fiction. Historical fiction. Identity (Psychology)--Fiction.