Description An extraordinary, exquisitely written memoir (of sorts) that looks at race--in a fearless, penetrating, honest, true way--in twelve telltale, connected, deeply personal essays that explore, up-close, the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities of growing up Black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, of getting a Ph D from Yale, of marrying a white man from the North, of adopting two babies from Ethiopia, of teaching at a white college and living in America\'s New England today.
She writes in Black Is the Body how each of the essays goes beyond a narrative of Black innocence and white guilt, how each is anchored in a mystery, and how e.
There was no connection between us, yet we were suddenly and irreparably bound by a knife, an attachment that cost us both: him, his freedom; me, my wholeness." Bernard explores how that bizarre act of violence set her free and unleashed the storyteller in her ("The equation of writing and regeneration is fundamental to Black American experience"). "I was not stabbed because I was black," she writes (the attacker was white), "but I have always viewed the violence I survived as a metaphor for the violent encounter that has generally characterized American race relations.
Bernard writes how, when she was a graduate student at Yale, she walked into a coffee shop and, along with six other people, was randomly attacked by a stranger with a knife ("I remember making the decision not to let the oddness of this stranger bother me").
Black is the body of the Stories I tell." And the storytelling, and the mystery of Bernard\'s storytelling, of getting to the truth, begins with a stabbing in a New England college town. "Brown is the body I was born into. "I am black--and brown, too," writes Emily Bernard.
from the acclaimed editor of Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten ("A major contribution," Henry Louis Gates; "Magnificent," Washington Post).
Description An extraordinary, exquisitely written memoir (of sorts) that looks at race--in a fearless, penetrating, honest, true way--in twelve telltale, connected, deeply personal essays that explore, up-close, the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities of growing up Black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, of getting a Ph D from Yale, of marrying a white man from the North, of adopting two babies from Ethiopia, of teaching at a white college and living in America\'s New England today
