From Publishers Weekly
Using his poet's eye for detail and his novelist's ear for speech, Major (who was shortlisted for a 1999 National Book Award for Configurations) mutes his voice to create his mother's memoir. With authentic plainness, Inez who is light, not white relates her journey to self-fulfillment through a world of demented racial complexity. In a country where a white woman could give birth to a black child but a black woman could not give birth to a white child, Inez lives a secret life as a white woman. Issues of race (as she deals with the employment opportunities available to her only as a white woman) and issues of gender (as Inez deals with an abusive husband) occupy, by virtue of their social significance, the core of this skillfully written book. The rich details of growing up (school, games, friends, church) and of family life (courting, marriage, babies, dying) give Major's book particular vitality. Captured through the vision of one woman, interchangeably black or white in a time and place where she could not be both, Inez's memoir moves from plantation to segregation to migration. As one generation's smallpox becomes another's measles, as Aunt Saffrey's fancy horse-drawn buggy is outmoded by Pa's new Chevrolet, as Inez moves from tiny Dublinville to the big city of Atlanta, a whole history of African-American life unfolds. Women readers will find Inez's resilience and perseverance inspirational.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Booklist
Poet and novelist Major explores the significance of race by recounting the life of his mother, a woman light enough to pass for white. Inez was born in Georgia, the daughter of a black woman and a wealthy white man. Because she looked white, Inez spent her life reacting to the color biases then prevalent in the South: whites assumed she was white and treated her accordingly; some blacks who knew her to be black were distant and resentful. Writing in his mother's voice, Major recalls her eventual move to Chicago to escape an abusive marriage. With her children living in Georgia with their grandmother, Inez is tempted by a friend in a similar situation to pass for white and improve her job prospects. By the 1960s, reunited with her children and living as a black woman, Inez is confronted with racial animus again when the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. makes white skin a liability in her neighborhood. This is a compelling look at the politics of skin color in the U.S. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
