Episodes
When a Colored Girl Speaks
Southern-born between the ellipses of segregation and desegregation, I journeyed colored, black, and white Americas, ultimately landing as an Ivy League-trained university professor burdened with racial silences of my own. It was a near hypertensive crisis that led me to gather up who I was and what I have become to reclaim the colored girl within.
Going Home to Where I Been
I revisit what was, but I do not long for an American past or seek the romanticisms of a segregated ethnic enclave. I go home to places where I been for the same reasons all those people left my Aunt Fannie to be guardian of so many memories—to know I am, and we were.
The Rich Davises
A generation beyond enslavement and into the twentieth century, my family sought freedom’s promise, something more than the American Dream. Gathered are fragments of stories told on the way of saying something else---stories of nation, family, and the tenaciousness of will.