Black is the Body Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine

"An extraordinary exquisitely written memoir (of sorts) that looks at race in a fearless, penetrating, honest, true way. ... 'I am black-and brown, too, ' writes Emily Bernard. 'Brown is the body I was born into. Black is the body of the stories I tell.' These twelve telltale, connected, deeply personal essays 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 PhD 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 New England today. The storytelling, and the mystery of Bernard's storytelling, of getting to the truth, begins with a stabbing in a New England college town. 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 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. ... 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'). Each essay goes beyond a narrative of black innocence and white guilt; each is anchored in a mystery; each sets out to discover a new way of telling the truth as Bernard has lived it. And what most interests Bernard is looking at 'blackness at its borders, where it meets whiteness, in fear and hope, in anguish and love'"--Back cover.