This book is several different books overlapped together, which the author tells us in the opening pages. It’s partly a memoir, telling the story of Farah Jasmine Griffin growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with parents heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement, especially the elements of the movement that intersect with radical writers and thinkers (even though as we are told they were a little too old to be involved in the Black Panthers, just as a way of placing them) and accounting for the different ways the Civil Rights movement shifted after 1968. This positioning helps us understand about the kinds of writing she was exposed to as a young person (Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, etc.)
The memoir piece here circulates out from the death of her father, who died from a brain aneurism. The author cannot separate his death from the way he was treated by Philadelphia police when they called for help at their home, laughed at and chided as drunk, even though he was suffering. The book is also a literacy memoir, focusing especially on the author’s becoming more and more aware of the books and writers around her. The book is also a syllabus and an exercise in close-reading. Griffin takes significant literary themes like liberation, death, love, home, and other big topics and explores them through the writing of Black writers from many different eras of American literature. Rather than trying to tell a complete, in order story of Black American literature (an impossible and maybe not coherent task), she looks for connections among time periods. One place this method really shines is in her reading of Toni Morrison’s Sula, which is published early in her career and takes place in the early decades of the 20th century, as offers an element of hopefulness and then comparing it to Morrison’s 1988 novel Beloved, which takes place right after the Civil War, and offers little hope. The difference in publication order and in setting challenge a coherent and fully progressive reading of Black history through a false sense of “things always getting better over time”.
The book offers a solid reading list for new readers as well as a model for reading closely and for readers already experience in most or all of these text, there’s maybe motivation to revisit them with some new ideas, or just as reminders.
