In the era of legal segregation, a “little colored” girl lives in three worlds: the restrictive Jim Crow world, her loving family and community world and the wide world of books she discovers, thanks to the integrated library her town built in the early nineteen sixties and the leadership of librarian Mrs. Margaret Reid Isbill. In 1961 an amendment to the American Library Association Bill of Rights essentially opened public library doors to everyone regardless of race, creed or national origin. “Colored girl” takes the reader to her worlds through historical references, poetry and colorful illustrations.
This is the rollicking, never-before-published memoir of a fascinating African American woman with an uncanny knack for being in the right place in the most interesting times. Actress, dancer, model, literary critic, psychologist, and free-spirited provocateur, Anita Reynolds was, as her Parisian friends nicknamed her, an American Cocktail.
A vibrant picture book featuring an irrepressible new character—perfect for fans of The Dot and Beautiful Oops!—from acclaimed illustrator Julia Denos. In a place where color ran wild, there lived a girl who was wilder still. Her name was Swatch, and color was her passion. From brave green to in-between gray to rumble-tumble pink . . . Swatch wanted to collect them all. But colors don’t always like to be tamed. . . . This is an exuberant celebration of all the beauty and color that make up our lives.
The acclaimed author of Their Eyes Were Watching God relates her experiences as an African American woman in early-twentieth-century America. In this autobiographical essay, author Zora Neale Hurston recounts episodes from her childhood in different communities in Florida: Eatonville and Jacksonville. She reflects on what those experiences showed her about race, identity, and feeling different. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” was originally published in 1928 in the magazine The World Tomorrow.
This is the story of Mick Scott, some of which is based on the author's Vietnam wartime experiences as an Air Force correspondent for Armed Forces Radio. In the fictionalized version of events, on his way to Vietnam, Scott is ordered to report to US Intelligence in San Francisco where he is recruited for a special assignment. It entails finding a Saigon street kid who is the long-lost son of a top North Vietnamese Communist official; perhaps Ho Chi Minh himself. Once found, intelligence hopes to use the kid as a pawn in peace negotiations. Meanwhile, Scott travels throughout Vietnam as a reporter, which provides a vehicle to impart what is happening in arguably the most pivotal year of the war; 1967-68, with the Tet Offensive as the catalytic episode. As the story progresses, he crosses paths with a double agent, and the infamous Panther Lady, who is riding around Saigon on a motorbike gunning down GIs. Along with them, the kid intelligence wants him to find, and his drinking buddy Bobby, Scott becomes entangled in a sticky web of intrigue and deceit.
Groundbreaking and heartbreaking, this triumphant novel by two of America's most acclaimed storytellers follows a family of women from enslavement to the dawn of the twenty-first century. From Reconstruction to both world wars, from the Harlem Renaissance to Vietnam, from spirituals and arias to torch songs and the blues, Some Sing, Some Cry brings to life the monumental story of one American family's journey from slavery into freedom, from country into city, from the past to the future, bright and blazing ahead. Real-life sisters, Ntozake Shange, award-winning author of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Ifa Bayeza, award-winning playwright of The Ballad of Emmett Till, achieve nothing less than a modern classic in this story of seven generations of women, and the men and music in their lives. Opening dramatically at a sprawling plantation just off the South Carolina coast, recently emancipated slave Bette Mayfield quickly says her goodbyes before fleeing for Charleston with her granddaughter, Eudora, in tow. She and Eudora carve out lives for themselves in the bustling port city as seamstress and fortune-teller. Eudora marries, the Mayfield lines grows and becomes an incredibly strong, musically gifted family, a family that is led, protected, and inspired by its women. Some Sing, Some Cry chronicles their astonishing passage through the watershed events of American history.
Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times raved: "Peter May is a writer I'd follow to the ends of the earth." Now Peter May takes us to a small island off the coast of Québec with an emotionally charged new mystery. When a murder rocks the isolated community of Entry Island, insomniac homicide detective Sime Mackenzie boards a light aircraft at St. Hubert airfield bound for the small, scattered chain of Madeline Islands, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, as part of an eight-officer investigation team from Montréal. Only two kilometers wide and three long, Entry Island is home to a population of just more than 100 inhabitants, the wealthiest of whom has just been discovered murdered in his home. Covered in her husband's blood, the dead man's melancholy wife spins a tale for the police about a masked intruder armed with a knife. The investigation appears to be little more than a formality--the evidence points to a crime of passion, implicating the wife. But Sime is electrified by the widow during his interview, convinced that he has met her before, even though this is clearly impossible. Haunted by this strange certainty, Sime's insomnia is punctuated by vivid, hallucinatory dreams of a distant past on a Scottish island 3,000 miles away, dreams in which he and the widow play leading roles. Sime's conviction soon becomes an obsession. And despite mounting evidence of the woman's guilt, he finds himself convinced of her innocence, leading to a conflict between the professional duty he must fulfill and the personal destiny he is increasingly sure awaits him.
