Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine(HC)

Emily Bernard

In these twelve deeply personal connected essays, Bernard details her experiences growing up black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop, marrying a white man from the North and bringing him home to her family, adopting two children from Ethiopia, and living and teaching in a primarily white New England college town. Each of these essays sets out to discover a new way of talking about race and of telling the truth as the author has lived it. “Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but it’s significance as an experience emerges sometimes randomly and unpredictably.... [R]ace is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book.”

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