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That night Dave feels annoyed at having to pay back Mr. Hawkins for the next two years, and even more annoyed with the fact that people view him as a child more now than ever before. He decides to leave his house and retrieve the gun in which he had buried, not thrown in a river like he claimed. He forces himself to fi...
"Girl" is a short story written by Jamaica Kincaid that was included in "At the Bottom of the River" (1983). It appeared in the June 26, 1978 issue of "The New Yorker".
The story is a to-do list and a how-to-do list containing one sentence of a 650 word dialogue. It features what the girl hears from her mother. The story is mostly told in the second person. The girl hears her mother's instructions and the behavior her mother is trying to instill in her. It is apparent that the mother ...
During the story, her mother's voice sounds somewhat condescending and critical when speaking, suggesting that the girl is likely to become a "slut." For example, in the short story, the mother states, "on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming." Throughout the piece the mothe...
Like most of Kincaid's piece of writing, "Girl" is based on her own relationship between her and her mother while growing up. Jamaica Kincaid has also revealed in interviews that the setting of this short story takes place in Antigua.
The theme for "Girl" is mother-daughter dispute. In this story, the mother goes on and on teaching the daughter how to be the perfect woman in society. As the story goes on, the mother’s directions get more demanding.
Difficult Women is a 2017 short story collection by Roxane Gay.
In "Vogue", Julia Fesenthal characterized "Difficult Women" as "a misogynist's taxonomy of the opposite sex. On the narrator's short list: loose women, frigid women, crazy women, mothers, and, finally, dead girls," depicted in stories "woven through with strands of magical realism."
Gay has described being challenged by publishers in the development of the collection owing to the difficult material the book covers. Speaking at the "Los Angeles Times" Festival of Books, Gay recounted, "Editors said, 'we love ["Difficult Women"] but it makes me want to kill myself."
Grove Press published the 272-page collection on January 3, 2017.
"Difficult Women" received favorable reviews from critics. Reviewing the collection in "The Washington Post", Megan Mayhew Bergman said Gay's "real gift to readers in "Difficult Women" is her ability to marry her well-known intellectual concerns with good storytelling." In "USA Today", Jaleesa M. Jones gave "Difficult ...
Life Is Not a Fairy Tale is a book describing the life of "American Idol" (season 3) winner Fantasia Barrino, and her rise to national prominence. The book later became a television movie shown on Lifetime.
"Life Is Not a Fairy Tale" by Fantasia.
In her autobiography "Life Is Not a Fairy Tale", a "New York Times" bestseller, Fantasia tells of her rise from high-school dropout to music star.
Life Is Not A Fairy Tale: The Fantasia Barrino Story is a 2006 American biographical film directed by Debbie Allen, loosely based on the life of American singer Fantasia Barrino. The film was adapted from the book "Life Is Not A Fairy Tale" written by Fantasia.
In this Lifetime original movie, director Debbie Allen gives viewers a first hand look at the struggles Fantasia faced before/during her rise to fame. The movie begins with Fantasia's humble beginnings, growing up in a close knit God-fearing family that faced its own personal demons of struggling with their dreams. Fan...
The movie premiered on Saturday, August 19, 2006 at 9:00 PM EST. It was Lifetime's second most watched movie in its 22-year history, with more than nineteen million viewers tuning in during the August 19–20 weekend. The movie was ranked the number one basic cable movie premiere in 2006 among women ages 18–49. Weekend o...
In 2007, the movie and its actors including Fantasia, Loretta Devine and Kadeem Hardison were nominated for 4 NAACP Image Awards. Kadeem Hardison won his award. It was also nominated for a 2007 Teen Choice Award for Choice TV: Movie.
Although a soundtrack was never released for the film, many songs were performed throughout the film. The following track listing are the songs that are performed in order throughout the film.
Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism by Patricia Hill Collins is a work of critical theory that discusses the way that race, class and gender intersect to affect the lives of African American men and women in many different ways, but with similar results. The book explores the way that ne...
"Black Sexual Politics" also examines the way a narrow sexual politics based on American ideas/ideals of masculinity, femininity and the appropriate expression of sexuality work to repress gay and hetero, male and female. Collins' work also proposes a liberatory politics for black Americans, centered on honest dialogue...
The book starts from the premise that in order to achieve a more progressive black political agenda, African Americans need to look critically at the way race, class and gender intersect in their lives to create different responses. Looking at the black community as a monolith may prevent us from seeing that African Am...
In "Black Sexual Politics", Hill Collins proposes several ideas for black liberation, though the book is focused on getting individuals to find creative ways to challenge racism, sexism and homophobia as it manifests itself in their own communities. One idea that Hill Collins purports is that African Americans need to ...
Hill Collins also argues that it is critical for African Americans to define new visions of success that resist traditional Western/American views. She argues that equating masculinity with wealth and femininity with submissiveness and financial dependence is harmful to all groups, but especially for African Americans,...
Hill Collins argues that there needs to be a culture of honesty in the black community, whereby black persons can express their ideas and identities in a whole way. If we do not create the space for black people to express their sexual perspectives freely, then we create a space where the silence and deceptiveness that...
In "Black Sexual Politics" Collins expresses the view that the black community will not reach its progressive political agenda, nor will it be able to successfully address social issues such as the HIV/AIDS crisis affecting the black community, if it does not allow marginalized voices like women and LGBT persons to exp...
She argues that a narrow black sexual politics that places extreme value on limiting views of the role of the male and the role of the female, and also on the role of appropriate and socially acceptable sexual behavior works to deny LGBT people their agency, and prevents honest dialogue about different types of sexual ...
November Blues is a young adult novel by Sharon M. Draper, first published in 2007. It's the second novel of the Jericho Trilogy, the sequel to "The Battle of Jericho". The book tackles and discusses the issue of teen pregnancy, as well as making the readers aware that actions always have consequences and that taking r...
November Nelson lost her boyfriend, Josh Prescott, when a pledge stunt went horribly wrong. After his death, November has to deal with the heartache of losing him forever. Also, November realizes that she is pregnant with Josh's child. November faces the pressures of telling her family and friends that she is pregnant ...
The book grew out of "Conditions" magazine's November 1979 issue, "Conditions 5: the Black Women's Issue", originally edited by Barbara Smith and Lorraine Bethel. "Conditions 5" was "the first widely distributed collection of Black feminist writing in the U.S." The anthology was first published in 1983 by , and was rei...
Black feminism stems from the idea that women's experiences are intersectional and a reflection of race, sexism, gender oppression, and class. Within the anthology, black women authors take many different approaches to address the issues that arise from their identities and express their support for black feminist orga...
Sexuality is another topic brought up in many of the pieces throughout "Home Girls". Black women share their discoveries as well as stories about what it means to be a part of the LGBTQ+ community and how that has shaped them. In the preface, Smith acknowledges black lesbians and their activity within The Ad Hoc Commit...
The struggle black women face with sexual orientation is suggested in many of the contributor's pieces. Things such as physical appearance, clothes, mannerisms, and makeup affected the way these women were perceived and sexualized throughout their lives. In"Home Girls" many of the women reveal their personal stories an...
In relation to sexual orientation many of the writings in "Home Girls" contain personal stories about their LBGT experiences and reactions from community members and reactions from the LGBT community. Cheryl Clarke is one of the black feministolor Pre contributors to addresses homophobia within the black community. In ...
Together, the topics presented in this anthology exemplify intersectionality, the idea that multiple oppressions can be suffered together and mold a person's idea of their oppression. A feminist goal is to expand its diversity and inclusiveness. In order to achieve this goal, many activists suggest becoming more knowle...
Critical reception for "Home Girls" has been mostly positive. One reviewer for the Black American Literature Forum praises the book for its sense of unity and black feminist perspective. As the article states: "While many of the book's poems strike me as self-indulgent and forced, the majority of the selections are bot...
Confessions of a Video Vixen is a memoir written by Karrine Steffans which details the first 25 years of her life. Part tell-all covering her sexual liaisons with music industry personalities and professional athletes, and part cautionary tale about the dangers of the otherwise romanticized hip-hop music industry, it c...
"Confessions of a Video Vixen" recounts Steffans' life from her troubled girlhood living in poverty in St. Thomas, through abuse, drugs, rape and living as a teenage runaway who turns to stripping and hip hop modeling to support herself and, later, her young son.
Originally published in 2005 by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, the book was immediately a "New York Times" bestseller. (The 2006 paperback edition includes bonus material, and also made the NYT bestseller list.) The book created a stir when it went on sale because of Steffans' allegations of abuse at ...
Coming of Age in Mississippi is a 1968 memoir by Anne Moody about growing up in rural Mississippi in the mid-20th century as an African-American woman. The book covers Moody's life from childhood through her mid twenties, including her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement beginning when she was a student at the his...
"Coming of Age in Mississippi" is divided into four sections: "Childhood", "High School", "College", and "The Movement".
Moody begins her story on the plantation where she lives with her mother, Toosweet, and her father, Diddly, both sharecroppers, and her younger sister, Adline.
Later, Moody's mother gives birth to her third child, Jr. While Toosweet is pregnant with Jr., her father begins an affair with another woman from the plantation. Shortly after Jr.’s birth, her parents separate.
Moody moves with her mother and younger siblings to town to live with her great aunt and begins grade school. Moody's curiosity about race is sparked when her questions about her two uncles, who appear white, go unanswered. Moody's mother begins a relationship with a man named Raymond, whom she eventually marries and h...
At nine years old, Moody begins her first job sweeping a porch, earning seventy-five cents a week and two gallons of milk. She experiences her first real competition with Raymond’s sister Darlene; they're the same age and in the same class, constantly competing against one another whenever possible.
Though Moody enjoys attending Centreville church, which Raymond's family belongs to, she is tricked into joining her mother's church: Mt. Pleasant. She resents her mother for some time after that.
Once the family farm falls through, Moody takes on more responsibility to help support the family. When asked to obtain a copy of her birth certificate for graduation, her birth certificate shows up as Annie Mae. When Toosweet requests to have it changed, she is told there would be a fee; Moody asks if she can keep Ann...
Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects is a poetry collection written by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in 1854. Her non-fiction collection of poems and essays consists of a brief preface followed by a collection of poems and three short writings. "Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects" sold approximately 12,000 copies in its first f...
"Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects" contains 18 poems. Harper’s poetry is noted for its simple rhythm, biblical imagery, and storytelling style of oral tradition. The themes present in "Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects" focus on Christianity, slavery, and women.
Christianity became widespread to African Americans during the transatlantic slave trade. Before coming to America, African religious beliefs and practices were numerous and varied. Some Africans had been exposed to European Christianity before coming to America, so they were able to bring Christian beliefs with them. ...
In "Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects", Harper’s theme of slavery focuses on the struggles slaves faced such as separation and death. Poems that fit into the theme of slavery are “The Slave Mother”, “Eliza Harris”, “The Slave Auction”, and “The Fugitive’s Wife”. Harper's most notable abolitionist work, "Bury Me in a Free...
Harper’s works in "Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects" also address the subjects of marriage and motherhood. When Harper travelled to the South for the first time, she was abhorred by the poor treatment and severe hardships of thousands of black women. In fact, she asked white women to help support the black liberation mo...
The Yellow House is a memoir by Sarah M. Broom. It is Broom's first book and it was published on August 13, 2019 by Grove Press. "The Yellow House" chronicles Broom's family (mapping back approximately 100 years), her life growing up in New Orleans East, and the eventual demise of her beloved childhood home after Hurri...
"The Yellow House" was published by Grove Press on August 13, 2019, following the publication of an early excerpt in the "New Yorker" in 2015. The book debuted at number 11 on the Hardcover Nonfiction best sellers list for the September 1, 2019, edition of "The New York Times".
In November 2019, "The Yellow House" won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. The book was named one of the top ten books of 2019 by both the "New York Times Book Review" and the "Washington Post". "The Yellow House" won the John Leonard Award for Best First Book from the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Awards.
Feathers is a children's historical novel by Jacqueline Woodson that was first published in 2007. The story is about a sixth-grade girl named Frannie growing up in the '70s. One day an unexpected new student causes much chaos to the class because he is the only white boy in the whole school. "Feathers" grapples with co...
Taking place in the 1970s, in an urban all African American school, this book highlights the hard topics of racism, faith, hope, and disabilities. A white boy comes to the school and is soon dubbed "Jesus Boy". His entrance as the only white student causes tension and misunderstandings. Some of the students believe tha...
Later Samantha asks Frannie why she helped Trevor, and Frannie doesn't know. Samantha then admits that she was wrong about Jesus Boy and says she doesn't know what to believe in anymore. Frannie tries to comfort Samantha and says "Maybe there's a little bit of Jesus inside of all of us. Maybe Jesus is just that somethi...
At the end of the book Frannie reflects on all that has been happening in her life. She thinks of her mother's baby, her brother, Samantha's loss of faith, and, especially, Jesus Boy. She remembers the poem she read in class and decides "Each moment, I am thinking, is a thing with feathers"
The title of the book, Feathers, is a metaphor that the book revolves around. Woodson introduces it through a poem that Frannie reads in class.
After reading this, Frannie spends the rest of the book trying to understand hope. How does it have feathers?
The effort to understand one another was the focus of the sixth grade class as soon as Jesus Boy entered their classroom. Through Jesus Boy they realize that even the bully, Trevor, is a normal kid. After the fight Frannie realizes "Even though he was mean all the time, the sun still stopped and colored him and warmed ...
Jesus Boy helped the class to stop beating up each other so much and Trevor got scared by him.
Frannie's older brother is deaf and this is a source of tension throughout the story. Frannie feels compelled to protect her brother in a world of people who do not understand him. One difficulty Sean encounters is girls being attracted to him until they find out he is deaf. Woodson stated in an interview with NPR that...
Overall, the book gets mostly high praise, and Jacqueline Woodson is hailed for her beautiful style of writing. One fan says Woodson writes "pages of poetry" and "without any heavy-handedness or manipulation".
Jaqueline Woodson has written 29 books spanning from picture books to young adult fiction. Her books have received numerous awards such as the Caldecott Honor, Newbery Honor, and the Coretta Scott King Award. "Feathers" most resembles her novel "Locomotion" in which she "tackled grief, trauma, death survival, and hope"...
The History of White People is a 2010 book by Nell Irvin Painter, in which the author explores the idea of whiteness throughout history, beginning with ancient Greece and continuing through the beginning of scientific racism in early modern Europe to 19th- through 21st-century America.
The book describes attitudes toward and definitions of race among Europeans, and particularly Americans of European descent. The author says the idea of race is not just a matter of biology but also includes "concepts of labor, gender, class, and images of personal beauty".
The earliest European societies, including the Greeks and Romans, had no concept of race and classified people by ethnicity and social class, with the lowest class being slaves. Throughout most of European history, slaves were generally of European origin, often from conquered countries. From the fifth to the eleventh ...
When writers and scientists began to explore the concept of race, they focused on Europe, describing three or four different races among Europeans. Much of the classification was done by head shape and skull measurements, as well as height and skin pigmentation. The most attractive and most admirable race was that foun...
The author traces four consecutive "enlargements of American whiteness" by which Irish, Italians, Jews, Hispanics, and other discriminated-against ethnicities gradually became fully accepted into white society. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 eliminated legal discrimination by race. As of the book's publica...
The book was a "New York Times" best seller. Paul Devlin, writing in the "San Francisco Chronicle", said the book "is perhaps the definitive story of a most curious adjective. It is a scholarly, non-polemical masterpiece of broad historical synthesis, combining political, scientific, economic and cultural history." Lin...
In January 2019, it was translated into French as "Histoire des Blancs".
If i can cook / you know god can
if i can cook / you know god can (sometimes known as "If I Can Cook You Know God Can") is a culinary memoir by Ntozake Shange. It was originally published by Beacon Press, in Boston MA, United States, in 1998. The piece is both memoir and cookbook. Short essays precede recipes written in personal vernacular, and these ...
Chapter 2 takes the reader to St. Louis and Shange uses the experience of listening to a short wave radio emanating the sounds of Fidel Castro as a child to talk about her experiences in Cuba as an adult. She says that her child was one of Cuba's Young Pioneers and shared food, recipes and traditions with children from...
Shange is in Brixton, a working-class West Indian neighborhood and she describes shopping in the area with her daughter, as they look for food items. Savannah and Shange prepare for her friend Leila's birthday dinner, and each of the ingredients used is described. At the end of the chapter, she mentions the fact that L...
In Chapter 5, Shange is in the world of the Caribbean, and looking at the "matter of the flyin' fish" in Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados. Here, she describes the different ways in which two communities looked at one commodity. The Trinidad and Tobago fishermen were catching the flyin fish that were essential to the Ba...
Chapter 11 looks at boys. Shange says that from the first, she was expected to serve boys food, and that this was part of a dating ritual "to prove I was of value, valued my visitors and our time together so much that I made a hands-on effort to create something for whoever this person was". She discusses her adolescen...
Chapter 12 looks at the need "to re-create a 'where' for our people". It looks at people who do not commit to the American way of life. Shange talks about meeting a Rastafarian in Cancun, Mexico, and the ways in which African culture was destabilized during slavery. She uses the limitation of diet as an example. Yvette...
The epilogue contains references to Shange's dance experience and talks about sugar, giving people something to make them happy, and providing dessert recipes.
Shange looks at food as a feature of memory as well, for not only is the memory of history bestowed upon food but food, as a product of a long and rich culture, can trigger memory. When Shange spends New Years with her daughter in New York, she has an "insatiable desire to recreate for her daughter the family holidays ...
The recipes and essays are written informally in a personable tone of an experienced person conveying exactly how to recreate a recipe. The recipes make allowances for individual preference and skill level, while at the same time making basic assumptions about the reader's knowledge base. Shange writes in "trademark li...
M. C. Higgins, the Great, first published in 1974, is a realistic novel by Virginia Hamilton that won the 1975 Newbery Medal for excellence in American children's literature. It also won the National Book Award in category Children's Books
and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award; it was the first book to do so, and only one other book has done so since ("Holes", by Louis Sachar).
"M.C. Higgins" is a bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel) that covers three eventful days in the life of teenager Mayo Cornelius Higgins. It is set in the Appalachian Mountains on Sarah's Mountain, a fictional mountain in Kentucky, near the Ohio River, that is being encroached upon by a mining company. The book highlight...
The book has been translated into many languages, including Japanese and German, and was made into a movie in 1986.
Kindred is a novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler that incorporates time travel and is modeled on slave narratives. First published in 1979, it is still widely popular. It has been frequently chosen as a text for community-wide reading programs and book organizations, as well as being a common choice for high sch...
The book is the first-person account of a young African-American woman writer, Dana, who finds herself being shunted in time between her Los Angeles, California home in 1976 and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. There she meets her ancestors: a proud black freewoman and a white planter who has forced her into slaver...
"Kindred " explores the dynamics and dilemmas of antebellum slavery from the sensibility of a late 20th-century black woman, who is aware of its legacy in contemporary American society. Through the two interracial couples who form the emotional core of the story, the novel also explores the intersection of power, gende...
While most of Butler's work is classified as science fiction, "Kindred" is considered to cross genre boundaries. It has been classified also as literature or African-American literature. Butler has categorized the work as "a kind of grim fantasy."
"Kindred" scholars have noted that the novel's chapter headings suggest something "elemental, apocalyptic, archetypal about the events in the narrative," thus giving the impression that the main characters are participating in matters greater than their personal experiences.
Dana wakes up in the hospital with her arm amputated. Police deputies question her about the circumstances surrounding the loss of her arm and ask her whether her husband Kevin, a white man, beats her. Dana tells them that it was an accident and that Kevin is not to blame. When Kevin visits her, they are both afraid of...
In a flashback, Dana recounts how she met Kevin while doing minimum-wage temporary jobs at an auto-parts warehouse. Kevin becomes interested in Dana when he learns she is a writer like him, and she befriends him even though he is white and their coworkers judge their relationship. They find they have much in common; bo...
In a flashback, Dana remembers how she and Kevin were married. Both of their families opposed the marriage due to ethnic bias. While Kevin's reactionary sister is prejudiced against African Americans, Dana's uncle abhors the idea of a white man eventually inheriting his property. Only Dana's aunt favors the union, as i...
Dana's and Kevin's happy reunion is short-lived, as Kevin has a hard time adjusting to the present after living in the past for five years. He shares a few details of his life in the past with Dana: he witnessed terrible atrocities against slaves, traveled farther up north, worked as a teacher, helped slaves escape, an...
Dana and Kevin travel to Baltimore to investigate the fate of the Weylin plantation after the death of Rufus, but they find very little; a newspaper notice reporting Rufus's death as a result of his house catching fire, and a Slave Sale announcement listing all the Weylin slaves except Nigel, Carrie, Joe, and Hagar. Da...
Realistic depiction of slavery and slave communities.
"Kindred "was written to explore how a modern black woman would experience the time of a slavery society, where most black people were considered as property; a world where "all of society was arrayed against you."
In several interviews, Butler has mentioned that she wrote "Kindred" to counteract stereotypical conceptions of the submissiveness of slaves. While studying at Pasadena City College, Butler heard a young man from the Black Power Movement express his contempt for older generations of African-Americans for what he consid...