Flat-Footed Truths
Telling Black Women's Lives
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A new and exciting collection from Patricia Bell-Scott, the editor of the enormously successful Life Notes and the award-winning Double Stitch. With a foreword by Marcia Ann Gillespie.
To tell the flat-footed truth is a southern saying that means to tell the naked truth. This revealing and inspiring anthology brings together twenty-seven creative spirits who through essays, interviews, poetry, and photographic images tell black women's lives. In the opening section that discusses the risks involved in sharing your life with others, Sapphire tells us about the challenges in recording her experiences when there has never been any validation that her life was important. The next section chronicles the adventure in claiming the lives of those who have been lost or neglected, such as Alice Walker's search for the real story of Zora Neale Hurston. The third part, which affirms lives of resistance, includes Audre Lorde's acclaimed essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury." The final chapter, focusing on transformed lives, presents an insightful interview with Sonia Sanchez.
This wonderful collection, featuring such writers as bell hooks, Barbara Smith, Marcia Ann Gillespie, and Pearl Cleage, is testimony to a flourishing literary tradition, filled with daring women, that will inspire others to tell their own stories.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rather than solicit autobiographical essays, Bell-Scott, a professor of child, family and women's studies at the University of Georgia, and Johnson-Bailey, an assistant professor of adult education at the same university, sought contributors who could comment on the process of how black women relate their stories in their writings and art. The book, organized in three sections--"Telling One's Own Life," "Claiming Lives Lost" and "Telling Lives as Resistance"--succeeds admirably in examining the difficulties and rewards of autobiography. The tone is beautifully set with a piece by bell hooks on the uncertain quality of memory and the struggle to capture the past with the lens of the present. An interview with Sapphire highlights the danger of reductionism as she recounts the story of people who wanted to meet her not because of her work but because she had once been a prostitute. The collection's least pensive but most touching essay is provided by Alice Walker, who writes about her quest to buy a gravestone for writer Zora Neale Hurston. Other pieces include Senate testimony by Anita Hill, the stellar "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" by Audre Lorde, a brief biography of Sojourner Truth by Nell Painter and uplifting poems by Ruth Forman, Elaine Shelly and Becky Birtha. Several essayists discuss not just how to write autobiography but why and when. Bell-Scott and Johnson-Bailey have gathered together a formidable group of women who write with power and grace.
