Crossing the Color Line: Readings in Black and White

From Booklist
Despite current emphasis on multiethnicity, tension between black and whites, the legacy of American slavery, continues to preoccupy American culture. This compilation offers insights into racial relationships in short stories that examine racial differences and commonalities and attempt to reshape perceptions of race. The book is in three sections: "Misreadings," whose contents highlight misunderstandings arising from unequal social status as well as race; "Rereadings," consisting of stories of situations that promote racial understanding; and "New Readings," made up of stories that are cautiously optimistic about the future of race relations. The authors represented include Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, John A. Williams, Elizabeth Spencer, and David Means, and story premises include a white woman's ruminations about her maid, the "dark and intimate Southern knowledge" between blacks and whites, and a black Hollywood writer's strong and cynical reaction to seeing his mother, as maid to a wealthy white family, caring for her spoiled, white charge. An interesting overview of how fiction has chronicled what has changed and what has remained the same in American race relations. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Josephine Humphreys, author of Nowhere Else on Earth
"a must-read if you want to understand race in America...clear proof of fiction's mysterious capacity to elucidate reality, and to heal, avenge, transcend."


Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2001
". . . a fascinating collection . . . . Jones succeeds in providing a vehicle for both races to alter perceptions of one another."


Book Description
Crossing the Color Line Readings in Black and White "Crossing the Color Line: Readings in Black and White is an important book if for no other reason than that periodically we need to remind each other: We Exist." —Nikki Giovanni, author of Blues: For All the Changes: New Poems "Crossing the Color Line is a must-read if you want to understand race in America. Here is clear proof of fiction's mysterious capacity to elucidate reality, and to heal, avenge, transcend."—Josephine Humphreys, author of Nowhere Else on Earth The complex truth about the color line—its destructive effects, painful legacy, clandestine crossings, possible erasure—is revealed more often in private than in public and has sometimes been visited more easily by novelists than historians. In this tradition, Crossing the Color Line, a powerful collection of nineteen contemporary stories, speaks the unspoken, explores the hidden, and voices both fear and hope about relationships between blacks and whites. The volume opens with stories by Alice Adams, Toni Cade Bambara, Ellen Douglas, Reynolds Price, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, and John Williams that focus on misunderstandings created by racial stereotypes and by mislabeling cultural differences. In a second group of stories, Anthony Grooms, Randall Kenan, James Alan McPherson, Toni Morrison, Frances Sherwood, Alice Walker, and Joan Williams examine situations that promote understanding, even when relationships between blacks and whites are complicated by charged issues of politics, religion, class, gender, and sexual orientation. The final section features recent stories that turn on personal similarities as often as racial differences, but even here the legacy of racism lingers. It tests the emerging friendship of Alyce Miller's women, the professional relationship of David Means's men, the alliances between Clifford Thompson's college students, the romance of Reginald McKnight's interracial couple, and the business venture between Elizabeth Spencer's white woman and black man. Much of the power and poignancy of these recent stories, however, comes from the possibility that equal and amiable relationships can, and do, cross the color line. SUZANNE W. JONES is an associate professor of English at the University of Richmond in Virginia. She is the editor of another collection of stories, Growing Up in the South: An Anthology of Modern Southern Literature, and a collection of essays, Writing the Woman Artist. Jones has published articles on twentieth-century American fiction, women writers, and the literature of the South. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.


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Crossing the Color Line is a must-read if you want to understand race in America. Here is clear proof of fiction's mysterious capacity to elucidate reality, and to heal, avenge, transcend. — (Josephine Humphreys, author of Nowhere Else on Earth)


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