"The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in 'orchestrated chaos' with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. 'Mommy,' a fiercely protective woman with 'dark eyes full of pep and fire,' herded her brood to Manhattan's free cultural events, sent them off on buses to the best (and mainly Jewish) schools, demanded good grades and commanded respect. As a young man, McBride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion--and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain."
Williams tells the story of his very unusual youth. Of mixed-race parentage, he was raised as a white in Virginia and as a black in Ohio. We experience with him his pain, his struggles, and his triumphs.
This profile of the Hairstons, a large family of planters and slaves, traces this black, white, and interracial family through the Civil War and beyond.
Relates how Benjamin Banneker's grandmother journeyed from England to Maryland in the late seventeenth century, worked as an indentured servant, began a farm of her own, and married a freed slave.
