Flat-Footed Truths

Telling the truth can be a painful exercise. Telling the truth can open unhealed wounds with poisonous pus erupting. Once told the silence is broken. Only then can truth be liberating and true healing can take place. African-american women get the truth told about their lives in this diverse collection of essays, poetry, interviews and photography. Through these various mediums we engage Black women in discussing the difficulties in telling about their lives, healings which took place, relationships that have been broken and reclaimed and the challenges of resisting marginalization. For years many gifted Black women have been relegated into the obscurity of silence by the culture at large and sadly by their own people. Travel with Alice Walker as she rescues Zora Neale Hurston from the pit of obscurity. Walker shares with us the adventure of one Black woman writer searching to honor another Black woman writer who was placed in obscurity. Zora was independent and shows what happens to a woman with a mind of her own. Kate Rushin questions us about suicide. Are Black women crazy enough to consider it? We're too busy going through life changes to worry about it. Or do we? Consider Rushin's poetry. Overall this volume presents Black women as they are. They are not the superwomensapphiresbitchesmammies and other stereotypes that are placed upon them but are reflective, intelligent women whose lives have enriched their culture. A brief glimpse of their works enables us to appreciate them for whom and what they are. Through the telling of the truth then we can appreciate ourselves and those women in our communities who have given so much. By all means put this book in your own personal library. I have.

I bought this book this weekend after hearing Drs. Bell Scott and Johnson-Bailey read from it on campus. I did not expect to be so moved, to experience the power of these stories. Once I did, though, I had to buy the book to read the rest of it. I was amazed by my own emotional reaction to stories so far removed from my life as a young, white, yankee girl.