Say I'm Dead

A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love

Say I'm Dead
E Dolores Johnson
RRP:
NZ$ 69.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 55.99
Hardback
h228 x 6mm - 288pg
2 Jun 2020 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9781641602747
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
Fearful of prison time-or lynching-for violating Indiana' s anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson' s black father and white mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo. Her mother simply vanished, evading an FBI and police search that ended with the declaration to her family that she was the victim of foul play, either dead or sold into white slavery. When Johnson was born, social norms and her government-issued birth certificate said she was Negro, nullifying her mother' s white blood in her identity. As an African American, she withstood the advice of a high school counsellor who said that blacks don' t go to college by graduating from Harvard. Then, as a code-switching business executive feeling too far from her black roots, she searched her father' s black genealogy. Johnson was amazed to suddenly realise that her mother' s whole white side was-and always had been-missing. When confronted, her mother' s decades-old secret spilled out. Despite her parents' crippling and well-founded fears of rejection and reprisals, and her black militant brother' s accusation that she was a race traitor, Johnson went searching for the white family who did not know she existed. When she found them, it' s not just their shock and her mama' s shame that have to be overcome, but her own fraught experiences with whites.
"Powerfully important and deeply moving, Say I' m Dead is a story of race, family, and identity. Dolores Johnson is the daughter of a black man and a white womanbut how and why it took her years to realize that, and to unearth the secrets that defined her family along the way, testifies to the complicated his-tory of race relations in America. Johnson lived the changes our country has gone through and continues to wrestle with, and her story will both inspire and educate. " Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich , author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir
E. Dolores Johnson' s writing focuses on the evolution of attitudes on interracial relationships through American history, with an eye to the accelerating browning of America' s future. She has written for Narratively, Buffalo News, Lunch Ticket, The Writer of Color Anthology: Boundaries and Borders and Pangyrus, among others. Johnson has consulted on diversity for universities, major corporations, and nonprofits and has served as a panelist for the Harvard Faculty Seminar on Inter-racialism.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9781641602747
Published: 2 Jun 2020
Published In: United States
Imprint: Chicago Review Press
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Format: Hardback
Height: 228mm
Width: 6mm
Spine: 152mm
Pages: 288

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