Shame---Secrets---Lies
When Imani Shepherd, a world-traveled journalist, tries to find out about her family tree through interviewing her elderly parents on video, she runs into a brick wall made up of half-truths, evasions and shame. Instead of finding the truth, what she inds is a family consumed with keeping hidden their "dirty little secrets."
Because of her mother's denial, the family history can only be reconstructed, brick by brick, by the unspoken words. Although Imani is blocked by her mother's silence, these secrets are crucial to understanding the African American past. This novel is an example of Black women who struggle to find themselves by connecting to the pieces of the cultural puzzle
In the main character, Jewel Shepherd, the reader sees how a suffering Back woman can hold her head so high, one might thinks she owns the world. Jewels story also epitomizes the pattern of distant relationships between mothers and daughters, which resulted from the slavery experience. Starting with the collective memory of rape, the slave past is a part of their lives, which they hoped would remain buried forever.
What People Are Saying:
This book will help Black mothers to heal the wounds and break the silence of shallow conversation between themselves and their daughters forever. Black mothers who did not rear their daughters will release their guilt and shame, when often they were making the best of a bad situation. They will no longer feel guilty nor responsible for the things over which they have no control.
--Dr. Rosie Milligan, Founder of Black Writers on Tour
Genre: Historical
When Imani Shepherd, a world-traveled journalist, tries to find out about her family tree through interviewing her elderly parents on video, she runs into a brick wall made up of half-truths, evasions and shame. Instead of finding the truth, what she inds is a family consumed with keeping hidden their "dirty little secrets."
Because of her mother's denial, the family history can only be reconstructed, brick by brick, by the unspoken words. Although Imani is blocked by her mother's silence, these secrets are crucial to understanding the African American past. This novel is an example of Black women who struggle to find themselves by connecting to the pieces of the cultural puzzle
In the main character, Jewel Shepherd, the reader sees how a suffering Back woman can hold her head so high, one might thinks she owns the world. Jewels story also epitomizes the pattern of distant relationships between mothers and daughters, which resulted from the slavery experience. Starting with the collective memory of rape, the slave past is a part of their lives, which they hoped would remain buried forever.
What People Are Saying:
This book will help Black mothers to heal the wounds and break the silence of shallow conversation between themselves and their daughters forever. Black mothers who did not rear their daughters will release their guilt and shame, when often they were making the best of a bad situation. They will no longer feel guilty nor responsible for the things over which they have no control.
--Dr. Rosie Milligan, Founder of Black Writers on Tour
Genre: Historical
Used availability for Maxine Thompson's The Ebony Tree