Summer Snow
by Trudier Harris

Bargain Book at 75% off

Description:

Trudier Harris will tell you that African Americans who consider themselves southern are about as rare as summer snow. But Harris has always embraced the South, and in Summer Snow, her collection of poignant autobiographical essays, Harris explores her experiences as a black southerner and how they have shaped her into the writer and intellectual she has become.

Harris grew up in the racist environment of Tuscaloosa, Alabama in the 1950s and '60s. A member of a black southern family whose father was born in 1885 and whose mother died in 2001, she claims three centuries of blackness and southernness as pivotal forces in her life. Not surprisingly her most important influence was her mother. The book opens with a charming essay about how her mother chose the name Trudier, not Trudy, as her daughter's first name. Additionally, Harris includes a funny piece about her mother's use of "cotton-pickin' authority," an entertaining tribute to her mother's lifelong love of fishing, and a touching story of her mother's final heroic years in a nursing home.

Harris's family, church, and community served as antidotes to the white racism that surrounded her. Whether writing about the family front porch, where storytelling prevailed, or the church choir, where black voices could sing as loudly as they liked, Harris depicts sites where black life thrived and prospered. Within her black community, though, colorphobia did affect her high school experiences, and sexual harassment by black professors followed her to the black college she attended.

Summer Snow is filled with wonderful stories and wry wit. But it also containtes a number of tough-minded essays -- one, about the price blacks have paid for desegregation, and another on the "staying power of racism." In still anothter moving piece, Harris remembers a white teenager who propositioned her for sex when she was twelve years old, in exchange for five dollars.

Eloquent and spirited, Summer Snow joins a long and illustrious tradition of autobiographies by black women. It also stands as a testament to one woman's ability to transcend insurmountable odds.

Unflinching in her assessment of white souther culture, yet deeply attached to a South many black intellectuals have abandoned, Harris in Summer Snow takes readers on a surprising tour of one woman's life, loves, and lessons.

Summer Snow
by Trudier Harris

ISBN: 9780807072547
ISBN-10: 0807072540
Publisher: Beacon Press
Publication Date: 2003
Format: Hardcover, 186 pages
Book Type: New