Many books have been written about the Southern lifestyle during the 1930's through the 1940's, but sit back and lend your ear (eyes) to a personal account of how a young man grew up under these trying conditions. Not only were the conditions trying, but getting an education was bleak and almost impossible, not just due to the segregation, but from the internal conflicts among the families. See how the hand of God moved to help this family over-come hardships and calamities, but how He touched the life of this young man when he was determined to better himself, his sisters and brothers, mother and father and to make a life outside the Racial Southern expectations of young black men. These are issues that I experienced growing up as a black person in the South in the USA. I want my children and grandchildren to know the things I experienced and how I was able to overcome and make a better life for my family. Currently I am living in Southern California, and I have lived quite a long life. I am currently on the downside of being a septagenarian. Unfortunately, I have lost my eyesight due to a disease called diabetic retinopathy. I am dependent on my wife and my sister to assist me in getting this book completed. I have been trying to get the book finished for the past fifteen years. I hope this book gives insight to not only my family, but to all that would care to read it.

The poems collected here insist that with the power to do right, people also have a responsibility to themselves, their loved ones, and complete strangers to be better and strive harder.

Stories Seen Through Screen Doors The Roots and Branches of Black Southern Experience A truth seldom recognized is that there are almost as many African American southern experiences as there are states and cities in the South. Our lives as southern black people intersect, but they also diverge into unique patterns of learning, growth, and discovery. The stories contained in this collection illustrate some of those similarities as well as the differences. Wanda Macon shares with millions of African Americans a southern soil that is rich in family, church, and racial repression, but she also highlights the spiritedness of a tomboyish young girl, too smart for her preschool age, formed by a variety of occurrences in her small southern community. "The Courts," a horseshoe shaped neighborhood and home to twenty-three families located in fictional Friarsdale, Mississippi, is the site for experience, memory, reflection, and locating one's self in the history of the geography as well as the history of family and community. By Trudier Harris, University Distinguished Research Professor Department of English, The University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, Alabama

“A towering and multilayered gem.” —NoViolet Bulawayo Amid the turmoil of modern Zimbabwe, Abednego and Agnes Mlambo’s teenage son has gone missing. Zamani, their enigmatic lodger, seems to be their only hope for finding him. As he weaves himself closer into the fabric of the grieving community, it's almost like Zamani is part of the family.… Zamani—one of the great unreliable narrators of contemporary world literature—knows that the one who controls the narrative inherits the future. As Abednego wrestles with alcoholism and Agnes seeks solace in a deep-rooted love, each must confront the burdens of history. Written with dark humor, wit, and seduction, House of Stone is a sweeping epic that spans the fall of Rhodesia through Zimbabwe’s turbulent beginnings, exploring the persistence of the oppressed in a nation seeking an identity.

“A breezy, light, and utterly charming tale of a musician’s life with all the ups-and-downs and turns-and-twists that are a part of those of us in jazz.” —Marian McPartland, jazz legend and host of the award-winning Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz A pianist, singer, songwriter, and co-leader of the Sweet Baby Blues Band, Jeannie Cheatham has played and sung with many of the greats in blues and jazz—T-Bone Walker, Dinah Washington, Cab Callaway, Joe Williams, Al Hibbler, Odetta, and Jimmy Witherspoon. Cheatham toured with Big Mama Thornton off and on for ten years and was featured with Thornton and Sippie Wallace in the award-winning PBS documentary Three Generations of the Blues. Cheatham’s signature song, “Meet Me with Your Black Drawers On” is a staple in jazz and blues clubs across America and in Europe, Africa, and Japan. In this delightfully frank autobiography, Jeannie Cheatham recalls a life that has been as exuberant, virtuous, wild, and truthful as her music. She begins in Akron, Ohio, where she grew up in a vibrant multiethnic neighborhood surrounded by a family of strong women. From those roots, she launched a musical career that took her from the Midwest to California, doing time along the way everywhere from a jail cell in Dayton, Ohio, where she was innocently caught in a police raid, to the University of Wisconsin-Madison—where she and Jimmy Cheatham taught music. Cheatham writes of a life spent fighting racism and sexism, of rage and resolve, misery and miracles, betrayals and triumphs, of faith almost lost in dark places, but mysteriously regained in a flash of light. Cheatham’s autobiography is also the story of her fifty-years-and-counting love affair and musical collaboration with her husband and band partner, Jimmy Cheatham.

2018 PEN America Literary Award Winner–Los Angeles Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes chronicles ordinary people achieving vivid extrasensory perception while under extreme pain. The stories tumble into a universe of the jaded and the hopeful, in which men and women burdened with unwieldy and undesirable superhuman abilities are nonetheless resilient in subtle and startling ways. Venita Blackburn's characters hurl themselves toward the inevitable fates they might rather wish away. Their stories play with magic without the sparkle, glaring at the internal machinations of the human spirit. Fragile symbols for things such as race, sexuality, and love are lifted, decorated, and exposed to scrutiny and awe like so many ruins of our imagination. Through it all Blackburn’s characters stumble along currents of language both thoughtful and hilarious.

Stephen Frears has a career approaching over half-a-century, directing films of astonishing variety, beauty, and daring, and yet many often have trouble remembering his name. The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears celebrates this great filmmaker, beginning with a short biography of Frears, general observations on unifying themes and styles in his oeuvre, and the characterization of his manner of directing. By focusing on 10 key films, Lesley Brill finds coherence in Frears' characteristic irony and in his concentration on many kinds of love. In movies such as My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity, The Queen, Philomena, and many others, Frears portrays widely varied situations and characters with a combination of insight, skepticism, and sympathy. He has the passionate, unjudgmental focus of an artist who stands simultaneously at a distance from his subjects and within their worlds. Through Frears' work is widely admired, Brill argues that he has attracted little scholarly writing because of a combination of the diffidence of his self-presentation and the difficulty of explicating the complex ideas and characters of his films. The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears is meant to inspire others to further examine his films individually and his career as a whole.

When precocious Mandolin MacDuff wakes up in a strange room, she feels scared, abandoned and then total emptiness turned her body into mush. But when she looked out her window, the only window, she sees a tall man driving a machine with one arm up and down, up and down. She studied him through her tears, discovered his other arm was kind of withered, hung loosely, and didn't seem to bother him. That meant he was brave. Cool! He would be her friend." And so begins a captivating generational story; a thirty-year quest into a complex world to find her way, to learn the truth, the secret of her past and the ever illusive hakka bakka