The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey - Hardcover

Derricotte, Toi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393045447 ISBN 13: 9780393045444

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1997

Synopsis

Spanning twenty years, from the time the author, a light-skinned black woman, moved into an all-white neighborhood, a journal ponders the meaning of being black in a racially divided country, and the price of denying it.

About this title

Review:

Realizing that her light skin and "good hair" conspired to give her a unique, unasked-for perspective on the racial divide in the United States, African American poet Toi Derricotte inscribed her anguish in two decades' worth of journal entries. The Black Notebooks records countless moments when Derricotte was showered with offhand entitlements and racist confidences by whites who assumed she, too, was white. She speaks ambivalently of milking such moments, deliberately making end runs around her dark-skinned husband, Bruce, while looking for a home in an all-white suburb or hoping for a decent hotel room. Derricotte talks bluntly, too, of a self-loathing that accompanies being black in America and of not being "black enough." Her honest, angry, painful truth-telling veers into self-absorption and repetition, but perhaps that's fitting: racism hammers away at people in tiny and huge events repeated day after day. Says Derricotte, "My skin causes certain problems continuously, problems that open the issue of racism over and over like a wound."

About the Author:

Toi Derricotte is a poet who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is the author of Captivity and Natural Birth.

About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0393045447
• ISBN 13: 9780393045444
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 205