Divided To The Vein: A Journey into Race and Family - Hardcover

Minerbrook, Scott

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151931070 ISBN 13: 9780151931071

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996

Synopsis

The son of an African-American father and white mother presents a lyrical and incisive memoir of growing up during the civil rights movement and his attempts to bring down the barriers of race that had kept his white grandparents from acknowledging his existence. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Scott Minerbrook's parents hail from opposite ends of the cultural spectrum. His father was a pampered only child born into Chicago's aspiring black bourgeoisie, while his mother was an idealistic girl from a large family of poor white Missouri farmers. Minerbrook grew up in the 1950s and '60s, in a world that was fighting the grim realities of racial separatism and willful ignorance with the ideals of equality and integration. At home, his parents fought each other and a host of personal demons, even as they raised four boys, excelled in their careers, and moved from Chicago, to Manhattan's Upper West Side, and finally to the leafy suburbs of Connecticut. Minerbrook completed his schooling at Harvard's burgeoning African-American studies department and went on to raise a family of his own. But by the time he reached his late thirties, he was no longer satisfied with living an emotional half-life, rejecting and rejected by so much of his flesh and blood. He set out for his mother's hometown in the Botheel of Missouri, determined to claim the white relatives who had refused to recognize his existence. Despite their desire to "keep things just as they are", he knew that bringing down the daunting barrier called race was essential to his humanity and to theirs.

Reviews

"I couldn't love myself if I hated my own flesh and blood," declares Minerbrook, a black journalist for U.S. News & World Report, explaining his effort to reconnect with his white maternal grandmother, who cut off her daughter when she married a black man. When he visited her Missouri farm town in an attempt to see her, he was thwarted; a year later, he found grace in a reunion. His book encompasses those stories and the larger stories of his parents' paths and his own troubled upbringing. His father's family were bourgeois strivers; his mother's family was long shamed by poverty. His parents' marriage was stormy, even violent; as a youth, after a move to suburbia, Minerbrook pursued both studies and sports as a way to fit, uneasily, with both whites and blacks. At Harvard, he felt personal liberation, even as he felt discomfort among the comformingly nationalist fellow black students. There he embraced Orwell, whose works "encouraged me to be honest with myself"; such honesty, infused with both passion and a spirit of forgiveness, animates this memorable book. Photos. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Like Gregory Williams's Life on the Color Line (LJ 2/1/95), these two memoirs describe growing up interracial from the perspective of the sons of African American fathers and white mothers. McBride, an accomplished journalist and musician, has viewed the yawning chasm of racial division from both sides and, despite carving out a successful life, has been scarred. Unlike Williams and Minerbrook, though, he focuses on a single, singular parent, a rabbi's daughter who later helped her husband establish an all-black Baptist church in her home and saw 12 children through college. His mother's own story, juxtaposed with McBride's, helps make this book a standout. Recommended for all collections. Minerbrook's father came from Chicago's African American high society, his mother from rural Missouri. He paints a detailed portrait of their family life, of relationships complicated by the fact that "human emotions, when mixed with racial issues, are prone to shatter like glass." Nearing middle age, he seeks out the white side of his family, who have rejected his mother and her offspring, and achieves a well-deserved catharsis. Still, his accounts of the almost unrelenting prejudice of white against black, black against white, light-skinned black against dark-skinned black, and so on are deeply disturbing. One is left to borrow the words of another recent commentator and say that this cancer does indeed make me want to holler. Highly recommended.
-?Jim Burns, Ottumwa P.L., Ia.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151931070
• ISBN 13: 9780151931071
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 259