Rooted Against the Wind: Personal Essays. This item is unavailable.Rooted Against the Wind: Personal Essays

In these beautifully written essays, Gloria Wade-Gayles is at times painfully candid as she confronts such controversial subjects as rape, homophobia, interracial relationships, and even "looking and acting too young" for her age. Yet what emerges from each piece is a powerful connection to her community, which serves as her well-spring of strength, sheltering her faith.

When Gloria Wade-Gayles manages to avoid the mire of political correctness, the essays in this collection achieve the kind of power that allows them to transcend the personal to become universal. This is evident in "Who Says an Older Woman Can't/Shouldn't Dance?" which is by turns, funny, wistful, and tart, as Wade-Gayles dismisses putative compliments about how well she looks as " 'condiments' ... intended to make palatable the unappetizing reality of growing older." This wistful humor is offset by the sad anger of "Fissures in the Moon," an account of how Wade-Gayles was robbed at knifepoint by a man who broke into her home. "The intruder stole the night from me," she writes, "the beauty of lighted darkness...." Words like these carry far more power than Wade-Gayles's professions of solidarity with oppressed people and pledges to "never again attempt to speak for any group of which I am not a bona fide member."