Go left or go right? It seems that at every point in life, you need a decision: take a familiar street, or a route you rarely travel? A restaurant you frequent, or something new for dinner? Sometimes, the choices won’t matter next week or in a year, but – as in the new book “Three Girls from Bronzeville” by Dawn Turner – other decisions are more consequential. One of her earliest memories involves her newborn sister. Dawn Turner was no more than a toddler herself then, living in a hotel room with her mother because her father was gone again.…
Author: Terri Schlichenmeyer
By Terri Schlichenmeyer This morning, your head hurt something terrible. Is it anything to worry about? Your grandfather had heart problems and died after a stroke. Your grandmother suffered from diabetes and you know there’s got to be a way to avoid their fates. Does your headache have anything to do with that? Do you need “Black Health Matters” by Richard W. Walker, Jr., MD to calm your fears? While growing up in Spanish Harlem years ago, Walker noticed how much diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and kidney failure affected the people in his neighborhood. It made hiim “angry,” he…
See one, do one, teach one. They say that that’s a good way to gain a new skill: observe, try the action yourself, and then share what you did with someone else. You can learn a lot from another’s experiences, as you’ll see in these great memoirs by women writers… We all like to think we had a normal growing-up, but what is “normal”? In “Nowhere Girl” by Cheryl Diamond (Algonquin, $27.95), the author recounts a childhood of seeming adventure, spent in a number of countries and continents. By the time she was a teen, she’d done things that most…
Start small, plan big. You don’t have to have much for the former, just a little love and a place to launch. The latter, though, that takes some work. You have to see the goal, hold your confidence tight, and know yourself well. And then, as in the new book “Where You Are is Not Who You Are” by Ursula M. Burns, you step up and fly. When she was a child growing up in a New York tenement, Ursula Burns never thought about how much her mother sacrificed for her and her siblings. The family had food, shelter, a…
Your legs felt as though they were made of rubber. It was like walking on a bed of marbles, like wearing rollerskates on a waterbed. Your arms flailed for something steady but whether this was an inner event or something outside, you wonder if you’ll ever feel stable again. As in the new book “The Ground Breaking” by Scott Ellsworth, you’re rattled. In their last season without responsibility, twelve-year-old Scott Ellsworth and his buddies spent the summer of 1966 exploring their hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and visiting the library. There, Ellsworth discovered hints that the whispers he’d overheard his entire…
Your seat has been reserved. You’re excited about this trip, but also nervous; you’ve never been where you’re going and you hope this is a one-and-done trip. Still, going there is necessary for you and for the future so grab your bags. Author Charles Person says “The Buses Are A Comin’” and you’re on-board. He didn’t know it then, but Charles Person grew up in poverty. His family was rich in love, wealthy at mealtimes, affluent when it came to lessons, they had an abundance of fun, but he was in tenth grade before he realized that his extended family…
The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son. That’s what’s said, that a son pay for his father’s misdeeds, but maybe the old man didn’t intend to leave a negative legacy. Maybe he tried his best, but something went wrong. Maybe, as in the new novel “The Son of Mr. Suleman” by Eric Jerome Dickey, Pops meant well. Adjunct Professor Pi Suleman didn’t want to be at his employer’s event. He had better things to do, better places to be than a room at UAN, but his boss, the white woman who hired him, the wife of…
One little hole in the ground. That’s all it takes, as big around as your little finger, a pencil eraser, a coffee stirrer. A tiny fissure in the Earth, that’s what you need to grow dinner next week or next winter, flowers for your table, sustenance for your animals or, as in the new book “We Are Each Other’s Harvest” by Natalie Baszile, a tie to your past. Years ago, while taking weekly provisions to an elderly relative, Natalie Baszile learned that the presence of food in a neighborhood (or its lack) could be a racial issue. Shortly afterward, she…
Your teeth got a good workout. Yep, as a kid, you wanted those certain hard-to-find, favorite-player baseball cards but you didn’t want to be wasteful. Because you’d do anything to get the cards, you spent your change, hoped you’d be lucky, and you chewed a lot of gum. In the new book “Comeback Season” by Cam Perron (with Nick Chiles), though, the best things don’t come in a pack. It all started with coins. When Cam Perron was a little boy, his grandfather introduced him to coin collecting by taking young Perron to a local Massachusetts flea market, where the…
This really makes your blood boil. This. The racism gone amok, discrimination, the protests that don’t seem to work, nobody’s listening. You’re hot under the collar over it all, totally inflamed, ready for real action, and in “This Is the Fire” by Don Lemon, you’ll find some sometimes-warm, sometimes-scorching thoughts to sit with first. Coincidentally or not, as a trial begins soon in Minnesota, this book opens with a poignant letter from Lemon to his young nephew on the evening of George Floyd’s death. Lemon writes of the legacy he got from his parents, his grandmother, and his beloved older…