The subtitle annoyed me already – how is it that in this country a child of one black and one white parent is called black (as if the white part somehow doesn’t count) instead of mixed?
Anyway, most of the book, I enjoyed: By telling the story of his Jewish American mother who had 12 children with 2 consecutive black husbands, James McBride also tells part of the social history of America of this time (from the 40ies to the present day). By going against the grain of defined racial differences, her story highlights a lot of them. What I enjoyed beyond the obvious issue of race and multi-racial families was to learn something about being poor in America in times past, when being poor didn’t necessarily mean coming from a wrecked family background or living in high crime areas. Nice contrast to the present day black poverty account of “Gang Leader for a Day” (below).
A friend once told me: If you want to teach people from your own experience, you have to tell them a story without spelling out the moral of the story. And that’s why I only enjoyed most and not all of this book. If he could have resisted the urge to explain what this all means to the reader and just stopped when the story was done, it would have been a much stronger book.
