Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine

"'I am black--and brown, too,' writes Emily Bernard. 'Brown is the body I was born into. Black is the body of the stories I tell.' And the storytelling begins when Bernard, then a graduate student at Yale, was randomly attacked by a stranger with a knife. She explores how that bizarre act of violence set her free and unleashed the storyteller in her. Bernard writes how each of the essays goes beyond a narrative of black innocence and white guilt, how each is anchored in a mystery, and how each sets out to discover a new way of telling the truth as the author has lived it"--Back cover