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Miss Jones shows how the need to maintain family life shaped the work habits and choices of blacks in general and black women in particular. Examining black women as laborers is one thing; examining this labor force in the context of its life-and-death struggle to save the family is quite another. The attempt to annihilate black families was so spirited that every effort to protect those families was seen as nothing less than sabotage. A male slave who ducked off the plantation to go fishing was perceived as a loafer rather than a provider. Similarly, after slavery, when free black women stayed at home to care for their children (a duty and virtue for white women), they were said to be ''doing nothing'' and to have ''played the lady'' by demanding that their husbands ''support them in idleness.'' Like a silent, underground river, family priorities run through the work choices blacks made after and during slavery. ''Freed blacks resisted both the northern work ethic and the southern system of neoslavery,'' Miss [Jacqueline Jones] writes. ''The full import of their preference for family sharecropping over gang labor becomes apparent when viewed in a national context. The industrial North was increasingly coming to rely on workers who had yielded to employers all authority over their working conditions. In contrast, sharecropping husbands and wives retained a minimal amount of control over their own productive energies and those of their children on both a daily and seasonal basis. Furthermore, the sharecropping system enabled mothers to divide their time between field and housework in a way that reflected a family's needs. The system also removed wives and daughters from the menacing reach of white supervisors. Here were tangible benefits of freedom that could not be reckoned in financial terms.'' THOUGH she provides a context for joining the African past to the Afro-American present, Miss Jones is not at all optimistic about the future. She believes that the black woman's unprecedented strength can no longer ward off the quite precedented assaults on the black family. But in calling for ''a massive public works program (and) a 'solidarity wage' to narrow the gap between the pay scales of lower- and upper-echelon workers,'' she is exchanging one dependency for another. If Miss Jones is right, if the traditional ''make a way out of no way'' resourcefulness of black women can't save the black family and blacks are still at the Government's mercy, then they face their gravest danger yet.

Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry \"The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010may be the most important book of poetry to appear in years.\"--Publishers Weekly \"All poetry readers will want to own this book; almost everything is in it.\"--Publishers Weekly \"If you only read one poetry book in 2012,The Collected Poems of Lucille Cliftonought to be it.\"-NPR \"The 'Collected Clifton' is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us.\"--The Washington Post \"The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton-both the woman and her poetry-is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness.\"-Toni Morrison, from the Foreword The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965-1969, a collection-in-progress titledthe book of days(2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career. On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose \"lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition,\" and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. \"mother-tongue: to man-kind\" (from the unpublishedthe book of days): all that I am asking isthat you see me as somethingmore than a common occurrence,more than a woman in her ordinary skin.

Nine years after a white boy spit at my son and accused him of being black, this year a white boy accused him of not being black. He was confused. ''Well,'' I said, ''white people complain a lot. They use blackness for lots of things - for whatever is going on in the world. Please don't let them define you. And please don't try to please them. Whatever they want you to be, chances are they want it for themselves, not for you.''

Sam Durrant’s powerfully original book compares the ways in which the novels of J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison memorialize the traumatic histories of racial oppression that continue to haunt our postcolonial era. The works examined bear witness to the colonization of the New World, U.S. slavery, and South African apartheid, histories founded on a violent denial of the humanity of the other that had traumatic consequences for both perpetrators and victims. Working at the borders of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and drawing inspiration from recent work on the Holocaust, Durrant rethinks Freud’s opposition between mourning and melancholia at the level of the collective and rearticulates the postcolonial project as an inconsolable labor of remembrance.

This compelling study explores the inextricable links between the Nobel laureate's aesthetic practice and her political vision, through an analysis of the key texts as well as her lesser-studied works, books for children, and most recent novels. * Offers provocative new insights and a refreshingly original contribution to the scholarship of one of the most important contemporary American writers * Analyzes the celebrated fiction of Morrison in relation to her critical writing about the process of reading and writing literature, the relationship between readers and writers, and the cultural contributions of African-American literature * Features extended analyses of Morrison's lesser-known works, most recent novels, and books for children as well as the key texts