In Search of Our Mother's Garden
1983
- biography
- american authors
- feminism
- african american women
- african american authors
- afro-american women
- african american women authors
- mujeres
- biographies
- écrivains américains
The story
In this, her first collection of nonfiction, the author speaks out as a Black woman, writer, mother, and feminist in thirty-six pieces ranging from the personal to the political. Among the contents are essays about other writers, accounts of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the antinuclear movement of the 1980s, and a vivid memoir of a scarring childhood injury and her daughter's healing words.
What it’s like
Essay prose with a conversational, lyrical voice that moves easily between the intimate and the public, so a reader can sink into a single piece on a quiet afternoon and come up with the sense of having been talked to by a wise, unhurried friend. The sensory world is domestic and earthy: kitchen gardens, quilts, the grain of a mother's hands at work, Southern summer heat and red clay, with the memoir passages drawing the body close through the physical detail of an injury and its slow mending. Pacing is loose by design. Pieces are short enough to read one at a time, so the book suits a rainy Sunday, a bedside stack, or a slow commute rather than a single sitting. Tone runs from tender and reflective to fiercely angry when the essays turn to civil rights, racism, and nuclear dread, and the register stays grounded and warm even at its sharpest. Some passages carry real weight: grief, violence against Black people, and the anxieties of a world under the bomb appear without gore, though the civil rights accounts describe harassment and danger directly. The arc is less a plot than a gradual self-claiming, a writer working out what she owes to the women who came before her and what she owes to herself. For readers who want thoughtful, unflinching essays about womanhood, Black creative lineage, and the everyday work of making art.
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