Black is the body

An extraordinary, exquisitely written memoir (of sorts) that looks at race – in a fearless, penetrating, honest, true way – in twelve tell-tale, connected, deeply personal essays that explore, up-close, the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities of growing up black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, of getting a PhD from Yale, of marrying a white man from the North, of adopting two babies from Ethiopia, of teaching at a white college and living in America’s New England today.