Sarah Gordon Weathersby: 4 books

Let's say you're a people person. You like helping people, taking them soup when they're sick, inviting their college children for dinner, solving their computer problems, supporting them in their business efforts. Then one day you realize you're always on the answering end of the phone, and you have...

Adventures in Blackface is a short story and one of a selection of “shorts” retrieved from the cutting room floor. The short story centers on a black college freshman, Ruth, one of six black students in an otherwise white university in the 1960’s. Ruth faces the challenge of the romantic advances of a white male student, and the racism of white faculty.

Imagine you gave a baby up for adoption forty years ago, and after years of trying to find her, she finds you. Now come the hard questions. She's healthy, beautiful, and successful, but she wants to know why you gave her away and why you didn't marry her father. How do you explain to her that giving her away was the best gift you could offer?

In the summer of 1955, our mother, Georgia recalled the details of the story I had heard all of my life. She was recuperating from a mastectomy, and I was trying to rearrange the pieces of my life. The continuous conversation under the ash tree on West Street, about Mama and all the kin folks was therapy for both of us.