Porgies Are Best

A Fishmonger’S Daughter

B.J. Ray is on a hilarious journey with one goal in mind, an interracial marriage. For sixteen years, she has been planning her escape from the South Bronx projects. If she ignores the experiences and opportunities, she may be stuck with project dwelling forever. She encounters the challenge of having to ingest salt tablets and collect rocks in one-hundred-degree weather, a prerequisite for interracial dating. She also attends Hampton share parties where white folks drink out of paper cups, not Welchs grape jelly jars, and a share consists of a cot in the laundry room every fourth weekend. She finds invited guests to your home demand bottled water, request organic wines, organic foods, and really cant tell the difference about most things in life, not to mention water, foods, and wine. One March night, B.J. Ray attends her middle sisters birthday party with her younger sister and they are summoned to pick up the Carvel cake. They dont return until the wee hours of the morning. B.J. Ray meets a man and discovers that he is the key to her becoming a highly successful individual. Porgies Are Best: A Fishmongers Daughter is a book of vignettes of a young African American, Jewish girl from the projects of the South Bronx, who experiences love, humor, misfortune, compassion, and accomplishment.