• 0
• 0
• 0

Summary

A gorgeous, moving memoir of how one of America's most innovative and respected journalists found his voice by coming to terms with a painful past 
New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow mines the compelling poetry of the out-of-time African-American Louisiana town where he grew up-a place where slavery's legacy was felt astonishingly close, reverberating in the elders' stories and in the near-constant wash of violence. 
Charles's attachment to his mother-a fiercely driven women with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, a job plucking poultry at a nearby factory, a soon-to-be-ex husband, and a love of newspapers and learning-cannot protect him from secret abuse at the hands of an older cousin. It's damage that triggers years of anger and searing self-questioning. 
Finally, Charles escapes to a nearby state university, where he joins a black fraternity after a passage of brutal hazing, and then enters a world of racial and sexual privilege that feels like everything he's ever needed and wanted, until he's called upon, himself, to become the one perpetuating the shocking abuse. 
A powerfully redemptive memoir that both fits the tradition of African-American storytelling from the South, and gives it an indelible new slant.

Duration: about 10 hours (10:08:42)
Publishing date: 2014-09-23; Unabridged; Copyright Year: 2014. Copyright Statment: —

• Biography & Memoirs
• Body, Mind & Spirit