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In the country of women : a memoir / Susan Straight.

by Straight, Susan, author.

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New York : Catapult, 2019.

Straight, Susan.

Straight, Susan -- Family.

Authors, American -- Biography.

Women authors -- Biography.

Racially mixed people -- United States -- Biography.

9781948226226 (hardcover) :

1948226227 (hardcover)

xviii, 363 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Prologue: Homerica -- Part I. Little House in the Thistles ; The First Bullet ; The Dance ; The Country Squire ; Nurse-in-Charge ; Hey Now ; Olympia - One Can Could Get You Pregnant ; Daisy Belle ; Driveway #1 - The First Love Letter -- Part II. Castas ; Mulato ; The Second Bullet ; Fruitful ; The Toast ; Fruitful #2 -- Part III. Run the World ; Wild Things ; Pig ; The Santa Ana River ; A Secondhand Lonely ; Dew Point - Pack of Four ; Love Strands ; Crosses and Missions ; Coach - Driveway #2 ; The Batmobile ; The Yard Couch ; Grizzly ; Nine ; Al Green - Driveway #1, The Second Love Letter ; Travels with My Ex in the Time of Revenue -- Part IV. Switzerland, Loveland, Cuddlyland ; Bring Me Your Smartest Girl ; Kin - White House #1 ; A Place of Style and Refuge - White House #2 ; Letter to My Nephew - Our Dungeon Shook (After James Baldwin) ; American Human Not Interested ; Braid/Züpfe ; Ancestry ; Saphina ; The Work of Women - Evaporation and Memory, white House #3 -- Acknowledgements

"In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close-knit Sims family, Straight--and eventually her three daughters--heard for decades the stories of Dwayne's female ancestors. Some women escaped violence in post-slavery Tennessee, some escaped murder in Jim Crow Mississippi, and some fled abusive men. Straight's mother-in-law, Alberta Sims, is the descendant at the heart of this memoir. Susan's family, too, reflects the hardship and resilience of women pushing onward--from Switzerland, Canada, and the Colorado Rockies to California. A Pakistani word, biraderi, is one Straight uses to define a complex system of kinship and clan--those who become your family. An entire community helped raise her daughters. Of her three girls, now grown and working in museums and the entertainment industry, Straight writes, "The daughters of our ancestors carry in their blood at least three continents. We are not about borders. We are about love and survival." In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women." -- from Jacket.

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