family
There is truly a reason why anything written by J. California Cooper has a permanent home in my library. Her work is lyrical, poetic, thoughtful, and troubling. Reading family took my heart on a journey of deep reflection, connection with the human spirit, pride in the survival of my people, and saddness for the evil that rested in the heart of man to do the things that slavery allowed him to do. That whiteness became the license to rape and kill and destroy and hate. Even in hating the actions, in reading her work, one understands the universality of the black mother and was transported back, in a way, to what the creation of man was like in the very, very beginning. This is more of narration of one of the "great cloud of witnesses" who in wanting to spare herself and her children more indignities that were in the land during the decades before the Civil War, she inadvertently set them on a course that would affect decades. Becoming a watcher and traveler in that