Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

  Book Discussion of Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert as told to Erin I. Kelly, with a foreword by Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI).                        Chasing Me to My Grave won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.   Winfred Rembert was an artist who painted scenes from his life in Cuthbert Georgia onto leather. His story details the hardship of his life in Cuthbert, his being abandoned by his mother, his being sentenced to a chain gang, and his near lynching. The shining light in his life was his marriage to Patsy, who he proposed to while still a prisoner. Winfred and Patsy moved to New Haven, CT, where encouraged by Patsy, Winfred began to seriously work on his art. Winfred Rembert passed away in 2021.   The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued Saturday Dec. 3 rd at the Wil...

  The Final Revival of Opal and Nev is a fictional oral history of the  interracial 1970s rock duo Opal Jewell and Nev Charles. The journalist S. Sunny Shelton  (nee SarahLena Curtis) is now editor of the music magazine Aural . Sunny proposes a book- length feature about Opal and Nev because there’s a rumor of an upcoming reunion tour.  Sunny has her own reasons for wanting to write this story. The book begins with her note: Disclosure: My father, a drummer named Jimmy Curtis, fell in love with Opal Jewell in the summer of 1970. For the duration of their affair, he was married to my mother, who in ’71 got pregnant with me. Before my birth…he was beaten to death by a racist gang during the riot at the Rivington Showcase. And before my mother could bury his broken body, his mistress blazed to stardom. In continuing the Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series, six of us met on Saturday Oct. 22 to discuss this incredible book. The way that the fictional duo fit int...

  eleven of us met Saturday Sept. 10 to discuss Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo. I started the discussion by asking the group: Did you just love Sankofa ? I did. I had read it over a year ago and I just re-read it over the last two days. Robin: I didn’t love Anna, I guess she had sort of tough childhood. I just wanted her to be tougher, braver. I thought she was so different in how she responded to things the way I would’ve, but I wasn’t raised as a biracial child by a white woman. Robin gave us a summary of the story:   Anna is a biracial woman in her fifties(?) her mother was white woman who lived in London but was Welsh. Her father was an African Student named Francis Aggrey who rented a room from Anna’s grandfather in the 1950s. Anna’s mother found out she was pregnant after Francis Aggrey went back to Africa. Anna was brought up in the household of her mother, her grandparents, and her aunt Caryl. Anna grows up and gets married to a white man and has a daughter Rose w...

  Book discussion of Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday July 23 rd in person at the Wilson Branch Library. Ten of us met and discussed Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead. I opened the discussion by asking a question from Readinggroupguides.com: Carney is described as being “only slightly bent when it came to being crooked, in practice and ambition” (page 31) --- suggesting a more nuanced understanding of seemingly criminal activity. How does his placement on the crooked spectrum change throughout the course of the novel? How does his crookedness compare to others he does business with? I watched the video of Colson Whitehead being interviewed at the MLK Jr. Library in Washington DC.   In our downtown library we have microfilm readers, people can read old newspapers on these machines.   Colson Whitehead actually said that when he was doing the research for the history, he too, went to old newspap...

    Assata Shakur was accused of murdering a New Jersey State Trooper on May 2, 1973. Assata, herself, was shot in that incident, yet she was handcuffed to her hospital bed and questioned and threatened by local, state and federal police. She was vilified in the press, accused of robbing banks, accused of kidnapping, and all other kinds of crimes. All those trials were either dismissed or she was acquitted. The one conviction, supposedly for the murder of the New Jersey State Trooper occurred in 1977. For four years she had been sent from prison to prison, many times in solitary confinement, once the only female in an all-male prison. In 1979 she escaped from prison and has been living in Cuba.  Assata Shakur tells her story in Assata: An Autobiography . Assata starts her story from the events of May 2, 1973, but then goes back to her childhood, spent between her mother up north and her grandparents down in North Carolina. Assata was restless as a teenager; she even...

 The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday May 14th with a discussion of both Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and   My Monticello (the novella in the collection of the same name) by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson.                          Octavia Butler wrote Parable of the Sower in 1993. The main character, teen-aged Lauren Olamina becomes a leader of refugees, walking from Robledo (a fictional town in southern California) to northern California, seeking a safe place to build a community. She's guided by a belief system that she herself penned called Earthseed. She's been prepared collecting food, money, seeds to plant, clothing, and supplies for the day she had to flee. Her neighborhood is burned down by a group of drugged pyromaniacs. Lauren grabs her bag and takes off, attracting fellow travelers along the way.  Jocelyn Nicole Johnson wrote My Monticello is 2021. The ...

   The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series met at the Wilson Library on Saturday, Aprl 2nd. We discussed  Ordinary Light  by Tracy K. Smith. This book is actually her memoir, which we chose to read for Poetry Month, rather than a poetry collection. Tracy K. Smith has had four collections of poetry published and one of them, Life on Mars , won the Pulitzer Prize 2011. She was also Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 until 2019. Reading her memoir was like reading poetry, as evidenced by the quoted passages below.  The book,  Ordinary Light , chronicles Tracy K. Smith's young life at home with her middle-class family. Her father is in the military and they mostly live on the military base, surrounded by whites.  She's especially close to her mother, who gets sick and dies while Smith is in college. The book actually opens with her mother's death with a prologue titled "The Miracle." p.5 "Then we heard a sound that seemed to carve a tunn...