Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

   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...

A Lesson Before Dying is set in a small Louisiana parrish where the people live on the same plantations that they had lived as slaves one hundred years before. The setting is 1948. The main characters are Jefferson, who gets sentenced to the electric chair, Grant Wiggins, the teacher who wishes he could escape from the parish, Reverend Ambrose, Grant's Aunt (Tante Lou), and Jefferson's godmother (Miss Emma), who convinces Grant to visit her godson in jail and to make a man out of him before he dies. Another character in the book is Vivian, a married (but working on a divorce) teacher who Grant loves. The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday Feb. 22 with a discussion of this work by Ernest J. Gaines. We began the meeting by watching an eight minute video segment of Mr. Gaines being interviewed for the National Endowment for the Arts. There were sixteen of us, men and women, Black and white. A Lesson Before Dying was published in 1993 and won t...

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued with a conversation about the book Black is the Body: Stories From My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time and Mine . We met on Saturday Jan. 11 and again on Monday Jan. 13. This was our first time having the same book discussion on the Monday after for those who couldn't make it on Saturday. The book is a collection of 12 essays written during the course of many years that have recently been published together as a loosely comprised memoir. The book begins with the author being stabbed in 1994 and all the health problems that have been the result of the stabbing. She, along with six others in a coffee shop, was randomly attacked by a stranger. Over the years since this incident, the author has attempted to tell the story of race, specifically how the stabbing of a Black woman by a white man can be used as a metaphor for the violence suffered by her ancestors by whites in this country.  Dr. Bernard is a prolif...

On Saturday Dec. 1 we had our last book discussion for this year and it was probably one of the most intense discussions we've had so far. There were eight of us, three of which it was their first time attending. I mentioned the book Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward in the last post and I honestly considered it to be a much "deeper" book than An American Marriage , but I have to admit after hearing what seven other people had to say, I see more in  An American Marriage as I had previously. Shelara pointed out for us the three paternal relationships that add nuance to the story: Roy and Big Roy Roy and Walter Andre and Carlos Shelara: "Walter is a fun house version of Big Roy" After being released, Roy writes a letter to his biological father Walter asking him for advice. This is the first time Roy acknowledges Walter as a father. Up until then Roy only respected Big Roy, the father who had married his mother and adopted him, gave him his name an...