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Generations: A Memoir

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$14.95
A moving family biography in which the poet traces her family history back through Jim Crow, the slave trade, and all the way to the women of the Dahomey people in West Africa.

Buffalo, New York. A father's funeral. Memory.

In Generations, Lucille Clifton's formidable poetic gift emerges in prose, giving us a memoir of stark and profound beauty. Her story focuses on the lives of the Sayles family: Caroline, "born among the Dahomey people in 1822," who walked north from New Orleans to Virginia in 1830 when she was eight years old; Lucy, the first black woman to be hanged in Virginia; and Gene, born with a withered arm, the son of a carpetbagger and the author's grandmother.

Clifton tells us about the life of an African American family through slavery and hard times and beyond, the death of her father and grandmother, but also all the life and love and triumph that came before and remains even now.

Generations is a powerful work of determination and affirmation. "I look at my husband," Clifton writes, "and my children and I feel the Dahomey women gathering in my bones."

ISBN/SKU: 
9781681375878
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Author: 
Lucille Clifton
Publisher: 
New York Review of Books

Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong

$14.95

Award-winning author Linda LeGarde Grover interweaves family and Ojibwe history with stories from Misaabekong (the place of the giants) on Lake Superior

Long before there was a Duluth, Minnesota, the massive outcropping that divides the city emerged from the ridge of gabbro rock running along the westward shore of Lake Superior. A great westward migration carried the Ojibwe people to this place, the Point of Rocks. Against this backdrop--Misaabekong, the place of the giants--the lives chronicled in Linda LeGarde Grover's book unfold, some in myth, some in long-ago times, some in an imagined present, and some in the author's family history, all with a deep and tenacious bond to the land, one another, and the Ojibwe culture.

Within the larger history, Grover tells the story of her ancestors' arrival at the American Fur Post in far western Duluth more than two hundred years ago. Their fortunes and the family's future are inextricably entwined with tales of marriages to voyageurs, relocations to reservation lands, encounters with the spirits of the lake and wood creatures, the renewal of life--in myth and in art, the search for meaning in the transformations of our day is always vital. Finally, in one man's struggles, age-old tribulations, the intergenerational traumas of extended families and communities, and a uniquely Ojibwe appreciation for the natural and spiritual worlds converge, forging the Ojibwe worldview and will to survive as his legacy to his descendants.

Blending the seen and unseen, the old and the new, the amusing and the tragic and the hauntingly familiar, this lyrical work encapsulates a way of life forever vibrant at the Point of Rocks.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781517911935
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Author: 
Linda Legarde Grover
Publisher: 
University of Minnesota Press