African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Winner of the 1978 National Book Critic's Circle Award for fiction., 305 p., The lives of 5 people, black and white, servant and millionaire, are entertwined. The setting is a Caribbean island. A visitor, young Jadine, neice of the butler and his wife and protegee of the Streets, educated at the Sorbonne, comes home for a visit from Paris. Son, black American street man breaks into the house and all lives are changed. Jadine and Son come together and strive to hold and understand each other as backgrounds and cultural circumstances come into play.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
316 p., She was an 18th century black Suriname woman with millions of dollars. But she sought the forbidden: to marry a white man. Why, when she already had so much? Elisabeth Samson's immense wealth puzzled many early historians who concluded that it could only have been the result of an inheritance from a master with whom she had lived and by whom she had been set free.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
951 p., Story of an elderly African, blind and dying, traveling from Africa to Brazil in search of the lost son for decades. Along the journey, she will tell her life, marked by killings, rape, violence and slavery. Set in an important historical context in the formation of the Brazilian people and narrated in a way in which the historical facts are immersed in daily life and in the lives of the characters.
