Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine

I believe story is how we make sense of the world. This is not an original thought, but it is why I read books. Author Emily Bernard is a masterful storyteller. She makes writing her life look easy in the memoir Black Is the Body. Yet her life isn’t easy. In the first of ten essays, Bernard writes of being randomly attacked by a stranger with a knife at a coffee shop when she was a graduate student at Yale. All of these essays use her particular lens: a black woman married to a white man, a teacher and a parent to two daughters from Ethiopia. I was carried along by her beautiful writing and a need to follow her storyline (what happens next?). But when I was done reading, I had learned more about race relations in America. I plan on reading this book twice: I have more to learn.