Black is the body : stories from my grandmother's time, my mother's time, and mine /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably. . . . Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book."

In these twelve deeply personal, connected essays, Bernard details the experience of growing up black in the south with a family name inherited from a white man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop, marrying a white man from the North and bringing him home to her family, adopting two children from Ethiopia, and living and teaching in a primarily white New England college town. Each of these essays sets out to discover a new way of talking about race and of telling the truth as the author has lived it.

" Black Is the Body is one of the most beautiful, elegant memoirs I've ever read. It's about race, it's about womanhood, it's about friendship, it's about a life of the mind, and also a life of the body. But more than anything, it's about love. I can't praise Emily Bernard enough for what she has created in these pages." --Elizabeth Gilbert

WINNER OF THE CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD PRIZE FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PROSE

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND KIRKUS REVIEW S

ONE OF MAUREEN CORRIGAN'S 10 UNPUTDOWNABLE READS OF THE YEAR

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Beginnings (p. xi)
• Scar Tissue (p. 3)
• Teaching the N-Word (p. 21)
• Interstates (p. 45)
• Mother on Earth (p. 70)
• Black Is the Body (p. 84)
• Skin (p. 98)
• White Friend (p. 111)
• Her Glory (p. 122)
• Motherland (p. 137)
• Going Home (p. 163)
• People Like Me (p. 193)
• Epilogue: My Turn (p. 215)
• Acknowledgments (p. 219)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Beginnings This book was conceived in a hospital. It was 2001, and I was recovering from surgery on my lower bowel, which had been damaged in a stabbing. A friend, a writer, came to visit me in the hospital and suggested not only that there was a story to be told about the violence I had survived, but also that my body itself was trying to tell me some­thing, which was that it was time to face down the fear that had kept me from telling the story of the stabbing, as well as other stories that I needed to tell. I began to write essays. The first one I published was "Teaching the N-Word." Over the next few years, more essays followed, along with several attempts to write about the stabbing. I couldn't tell that story yet because I didn't know what it meant. It took seven more years for me to understand that the experience of being at the wrong end of a hunting knife was only the situation, not the story itself; it was the stage, not the drama. In The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, Vivian Gornick writes: "The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say." The setting of "Scar Tissue," which is the essay I even­tually wrote about being stabbed, is my gut; the blood let flow by the knife is the trail I followed until I discovered the story, which is the mystery of storytelling itself, and how hard it is to tell the whole truth. Each essay in this book is anchored in this mystery, in blood. They are also rooted in contradictions, primary among them being that the stabbing unleashed the storyteller in me. In more than one way, that bizarre act of violence set me free. But, of course, the stabbing has been a source of mis­ery as well as opportunity. For instance, I suffered from recurrent, excruciating stomach pain for many years before another trip to the hospital revealed that I had developed adhesions in my bowel. The surgeon was able to untangle my intestines and scar tissue, but he warned me that the adhesions would return. There was nothing I could do to prevent or predict them. "You're just unlucky," he said sympathetically. The pain, he assured me, would be ran­dom and severe. It did return, thundered, again, through­out my body, and sent me back to the hospital, where a third surgeon ceded to the inherent mystery of the malady and confessed that medicine was more art than science. The gift of his honesty was, to me, as valuable as any solu­tion to the problem would have been. Once I accepted the randomness of the situation in my bowel, life took on a new urgency, and so did the desire to understand it. I turned to art over science, story over solu­tion. I found a voice. The book imagined in 2001 began to take shape in a need to know, to explore, to understand, before it was too late. Insofar as the personal essay is, at heart, an attempt to grasp the mysteries of life, the form made sense to me on a visceral level. The need to under­stand, in fact, was what engendered the stabbing in the first place: I met the knife head on. Something in me just needed to know. Each essay in this book was born in a struggle to find a language that would capture the totality of my experi­ence, as a woman, a black American, a teacher, writer, mother, wife, and daughter. I wanted to discover a new way of telling; I wanted to tell the truth about life as I have lived it. That desire evolved into this collection, which includes a story about adoption that is as pragmatic as it is romantic; a portrait of interracial marriage that is absent of hand-wringing; and a journey into the word "nigger" that includes as much humor as grief. These stories grew into an entire book meant to contribute something to the American racial drama besides the enduring narrative of black innocence and white guilt. That particular narrative is not false, of course, which accounts for its endurance, but there are other true stories to tell, stories steeped in defiance of popular assumptions about race, whose con­tours are shaped by unease with conventional discussions about race relations. These other true stories I needed to explore, but I was mainly driven by a need to engage in what Zora Neale Hurston calls "the oldest human longing--self-revelation." The only way I knew how to do this was by letting the blood flow, and following the trail of my own ambivalence. I was not stabbed because I was black, but I have always viewed the violence I survived as a metaphor for the violent encounter that has generally characterized Ameri­can race relations. The man who stabbed me was white. But more meaningful to me than his skin was the look in his eyes, which were vacant of emotion. There was no connection between us, no common sphere, yet we were suddenly and irreparably bound by a knife, an attachment that cost us both: him, his freedom; me, my wholeness. Revisiting that wound has been a way of putting myself back together. The equation of writing and regeneration is fundamental in black American experience. So, if race was not an essential factor in what brought me into contact with a hunting knife, I have certainly treated the wound with the salve that I inherited from people whose experi­ences of blackness shaped their lives as fully and poetically as it has shaped mine. I am most interested in blackness at its borders, where it meets whiteness, in fear and hope, in anguish and love, just as I am most drawn to the line between self and other, in family, friendship, romance, and other intimate relationships. Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intan­gible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experi­ence emerges sometimes randomly and unpredictably in life as I have lived it. It is inconsistent, continuously in flux, and yet also a constant condition that I carry in and on my body. It is a condition that encompasses beauty, misery, wonder, and opportunity. In its inherent contra­dictions, utter mysteries, and bottomlessness as a reservoir of narratives, race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book. Excerpted from Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine by Emily Bernard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Bernard, a Black literature professor from the South who now lives in Vermont, writes about the role of race in her life and her family's.

Publishers Weekly Review

Bernard, a University of Vermont professor of English and race and ethnic studies, intimately explores her life through the lens of race in this contemplative and compassionate collection of personal essays. As a Yale graduate student, Bernard was the victim of a mass stabbing, an event at the center of the book's opening essay, "Beginnings," and her premise that writing about and remembering a traumatic past is a process "fundamental in black American experience." She aims to "contribute something to the American racial drama besides the enduring narrative of black innocence and white guilt," in essays that include "Teaching the N-Word" and "Motherland," about adopting and raising two girls from Ethiopia with her white husband. Bernard's voice throughout is personable yet incisive in exploring the lived reality of race. By examining her family's Southern roots and her present life in Vermont, in "Interstates," she explores the differences and the bridge between white and black in her life. In "Black Is the Body," a beautiful reflection on racial difference and disparities, she acknowledges how race has informed "everything I do, and everything I write." Bernard's wisdom and compassion radiate throughout this thoughtful collection. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Bernard covers four generations in her family in a dozen essays offering unexpected revelations about race and life experiences. Bernard explains that the book was conceived in a hospital in 2001 when she was recovering from surgery to repair an injury sustained when she and six others were stabbed by a deranged white male while they were sitting in a New Haven, Connecticut, coffeehouse. Bernard then remembers her grandmother and the stories she told about the terror of growing up in Mississippi during Jim Crow. Bernard's parents migrated from Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee, with their children; there Bernard recalls a segregated, close-knit, church-centered community. Her parents graduated from Fisk University and the Meharry Medical College; she earned a doctorate at Yale, and as a young professor married a white academic, who figures prominently in the book, along with the two Ethiopian daughters they adopt as babies. Bernard's musings about teaching, interracial marriage, and family are quickly read and richly engaging.--Grace Jackson-Brown Copyright 2019 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

A memoir in essays about race that is as lucid as the issue is complicated.Though Bernard (English and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies/Univ. of Vermont; Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White, 2012, etc.) is a scholar, her latest book is almost devoid of jargon. Instead, the writing is deeply felt, unflinchingly honest, and openly questioning. The author makes no claims to have all the answers about what it means to be a black woman from the South who has long lived and worked in the very white state of Vermont, where she might be the first black person that some of her students have encountered. From the evidence on display here, Bernard is a top-notch teacher who explores territory that many of her students might prefer to leave unexplored. She is married to a white professor of African-American Studies, and she ponders how his relationship with the students might be different than hers, how he is comfortable letting them call him by his first name while she ponders whether to adopt a more formal address. The couple also adopted twin daughters from Ethiopia, which gives all of them different perspectives on the African-American hyphenate. But it also illuminates a legacy of storytelling, from her mother and the Nashville where the author was raised and her grandparents' Mississippi. "I could not leave the South behind. I still can't," she writes, and then elaborates on the relationship between blacks and whites there: "We were ensnared in the same historical drama. I was forgedmind and bodyin the unending conversation between southern blacks and whites. I don't hate the South. To despise it would be to despise myself." The book's genesis and opening is her life-threatening stabbing by a deranged white stranger, a seemingly random crime. Toward the end of the book, she realizes that "in every scar there is a story. The salve is the telling itself."A rare book of healing on multiple levels. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

EMILY BERNARD was born and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and received her PhD in American studies from Yale University. She has been the recipient of grants from the Ford Foundation, the NEH, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Resident Fellowship at Harvard University. Her essays have been published in journals and anthologies, among them The American Scholar, Best American Essays, and Best African American Essays . She is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont.