Crossing the Color Line Readings in Black and White

The complex truth about the color line--its destructive effects, painful legacy, clandestine crossings, possible erasure--is revealed more often in private than in public & has sometimes been visited more easily by novelists than historians. In this tradition, Crossing the Color Line, a powerful collection of nineteen contemporary stories, speaks the unspoken, explores the hidden, & voices both fear & hope about relationships between blacks & whites. The volume opens with stories by Alice Adams, Toni Cade Bambara, Ellen Douglas, Reynolds Price, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, & John A. Williams that focus on misunderstandings created by racial stereotypes & by mislabeling cultural differences. In a second group of stories, Anthony Grooms, Randall Kenan, James Alan McPherson, Toni Morrison, Frances Sherwood, Alice Walker, & Joan Williams examine situations that promote understanding, even when relationships between blacks & whites are complicated by charged issues of politics, religion, class, gender, & sexual orientation. The final section features recent stories that turn on personal similarities as often as racial differences, but even here the legacy of racism lingers. It tests the emerging friendship of Alyce Miller's women, the professional relationship of David Means's men, the alliances between Clifford Thompson's college students, the romance of Reginald McKnight's interracial couple, & the business venture between Elizabeth Spencer's white woman & black man. Much of the power & poignancy of these recent stories, however, comes from their portrayal of how equal & amiable relationships can cross the color line.Jones, Suzanne W. is the author of 'Crossing the Color Line Readings in Black and White' with ISBN 9781570033766 and ISBN 1570033765.