The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey
Realizing that her light skin and "good hair" conspired to give her a unique,  unasked-for perspective on the racial divide in the United States, African American poet Toi Derricotte  inscribed her anguish in two decades' worth of journal entries.The Black Notebooksrecords  countless moments when Derricotte was showered with offhand entitlements and racist confidences by  whites who assumed she, too, was white. She speaks ambivalently of milking such moments, deliberately  making end runs around her dark-skinned husband, Bruce, while looking for a home in an all-white suburb  or hoping for a decent hotel room. Derricotte talks bluntly, too, of a self-loathing that accompanies being  black in America and of not being "black enough." Her honest, angry, painful truth-telling  veers into self-absorption and repetition, but perhaps that's fitting: racism hammers away at people in tiny  and huge events repeated day after day. Says Derricotte, "My skin causes certain problems  continuously, problems that open the issue of racism over and over like a wound."--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.