Library Journal
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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.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

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

Publishers Weekly
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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.