Blond Black And Blue

Caitlyn and her children live in fear of the next attack. Shes tried to play to role of dutiful wife to her abusive and violent husband, but one night, as shes hiding in terror in the closet, she realizes that she wont survive much longer. Something has to changeand quickly. Shes heard all the excuses, and nothing changes. She has endured his abuse for years; despite repeated promises that each time is the last, she knows the truth. She is numb to the true horror of her life. Her children are too young to be so knowledgeable about the deception of life in an abusive household. When Caitlyn makes the decision to leave her husband behind, it is the most terrifying day of her new life. She fi nds refuge at the lake home of her loving Aunt Betty, but even there shes not truly safe. As Caitlyn tries to build a new, optimistic life far away from her dangerous past, she must now battle new demons. But with faith in the love of her family, trust in her own abilities, and hope that she truly deserves a more peaceful life, she is confi dent that she will escape the cycle of violence.

"Poignant and funny, studded with characters who haunt your imagination long after you've read the final page." -Anne Hillerman, New York Times bestselling author of The Way of the Bear on Kelsey's Where the Hurt Is Burr, Oklahoma, summer, 1976: On the eve of America's Bicentennial celebration, a notorious local politician is assassinated at a campaign rally. The case seems open and shut; the killer-a young, anonymous homeless woman-is shot by police at the scene. With the death of the assassin, the lead investigator is content to write off the crime as a random act. Burr's Chief of Police, Emmett Hardy, isn't so sure. Hardy becomes convinced the killing is the culmination of something deeper and darker-a violent conspiracy that not only makes a mockery of justice but ultimately threatens his life and those around him. A tale of murder, revenge, and intrigue, Blond Hair, Blue Eyes is Emmett Hardy's most difficult and exciting case yet.

A meditation on race and identity from one of our most provocative cultural critics. A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family’s multigenerational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a “black” father from the segregated South and a “white” mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of “black blood” makes a person black. This was so fundamental to his self-conception that he’d never rigorously reflected on its foundations—but the shock of his experience as the black father of two extremely white-looking children led him to question these long-held convictions. It is not that he has come to believe that he is no longer black or that his kids are white, Williams notes. It is that these categories cannot adequately capture either of them—or anyone else, for that matter. Beautifully written and bound to upset received opinions on race, Self-Portrait in Black and White is an urgent work for our time.

Rediscover the “most important book on black-white relationships” in America in a special 50th anniversary edition introduced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Walker Percy) “The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people . . . Any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black. They are all interrelated one way or another.” These words, written by Albert Murray at the height of the Black Power movement, cut against the grain of their moment, and announced the arrival of a major new force in American letters. In his 1970 classic The Omni-Americans, Murray took aim at protest writers and social scientists who accentuated the “pathology” of race in American life. Against narratives of marginalization and victimhood, Murray argued that black art and culture, particularly jazz and blues, stand at the very headwaters of the American mainstream, and that much of what is best in American art embodies the “blues-hero tradition”—a heritage of grace, wit, and inspired improvisation in the face of adversity. Reviewing The Omni-Americans in 1970, Walker Percy called it “the most important book on black-white relationships . . . indeed on American culture . . . published in this generation.” As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. makes clear in his introduction, Murray’s singular poetic voice, impassioned argumentation, and pluralistic vision have only become more urgently needed today.