This book is an autobiography of the childhood of Katherine Dunham,
the dancer- but there is little internal evidence of this. The
protagonist is "she" or "the girl", and dancing enters almost not
at all. This approach lends a curious, cool distant quality- it is
almost like a book about someone else. Albert Dunham, Katherine's
father, married twice- both times women much older than himself.
His first wife, Katherine's mother, was French-Canadian-Indian,
fair and wealthy. The descriptions of an upper middle class life
with houses and horses on the shifting line between many shades of
color are fascinating. After the mother's death, the family knew
the poverty of Negro city life, and Albert, though re-married,
never again succeeded in pulling his family- or himself- together.
It is probably these agonizing scenes of disintegration that are
responsible for the cool, literate style of the whole book- as if
this material were still too painful to handle directly, as well it
might be... An interesting study of a life most whites, and
probably few Negroes, have ever experienced in such profound
variety- though actually the author is less concerned with the
"problem" of color than with that of personalities under terrible
stress. (Kirkus Reviews)
An internationally known dancer, choreographer, and gifted
anthropologist, Katherine Dunham was born to a black American
tailor and a well-to-do French Canadian woman twenty years his
senior. This book is Dunham's story of the chaos and conflict that
entered her childhood after her mother's early death. In stark
prose, she tells of growing up in both black and white households
and of the divisions of race and class in Chicago that become the
harsh realities of her young life. A riveting narrative of one
girl's struggle to transcend the painful confusions of a family and
culture in turmoil, Dunham's story is full of the clarity, candor,
and intelligence that lifted her above her troubled beginnings.
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