This book is about my searcher for answers. I started going through some things in my life. I wanted someone to help me through all of it. Someone who wouldn't judge me for the chooses I made. Someone that I could be sure would love me know matter what. Some people told me that God would do that. But I wanted to know that for myself. I wanted to know more about God. I wanted to try to get some kind of understanding of the way he loves us. I wanted to if he really would be there for us me know matter what I did or what I've done. I had a lot of questions that needed to be answered. I wanted to know if anything that people told me about was true or not. I wanted to know about God. So I started praying for answers. When I got tired I started to pray. When I started to feel like I couldn't go on I started to pray. When I cried and felt alone I started to pray. When I prayed I felt better about everything that I was going through. Somehow I new that everything would be all right. I have leaned so much about God's power and love. I wanted to start what I leaned about God with other people. Through my writing I could convey the truth about what I wanted to know about God. And what I leaned about God and the struggles I had to go through. So I started writing it all down. What I leaned about God's love. What I leaned about God's mercy. So out of all that came this book that I'm very very proud of. And I hope that this book will touch your heart and help you to remember that know matter what you do and know matter what you're going through God is there with you. That is a lesson I had to lean on my on.

Black Mothers and the National Body Politic: The Narrative Positioning of the Black Maternal Body from the Civil War Period through the Present focuses on the struggles and triumphs of black motherhood in six works of narrative prose composed from the Civil War period through the present. Andrea Powell Wolfe examines the functioning of the black maternal body to both define and undermine ideal white womanhood; the physical scarring of the black mother and the reclamation of the black maternal body as a site of subversion and nurturance as well as erotic empowerment; and the construction of oppressive discourses surrounding black female bodies and reproduction and the development of resistance to these types of discourses. These tensions undergird a multifaceted discussion of the narrative positioning of the black maternal body within and in relationship to the national body politic, an inherently exclusionary and restrictive metaphorical entity constructed and socially contracted over time by an already politically empowered citizenry. Ultimately, close analysis of the texts under study suggests that the United States-as a figurative body complete with imagined "parts" that perform separate functions, from intelligence to labor, ingestion to expulsion-has simultaneously used and cast off the black maternal body over the course of centuries.