Black is the body : stories from my grandmother's time, my mother's time, and mine / Emily Bernard.

Beginnings -- Scar tissue -- Teaching the N-word -- Interstates -- Mother on Earth -- Black is the body -- Skin -- White friend -- Her glory -- Motherland -- Going home -- People like me -- Epilogue: my turn.

In these twelve deeply personal, connected essays, Bernard details the experience of growing up black in the south with a family name inherited from a white man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop while taking graduate studies at Yale, marrying a white man from the north and bring him home to her family, adopting two babies from Ethiopia, and living and teaching in a primarily white New England college town. Each of these essays goes beyond a narrative of black innocence and white guilt and sets out to discover a new way of telling the truth as the author has lived it.