Bøker av Sallie Reynolds

This is the story of Willis and Lila. Willis is a little girl who grows up in the turmoil of Jim Crow Virginia, whose White parents are manipulative and alcoholic. She spends her days with Lila, their Black housekeeper, who is warm and wise to the needs of children, who walks a delicate path between openness to Willis's questions and obedience to "the rules." Lila has a son, Eddie, and must juggle the needs of the two children. This is the story of childhood and adolescence in No One's Land, and Willis and Lila and Eddie are caught in the crosshairs of divergent emotions and possibilities. This scene of the 1940s is interspersed with life 40 years later, when Lila is old and ailing. Willis returns to help her and finds herself in a strange new "university," with surprising things to learn. Eddie is dead, and Willis's child-love for Lila is no longer enough for a full reconnection. An old woman's need is not enough. The culture may have new laws, but few new behaviors, so once more there is a narrow path. You can feel the structure of race relations constraining every move people make. Can these two women really come to know one another?

"Do something, Lila. Make the child be reasonable." "Time to settle," she always says to Mother. "Chirruns need time to settle their feelins." In the racist South of the 1940s, a white child, Sally, dreams of having a happy family. Sparked by her desire to belong, she shares forbidden activities to fill the empty spaces in her heart. Her parents' alcoholism, neglect, and lack of a strong family bond lead her to create her own prohibited family. But will this choice lead to divisions too deep and far-reaching ever to heal? "My gramamma tell me, 'You comin back to me one day, don't you worry. I done writ yo name on the black hen's egg.' 'What's the black hen's egg?' 'A way the old folks had of bindin you to em forever, honey. For ever!' " Virginia Primitive is a semi-autobiographical novel from acclaimed author Sallie Reynolds. Writing just the way the child Sally heard the vernacular of her family and friends, the grown-up Reynolds artfully shapes each word to reflect her conflicted youth in 1940s Virginia and her attempts to return and redeem. Virginia Primitive is a powerful remembrance of lifelong struggle and love. This book is a blending of two lives over two eras, and is told by the narrator as a child and as an adult 40 years later. It is set in Virginia at the very end of the "Old South," when the black "help" did the parenting and house- and yard-work of many white families, and where pain and lies were never acknowledged. Raised half in one world, half in the other, the narrator struggles as a child to establish a base of love and identity. Later, as an adult in New York, she realizes that she is still living a lie, and that the only person she'd really loved in her childhood was a black woman named Lila who'd given her affection and hope. She goes back and finds the same sassy, tough Lila she remembered. But old, poor, and alone. In Virginia Primitive, as the narrator tells four stories, the child's and the adult's and the black's and t