The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing [Hardcover]

Carroll Parrott Blue (Author)

Book Description

Series: Constructs Series | Publication Date: January 1, 2003

Individual lives, viewed through the right lens, can reveal the essence of a time and place with startling clarity. In this innovative memoir, filmmaker Carroll Parrott Blue turns her lens on her mother's and her own lives as African American women in the segregated South before and during the Civil Rights era. This mother-daughter story foregrounds two strong women who fought institutionalized racism - one through community activism, the other through artistic creativity - even as the effects of racism and their differing responses to it frayed the very fabric of their relationship.In telling this story, Blue underscores how strongly popular culture images of Blacks affected the lives of individual African Americans. She remembers movies such as "Imitation of Life" that she and her mother viewed together and fought about, ads that portrayed Negroes as unclean, TV shows like Amos 'n' Andy that perpetuated stereotypes - and shows how the unending barrage of demeaning images set her mother on a lifelong quest for self-improvement and middle-class respectability. Blue also describes how the same images, coupled with her mother's relentless efforts to impose essentially white standards of behavior and appearance on her daughter, created in "Blue" the desire to be a shaper of images rather than just a consumer, which eventually led to her becoming a photographer and filmmaker. Sweeping across the whole twentieth century, this mother-daughter story ultimately becomes a seething American history, the story of a growing African American awareness.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Filmmaker Blue extends the boundaries of memoirs with this engrossing look at her life and the life of the nation. Using text, photographs, letters, and periodicals, Blue focuses on her own experiences and those of her mother as black women struggling beyond the constraints of the segregated South. (A companion DVD includes a broader array of media, including film, interviews, e-mails, Web sites, and song lyrics.) Blue intertwines the story of her life with changes in the national awareness of race issues. Her mother's relentless pursuit of self-improvement while, at the same time, harboring self-hatred of her own dark appearance produced a kind of lunacy that inspired Blue herself to closely examine the place of race in the individual's life. She chronicles entertainment and news media images of blacks since her birth in 1943, citing parallel developments in the nation and her own life. This is a lyrical, introspective testimony to endurance and creative energy in developing a strong sense of self. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Having been a filmmaker most of her life, the author of this lyric book makes clear the effects of the movies on real life drama, and vice versa. She plays lights and shadows on the imagined and the real and guides the reader to a truer seeing." Maxine Hong Kingston, author "Not since James Baldwin's essays on Hollywood films have we seen such moving and insightful testimony about how commercial culture forms the frames through which we learn about individual and collective identities. With exceptional flair and vision, Blue creates a completely new form of autobiography that links the public and the private, the personal and the political, and the spectator and subject in exciting new ways." George Lipsitz, author and historian "... an extraordinary first-person account of what it is like growing up as a Black woman in the South and carving out a professional life in a culture distorted by racism. It is one of those books in which one person's life illuminates the complexities of an entire society." Howard Zinn, historian "Carroll Parrott Blue brilliantly captures the chilling interior life of her mother, a professional Black woman in twentieth-century America. This beautifully written life story combines images and illustrations, social history, film and art analysis to create a richly textured work that poignantly explores the intersection of race, gender, class, and region in the construction of a unique identity, and in so doing reveals an awesome talent." Darlene Clark Hine, historian "Blue's words and stories lead readers into her personal and family history, which increases our own ability to contextualize how memory guides our life choices. It is a courageous book that helps us to see America through the lens of an innovative photographer, filmmaker, and passionate writer." Deborah Willis, art historian "In Carroll Parrott Blue's provocative memoir The Dawn at My Back, a montage of words and images unfolds before us with a focused dignity. As if the narrative is moved by light and shadow, like a postmodern scrapbook of experiences and sensations, lives converge into a brilliant canvas portrayed through immense integrity and imagination. The Dawn at My Back is a delight to read and see." Yusef Komunyakaa, poet

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: University of Texas Press; Har/DVD edition (January 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0292705395
• ISBN-13: 978-0292705395
• Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 8.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,889,926 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Innovative Biography!!, February 5, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing (Constructs Series) (Hardcover)

This is one of the most creative approaches to autobiography I've read in a long time. I enjoyed reading and studying it. The book is a highly visual autobiography---part prose, part poetry, part history and historical images. I particularly enjoyed how Ms. Blue revealed the nuances of an African American middle class mother-daughter relationship. Telling her story against the backdrop of the movies that were coming of age when she was growing up provided an enlightening perspective on the powerful influence of American movies on the human psyche. This book is a wonderful gem!

5.0 out of 5 stars great look at my family history, March 2, 2010

By 

Michael E. Benjamin "mikey970" (Houston, Texas, US) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing (Constructs Series) (Hardcover)

this book is part of my family history!! my father's stepfather is the uncle of the author. The pictures allowed my family to see a side of my family right after my mom and dad were married. I very enjoyable tale, that was more fact than fiction. A side of my family I never thought I would ever get to see, let alone read about.

5.0 out of 5 stars POWERFUL ...like Angela's Ashes, February 26, 2003

By 

Mary (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing (Hardcover)

If you appreciated Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt for its presentation and viewpoint of growing up in poverty, you'll like this book for the same reasons--not on the subject of poverty but on race and understanding what it's like to grow up Black (& middle-class) in this country. It just tells, in a straightforward voice, the story of her life.

As a 10 year old, my mother had me read a book called "Black Like Me." It was a white man's experiment with wandering around in the world as a Black man. Carroll Parrott Blue's book is a better, more authentic version written by a Black woman who has lived the experience and is willing to talk about it.

I loved this book because from the first pages, with its pictures and its text, it lets the reader inside like an intimate friend--she shares what most Black people don't talk about. She lets you inside her experience. It's personal, yet it's nonfiction that reads like a novel. She shares her difficult personal relationship with her mother and her view of the world through popular culture that is familiar to all of us--but seen through Black eyes.