Flat-Footed Truths: Telling Black Women's Lives [Paperback]

Patricia Bell-Scott (Author), Juanita Johnson-Bailey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1999

Patricia Bell-Scott, an accomplished editor, has assembled another impressive chorus of revolutionary voices in Flat-Footed Truths. In this collection of candid essays, interviews, poetry and photographs, twenty-seven African-American women writers and artists share their memorable stories of identity and artistic creation. The flat-footed, or naked, truth, as told by the likes of Alice Walker, Sapphire, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, bell hooks, Marcia Ann Gillespie, and Barbara Smith, is a revealing and enlightening one that, for years to come, will resonate, inspire, and encourage the exploration of identity and creative expression of those who read it.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A flat-footed truth is just the rattling, stripped-down bones, ma'am, the hard facts not swaddled by polite frills. This ambitious collection by black women writers and artists aims less at individual stories--though it shares some good ones--and more at the larger issues of truth-telling when it hurts or scares you or shames those intent on silencing you.

Playwright Pearl Cleage drives home the unbearable pain of slavery as she tells us about the first time she heard the voice of Miss Leah, a character in her play Flyin' West. An ex-slave whose babies were taken from her while still suckling, Miss Leah, says, "When they sold my first baby boy offa the place I couldn't breathe for three days." The children she had after emancipation were stolen, too, by a fever that had them "racin' each other to heaven." An unadorned slice of the testimony given by law professor Anita Hill to a U.S. congressional committee considering Clarence Thomas for a seat on the Supreme Court is a mind-boggling refresher course in speaking out in the face of ridicule and disbelief. Sapphire, Alice Walker, and bell hooks are among the other writers who appear here alongside a few visual artists like Gilda Snowden and story-quilter Wini Akissi McQueen. --Francesca Coltrera --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Rather than solicit autobiographical essays, Bell-Scott, a professor of child, family and women's studies at the University of Georgia, and Johnson-Bailey, an assistant professor of adult education at the same university, sought contributors who could comment on the process of how black women relate their stories in their writings and art. The book, organized in three sectionsA"Telling One's Own Life," "Claiming Lives Lost" and "Telling Lives as Resistance"Asucceeds admirably in examining the difficulties and rewards of autobiography. The tone is beautifully set with a piece by bell hooks on the uncertain quality of memory and the struggle to capture the past with the lens of the present. An interview with Sapphire highlights the danger of reductionism as she recounts the story of people who wanted to meet her not because of her work but because she had once been a prostitute. The collection's least pensive but most touching essay is provided by Alice Walker, who writes about her quest to buy a gravestone for writer Zora Neale Hurston. Other pieces include Senate testimony by Anita Hill, the stellar "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" by Audre Lorde, a brief biography of Sojourner Truth by Nell Painter and uplifting poems by Ruth Forman, Elaine Shelly and Becky Birtha. Several essayists discuss not just how to write autobiography but why and when. Bell-Scott and Johnson-Bailey have gathered together a formidable group of women who write with power and grace.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 238 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks (February 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805046291
• ISBN-13: 978-0805046298
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,987,008 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars BROKEN SILENCE, July 21, 2000

By 

Bonita L. Davis - See all my reviews

This review is from: Flat-Footed Truths: Telling Black Women's Lives (Paperback)

Telling the truth can be a painful exercise. Telling the truth can open unhealed wounds with poisonous pus erupting. Once told the silence is broken. Only then can truth be liberating and true healing can take place.

African-american women get the truth told about their lives in this diverse collection of essays, poetry, interviews and photography. Through these various mediums we engage Black women in discussing the difficulties in telling about their lives, healings which took place, relationships that have been broken and reclaimed and the challenges of resisting marginalization.

For years many gifted Black women have been relegated into the obscurity of silence by the culture at large and sadly by their own people. Travel with Alice Walker as she rescues Zora Neale Hurston from the pit of obscurity. Walker shares with us the adventure of one Black woman writer searching to honor another Black woman writer who was placed in obscurity. Zora was independent and shows what happens to a woman with a mind of her own.

Kate Rushin questions us about suicide. Are Black women crazy enough to consider it? We're too busy going through life changes to worry about it. Or do we? Consider Rushin's poetry. Overall this volume presents Black women as they are. They are not the superwomensapphiresbitchesmammies and other stereotypes that are placed upon them but are reflective, intelligent women whose lives have enriched their culture. A brief glimpse of their works enables us to appreciate them for whom and what they are. Through the telling of the truth then we can appreciate ourselves and those women in our communities who have given so much. By all means put this book in your own personal library. I have.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible and Brave, February 21, 1999

By 

Blaise Astra Parker (Statham, GA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Flat-Footed Truths: Telling Black Women's Lives (Paperback)

I bought this book this weekend after hearing Drs. Bell Scott and Johnson-Bailey read from it on campus. I did not expect to be so moved, to experience the power of these stories. Once I did, though, I had to buy the book to read the rest of it. I was amazed by my own emotional reaction to stories so far removed from my life as a young, white, yankee girl.