Growing Up Nigger Rich [Hardcover]

Gwendoline Fortune (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 2002

An intricately crafted novel of homecoming and the South. Gayla Tyner is haunted by the South, what it means, has meant, and is becoming, as she struggles to find her place as professor, mother, wife, and daughter.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gwendoline Y. Fortune's Growing up Nigger Rich is appealing, but considerably less provocative than its title suggests. Black professor Gayla Turner returns during a sabbatical to the small Southern town where she grew up, haunted by memories of racism. The subplot of her friend Louise's current involvement with a white man echoes a doomed interracial love affair in the town decades ago. Meanwhile, Gayla worries over her own tenuous relationship with her father, an aging doctor, and remains all but oblivious to her husband's philandering back home. While Fortune's understatement is effective at times, one hopes she will raise her voice next time out.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Born in Houston, Texas, Gwendoline Y. Fortune grew up hearing stories of her mixed blood heritage: a free-born black great-grandfather, Native Americans, Scots-Irishmen, a cowboy grandfather, a Confederate great-grandfather, and relatives who were missionaries in pre-World War II China. She went to college at the age of fifteen and has been writing ever since. Selections from Growing Up Nigger Rich, also published by Pelican, placed in the top twelve entries of the annual Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society competition and placed second in the National Black Writersí Conference Awards. Gwendoline Fortune lives in Saxapahaw, North Carolina.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Pelican Publishing (February 28, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565549635
• ISBN-13: 978-1565549630
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,971,358 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breaking Open the Stones, April 1, 2002

By 

Joanna Catherine Scott (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Growing Up Nigger Rich (Hardcover)

I took Gwendoline Fortune's new memoir-as-novel Growing Up Nigger Rich to read on the plane to San Francisco this weekend. Once started, I could not close it up to sleep, but read straight through start to finish. It is a rich and complex novel, well-wrought and fascinating, especially for someone like me who did not grow up in the South, or in America at all, but in Australia.
The story centers on Gayla Tyner, daughter of a respected Black doctor in Carolton, South Carolina, who comes back home to the painful task of confronting, and eventually overcoming, old hurts. As Fortune says, It takes a lot of weight to break open the stones.'
Gayla's story gives us a different perspective on growing up in the segregated South. It gives us the world of the educated, upper-class Black, showing us what it was like to feel equal, even superior, to the white people who, by reason of their whiteness, felt free to call her nigger coon,' jigaboo,' darky,' tarbaby,' old yellow thing,' a world where even the compliment of being asked to sing for wealthy white groups, who thought nobody could sing like "the Colored,"' was an insult, a world of dislocation, of not knowing exactly where we're from in Africa,' of white relatives who don't come to Christmas dinner.'
Gayla's world is richly peopled by characters who walk right off the page into the heart. Their stories wind in and out of each other, turning back to look behind, leaping forward to peer into the future, a kaleidoscope of past, present, and hoped-for all happening together, the way they do in all of us.
Much in this rich layering is dark, but the reader is not left in darkness. With her keen eye for the telling detail, Fortune gives us glimpses of the hope that has grown up since desegregation: a black hand in a white, a passing smile from white to black, a reference to the easiness together of black and white in her children's generation.
Running through Gayla's story is the story of her husband, George, a compulsive and eventually doomed philanderer, who loved women . . . Tall, short, light, dark, young, or a little mature. The only ladies George ignored were ugly ones.' Fortune shows him, a newly minted PhD, applying for his first real job, as an Aeronautical Engineer, and being redirected to Altman's Custodial Placement.' His story gives Fortune the vehicle to voice her concern for the plight of her generation's Black man who, knew how it felt to be invisible,' and as a result, can't move forward, and . . . will not move backward.'
Nigger Rich has a strong visual and tactile impact. Gayla's neighborhood comes alive with wonderful details of food and clothes and customs, the sound of voices. She gives us a place where dogs wag their tails in simple pleasure for a clear, warm day,' a place of old women, the grandmothers, who nurture all the children of their neighborhood.' Here is a funeral feast set out on the round, oak dining table, baskets of golden, hot, homemade rolls wrapped in large, white, starched, cotton napkins, a buttery aroma announcing their entrance . . . Silver platters high with home-fried chicken, cut-glass bowls of creamy potato salad edged with slivers of oily pimiento, and sliced boiled eggs sprinkled with paprika, lined the dining table and sideboard. Coconut, pecan, and sweet potato pies filled two card tables because there was no room for them anywhere else.'
Fortune spends some time considering the concept of how to name her people: Black? Negro? Colored? African American? She comes down to the delicious notion of People of Color.' What a lovely phrase, and so apt. Never have I read a story with such a feast of skin color: yellow, high-yellow, molasses, umber, caramel, black-as-night, coffee, honey, cocoa, taupe, bamboo-brown, copper, buttered toast, henna, ebony, tea, chocolate. It's like a poem, or as one of her people says, "There's nothing prettier than a roomful of us, all decked out . . . A flower garden with all the colors of the rainbow. Yes, ma'am."
Growing Up Nigger Rich is a lovely book: an engrossing story, an education, and a finger pointing toward hope for true and lasting amity between the races.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Unique Treat, April 2, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Growing Up Nigger Rich (Hardcover)

This novel centers on the story of one black woman's attempt to come to terms with her heritage and therefore also the stories of the many people who shaped her existence. It is especially important for the light it sheds on a stratum of black society that has been relatively ignored. With many characters and deftly handled subplots, it has the feel of a perceptive, big-hearted, and visionary memoir. It would take a stone to read this book without gaining sympathetic insight into the endless trying to find a way of being, the exquisite and exhausting sensitivity to the nuances of a dangerous environment, the poignancy of living as "reluctant refugees."

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Growing Up Nigger Rich: Wealthy in Wisdom, October 4, 2002

By 

Jan Maher "Jan Maher" (Northcountry) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Growing Up Nigger Rich (Hardcover)

Gwendoline Y. Fortune's novel Growing Up Nigger Rich seems at first to tell a straightforward, simple story. College professor Gayla Tyner pays a visit of determined self-discovery to her parents and hometown. Caught in the ambiguities of a troubled marriage relationship, she contemplates her family relationships, connects with old friends, considers her options.
But scratch the surface of Fortune's story, and you find a commentary full of wisdom and experience that proves the old saying that the personal is political. Gayla embodies the peculiar social and economic history of this country. She is a daughter of privilege, yet as vulnerable as any African American to the insults and outrages of racism. Through her story, we see the history of social change in this country and are confronted with troubling questions that remain. Who are we? What have we gained, and what have we lost? And most importantly, where are we going?
Growing Up Nigger Rich is about reconciliation: Gayla's need for personal reconciliation with herself, her father, her husband's infidelity; but also America's need for reconciliation of its present with its past. Thanks to Gwendoline Fortune's skill as a storyteller, this is an alternately painful and exhilirating, ultimately enriching and most engaging process.

(c)2002 Jan Maher