From Publishers Weekly
Using her 1997 Emmy Award– winning documentary,
Secret Daughter, as inspiration for her memoir of the same name, Cross, a TV producer and journalism professor at Columbia University, narrates her life as the daughter of a white woman and a well-known black vaudevillian (Jimmy Cross) who was handed over to a black couple for rearing. Several elements fight for the center of this memoir: the emotional roller coaster of life spent between her bourgeois adoptive black family in Atlantic City and her Hollywood show business biological mother (who usually introduced her daughter as a niece or having been adopted); her undergraduate difficulties at the
Harvard Crimson, "a club of smart-assed white boys and prefeminist women, more butch than liberated"; and life in the '60s ("It was the season of Angela Davis's trial, so prisons were hip"). She also weaves in gossipy show business tales that follow the career trajectory of
F Troop actor Larry Storch as well as some settling of scores (Jerry Lewis borrowed from her father's act "Stump and Stumpy" but didn't send flowers to his funeral). Unfortunately, the bits and pieces fail to cohere, and her narrative often falls flat ("I rose from the piano stool and crossed the room") in what is otherwise an intriguing story.
(May 22) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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At four years old, Cross was sent by her white mother, Norma, to live with a childless black couple in Atlantic City. Norma had finally comes to terms with the difficulty of raising a mixed-race child in the 1950s, especially after the failure of her relationship with the child's father, a comic who was part of the famous black vaudeville act Stump and Stumpy. For Cross, it was the beginning of a life of confusion about racial identity, straddling the middle-class black world, where well-mannered behavior might stave off mistreatment, and her mother's freewheeling bohemian life of white entertainers. Her mother confided that if June hadn't darkened after birth, she would have kept her. After Norma's marriage to actor Larry Storch, it was even more urgent that it not be known that she had an illegitimate, mixed-race child, and Cross had to pretend to be Norma's niece or adopted daughter. This is a poignant follow-up on Cross' Emmy Award-winning documentary portraying the strains of a complicated family structure, ruptured by race, secrecy, and human fallibility.
Vanessa BushCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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