Customer Reviews

Soul Sister (30th Anniversary Edition)

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A very interesting book. Halsell has a history of putting herself in untenable positions purely to find out what they are like ("She has lived on a fishing junk in Hong Kong with a Chinese family of twenty-eight, traveled 2,000 miles down the Amazon by tug, and has crossed the Andes by jeep."), and then writing about them (her newspaper journalism has been "datelined Russia, China, Korea, and Vietnam"). Inspired by Griffin's "Black Like Me", she undertook to change the color of her skin (the process and results of which are a story unto themselves at the beginning of the book), donned dark contact lenses, and embarked on a journey through Harlem and Jackson, Mississippi in skin that was not her own.

The extreme sides of bigotry and compassion that she encountered are an account worth reading for any American, white or black, who is curious about how we humans receive eachother. It must be pointed out however that as a rather privileged white American, Halsell was left still lacking the experience of being raised black in our still-strictured country. Still, for lacking this total viewpoint, her "discoveries" are remarkably compelling on a simply human level (a point at which perhaps all things should be judged).

Whether she was wrong or right to do what she did, she did it for her own reasons, and indeed resisted withholding the truth of her real person from many of her black companions, preferring honesty (and being treated with dislike in some cases) to deceit. Overall very worthwhile reading, if only to provoke oneself into thinking about things many of us would prefer to ignore and let lie in the back of our heads instead of openly and objectively considering. And please, don't try to make yourself feel better when reading by saying, "Oh, well, this happened thirty years ago," when we should all be aware that these invisible walls and boundaries still exist all around us even today.

This book is a must read. I have read it twice, loaned out my copy, it's falling apart and I will order another one. I think I like it a bit better than BLACK LIKE ME, but both will leave you shocked and shattered. Things have changed, but things haven't changed, too, and I as a Caucasian male do not doubt that this book is as relevant today as when it was written.

Ms. Halsell (sadly, she died in August 2000) sees that the issues she is confronting and dealing with can't be simply ascribed to "race" issues, but go deeper, to matters of the human heart and the isolation that each one of us must bear and deal with as individual human beings in a world of sin and suffering and pain. Hence, she doesn't come to the easy answer of "If only Blacks and Whites (or Jews and Gentiles or Hispanics or American Indians or Palestinians and Israelis, etc.) would understand each other better, these problems wouldn't exist." She won't be that simplistic, and for that reason, SOUL SISTER raises (or should raise) larger issues in the readers' minds than the subject matter might lead one to expect.

Read it. Read it now. Read it often.

should be required in classrooms in America!!! I found this book on the "free book" shelf in our local library and truly found a treasure!! Who knew that someone such as Halsell went to such lengths to find out how blacks lived and thrived both in Harlem and in Mississippi???

Teh best things in life are free...and truly this was a great read!!!

This book goes hand in hand with In Their Shoes, by the same author.
This should be required reading in school.

Inspired by John Howard Griffin's "Black Like Me", Grace Halsell decided to see how things looked through a woman's eyes. Like Griffin, she saw a doctor and was prescribed the chemical that darkened her skin enough to pass as African-American. Then off she went to the Deep South to do her covert participant observation of white-generated racism.

Among her ordeals is the true account of arriving at a white family's house to work as a maid, only to be accosted by the husband when the wife went away. Luckily for Grace, the wife returned because she forgot something and saved her from probably getting raped. The kicker is that the husband was a high official in the Ku Klux Klan, a perfect cover for his rapes of black women. Who would believe a black woman accusing, say, Jeb Bush of rape? Similary, no one would believe the victims of this Klansman.

The highly readable recollections of Grace's ordeals during her short time in the South lack the sociological "thick description" of Griffin's work, but the accounts are nevertheless engaging. Halsell is an investigative journalist and her job is to share with us what happened; she doesn't dig into why this happening. Griffin's exposure to Catholic social philosophy helps him to analyze what is happening in terms of class conflict and status relations, which are all tied to power. And Griffin is a Southerner whereas Halsell is a Northerner, and that makes a difference as well. Nonetheless Halsell's investigative piece is a valuable compliment to Griffin's "Black Like Me".