Parallel Time
Growing Up in Black and White
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From Pulitzer Prize winner Brent Staples, an evocative memoir that poses universal questions: Where does the family end and the self begin? What do we owe our families, and what do we owe our dreams for ourselves? What part of the past is a gift and what part a shackle? For Brent Staples there is the added dimension of race: moving from a black world into one largely defined by whites.
The oldest song among nine children, Brent grew up in a small industrial town near Philadelphia. First a scholarship to a local college and then one for graduate study at the University of Chicago pulled him out of the close family circle. While he was away, the industries that supported the town failed, and drug dealing rushed in to fill the economic void.
News of arrests and premature deaths among Brent's childhood friends underscored the precariousness of his perch in a world of mostly white achievers. A younger brother became a cocaine dealer and was murdered by one of his "clients." His death propelled Brent into a reconsideration of his childhood and coming-of-age that offers vivid portraits of family and place, of values that supported and pressures that tore apart, of the appeal and pain of entering a predominantly white world, and of the strengths and vulnerabilities of the black world he grew away from.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In spare, affecting prose, Staples, a member of the editorial board of the New York Times , here recalls his hardscrabble boyhood in the mostly black world of Chester, Pa., and the pains and privileges of later joining a middle-class, whiter milieu. The oldest son among nine children, the author feared his violent alcoholic father but gained a nascent writer's sensibility from the kitchen rhythms of his mother and her friends. As if reflecting the dislocations of his 1960s youth, Staples sketches numerous fragments: his older sister slipping toward delinquency, the challenge by bullies at a new school, the untimely shooting death of his cousin. With wry hindsight he recalls his Black Power activism before he took advantage of a scholarship to a local college and won a graduate scholarship to the University of Chicago. The book ends with the first success of Staples's journalism career, which is paralleled with the death of his drug-dealing brother Blake in 1983. He observes resonantly that chance and complexity, not a simple morality tale, must be factored into any accounting for their divergent paths.
