Volume 40, Number 18 · November 4, 1993
The Best of Everything
By Darryl Pinckney
Waiting to Exhale
by Terry McMillan
Pocket Books, 400 pp., $5.99 (paper)
Home Repairs
by Trey Ellis
Simon and Schuster, 332 pp., $21.00
Fannie Lou Hamer once said that she didn't want to be liberated from men. Her husband was, after all, six foot-two. There was a time, only two decades ago, when many black women looked at the women's movement as a middle-class white concern, a passing political fashion, or argued that black women and white women wanted very different things. No one, they pointed out, expected white women to express solidarity with white men. For black women as black people the real struggle was elsewhere, and it might prove endless. Though Toni Cade Bambara's anthology, The Black Woman (1970), discussed the 'double jeopardy' of being both black and female, the historical moment belonged more to the mood of Elaine Brown's album for the Panthers, which included a song with the refrain, 'We'll just have to get guns and be men.' The year of Sisterhood is Powerful, 1971, was also the year George Jackson was assassinated in Soledad Prison.
Review, 5562 words
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