"In this collection of eight gut-wrenching short stories, Patrick explores the hardships endured by black men and women over two centuries of enslavement and oppression. Readers look through the eyes of a young woman whose mother's life is endangered in the colored waiting room of a doctor's office while the uninterested white doctors and nurses eat a leisurely lunch, and they feel the indignity of a Catholic schoolroom where a little black girl is punished for daring to look her teacher in the eye. They see the loss of reality experienced by a mother who sees her beloved son maimed and lynched. They mark the difficulty of trying to transcend an intraracial prejudice as a beautiful young woman loses a kidney to mercury poisoning caused by a lightening cream. They share the sickening realization with the accidental slaveholder that his seemingly benign business venture involves trafficking in human souls. They travel with a boy who witnesses his only male relatives shot to death on the steps of a library for demanding their right to vote, but who finds redemption after returning from Vietnam and realizing the strength of that legacy and the mandate it imposes on his future. Indeed, there is some measure of redemption in nearly every story, but it is almost always won through the shedding of blood. These are ugly truths exposed, brought to life with an immediacy that breaks through the gauzy filters of history.

Teachers looking for a YA complement to Richard Wright will find the multiple characters' stories here both useful and bracing." --The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books.