February 20, 2023
Black Coffee with White Friends blogger Walker examines her relationship to family, race, and religion in this achingly beautiful debut. When the author was five, her mother drove her five children to their grandparents’ house in a suburb outside Cleveland and left them there, ostensibly so they would go to better schools. But, “to this day, in many ways, I’m still waiting for my mother to come back for me,” muses Walker, who grew up bouncing between her grandparents’ mostly white suburban community and her mother’s all-Black Cleveland neighborhood. Though her mother taught her to love her Blackness (“Everything in neighborhood was dark and beautiful”), Walker endured soul-crushing racism at school, and as she grew up, her mother’s mental illness further strained the relationship between the two. When Walker was in her 20s, her mother was convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison. Walker writes of drawing strength from her faith as she struggled with anger and guilt (“I wish I could have saved her from all of it. But I am her daughter, not her savior”) and worked to come to terms with her mother’s outcome and her own identity. Walker’s gift is her soaring imagination and lyrical prose, which is reminiscent of a church lament—a song “sung like a wailing prayer, like a siren song to the heavenly host.” This captivates.