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In 1975 Genna Hewett-Meade's college roommate died a mysterious, violent death partway through their freshman year. Minette Swift had been assertive, fiercely individualistic, and one of the few black girls at their exclusive, "enlightened" college—and Genna, daughter of a prominent civil defense lawyer, felt duty-bound to protect her at all costs. But fifteen years later, while reconstructing Minette's tragic death, Genna is forced to painfully confront her own past life and identity...and her deepest beliefs about social obligation in a morally gray world.
Black Girl / White Girl is a searing double portrait of race and civil rights in postVietnam America, captured by one of the most important literary voices of our time.
A born storyteller, Oates has been spinning yarns since she was a little girl too young to even write. Instead, she would communicate her stories through drawings and paintings. When she received her very first typewriter at the age of 14, her creative floodgates opened with a torrent. She says she wrote "novel after novel" throughout high school and college -- a prolificacy that has continued unabated throughout a professional career that began in 1963 with her first short story collection, By the North Gate.
Oates's breakthrough occurred in 1969 with the publication of them, a National Book Award winner that established her as a force to be reckoned with. Since that auspicious beginning, she has been nominated for nearly every major literary honor -- from the PEN/Faulkner Award to the Pulitzer Prize -- and her fiction turns up with regularity on The New York Times annual list of Notable Books.
On average Oates publishes at least one novel, essay anthology, or story collection a year (during the 1970s, she produced at the astonishing rate of two or three books a year!). And although her fiction often exposes the darker side of America's brightest facades – familial unrest, sexual violence, the death of innocence – she has also made successful forays into Gothic novels, suspense, fantasy, and children's literature. As novelist John Barth once remarked, "Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map."
Where she finds the time for it no one knows, but Oates manages to combine her ambitious, prolific writing career with teaching: first at the University of Windsor in Canada, then (from 1978 on), at Princeton University in New Jersey. For all her success and fame, her daily routine of teaching and writing has changed very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human activity remains steadfast.
Oates's Black Water, which is a thinly veiled account of Ted Kennedy's car crash in Chappaquiddick, was produced as an opera in the 1990s.
In 2001, Oprah Winfrey selected Oates's novel We Were the Mulvaneys for her Book Club.
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ISBN: 0-06-112564-4
Ohhh God.
I was wakened by this cry. I was wakened instantly.
It must have been Minette, my roommate. On the other side of
my bedroom door. Minette Swift, in the outer room. This wasn't
the first time I'd been abruptly wakened by Minette talking to
herself, sometimes scolding herself, or praying. Ohhh God was
one of her half-grunts/half-moans.
Immediately I was out of bed, and opening my door.
"Minette-?"
My roommate was standing with her back to me, oblivious of me.
She was standing very still, as if paralyzed. Her head was
tilted back at an awkward angle and she was staring at the
window above her desk, where a crack had appeared in the upper
half of the pane. Minette turned vaguely toward me, without
seeming to have heard me. Her eyes were widened in wordless
panic behind her childish pink plastic glasses and her lips
moved soundlessly.
"Minette? What's wrong?"
I had to suppose it was the window. There was a shock in
seeing it, a visceral reaction: where no crack had been, now
there was an elaborate spiderweb crack that looked as if the
slightest touch would cause it to shatter and fall in pieces
on your head.
The previous night, we'd had a "severe thunderstorm watch" for
most of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, which had included
the 1,200 acres of land on the banks of the Schuylkill
belonging to Schuyler College where Minette and I were
freshmen. Local news bulletins had reiterated the warnings for
hours and when Minette and I had finally turned out our
lights, the worst of the storm appeared to have passed.
Each of us had a small bedroom that opened out onto our
sparely furnished study room. Each of us had a college-issued
desk and each desk was positioned precisely beneath a window
built into perpendicular walls. It was the larger of the two
windows, Minette's window, that had been damaged in the night
by the fierce gusting wind.
At least, I assumed that the damage had been done by the wind.
But Minette seemed frightened, wary. She must have heard my
question and must have noticed me standing only a few feet
away but she ignored me, staring and blinking up at the window
in the way of a stubborn child. Minette was one whom emotion
gripped powerfully, and even as emotion faded, as adrenaline
fades, still Minette seemed to wish to cling to her state of
arousal. Coming upon her at such a moment was to feel not only
unwanted but also invisible.
I thought She has forgotten she isn't alone. I should have
turned tactfully aside as I'd learned as a young child to turn
aside wishing not to see the eccentric behavior of adults,
sparing both them and me.
I'd been born in 1956. My mother had liked to speak of me as a
love child of the 1960s, the decade that had defined my
parents' generation.
Minette spoke softly at last. It was like her to reply in a
near-inaudible murmur to a question after so long a pause
you'd forgotten what you had asked.
"... got eyes, you c'n see."
Meaning, I could see perfectly well what was wrong: Minette's
window was cracked.
I said, "It must have been the storm, Minette. Don't get too
close, the glass might shatter ..."
I hadn't meant to sound bossy. It was my mother's eager
blundering way.
Minette sucked in her breath. Gave the belt of her bathrobe a
tug, to make sure it was tight enough. (It was. It was very
tight. Minette's belts and sashes were always as tight as she
could bear them.) She said, again softly, but laughing, as if
the fearful humor of the situation had to be acknowledged, "I
wasn't going to, thanks! I'm not some damn old fool." Behind
the lenses of her pink plastic glasses Minette's eyes shone
beautifully vexed, as if I'd suggested she might perform an
act not only dangerous but demeaning.
Minette had to be upset, she'd said damn. Minette Swift was a
minister's daughter and a devout Christian who never swore and
was offended by what she called "swear words" in the mouths of
others.
In Haven House, as at Schuyler College generally, in the fall
of 1974, Minette Swift was often offended.
I told Minette that I would report the cracked window to our
resident advisor Dana Johnson. Wiping at her eyes, Minette
murmured a near-inaudible "Thanks." Her nappy hair gleamed
like wires in the sunshine pouring through the window moist
from the previous night's rain, and the smooth eggplant-dark
skin of her face was minutely furrowed at her hairline. I
would have liked to touch her arm, to assure her that there
was no danger from the cracked window, but I dared not
approach her, I knew it wasn't a good time.
We were suite mates but not yet friends.
While Minette was using the bathroom in the hall, I dragged my
desk chair to her window to examine the crack. It did resemble
a cobweb, intricate in its design, lace-like, beautifully
splotched with jewel-like drops of moisture and illuminated by
the stark sunshine. I felt the temptation to touch it, to see
if it might break.
I pressed the flat of my hand against the crack. Stretching my
fingers wide.
Still, the glass didn't break.
Several feet beyond the window was an old oak tree with thick
gnarled limbs. One of these had split in the storm and hung
down broken, its pale raw wood like bone piercing flesh. I was
reminded uneasily of one of my father's photographs, on a wall
of his study in our home in Chadds Ford: a framed glossy photo
of a young black man who'd been beaten by heavily armed Los
Angeles riot police in April 1968 following the assassination
of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. The young black man
lay on filthy pavement streaming blood ...
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Black Girl/White Girl
by Joyce Carol Oates
Copyright © 2006 by Joyce Carol Oates.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Anonymous
Posted August 6, 2011
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Anonymous
Posted January 11, 2011
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Overview
In 1975 Genna Hewett-Meade's college roommate died a mysterious, violent death partway through their freshman year. Minette Swift had been assertive, fiercely individualistic, and one of the few black girls at their exclusive, "enlightened" college—and Genna, daughter of a prominent civil defense lawyer, felt duty-bound to protect her at all costs. But fifteen years later, while reconstructing Minette's tragic death, Genna is forced to painfully confront her own past life and identity...and her deepest beliefs about social obligation in a morally gray world.
Black Girl / White Girl is a searing double portrait of race and civil rights in postVietnam ...