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Overview
Eighteen-year-old LaShawndra, who wants nothing more out of life than to dance in a music video, has messed up again — but this time she isn't sticking around to hear about it. Not that her mother seems to care: Sandra is too busy working on her career and romancing a local minister to notice. It's LaShawndra’s grandmother Lily Paine Pines who is out scouring the streets at midnight looking for her granddaughter. But Lily discovers she is not alone. A ghost of a well-known Mulberry pioneer is coming out of the shadows.
Over the course of one weekend, these three disparate women, guided by the wisdom of three unexpected spirits, will learn to face the pain of their lives and discover that with reconciliation comes the healing they all desperately seek. You Know Better brilliantly portrays the fissures in modern African American family life to reveal the indestructible soul that bonds us all.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780060512460 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 01/07/2003 |
| Series: | Harper Perennial |
| Edition description: | FIRST |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.76(d) |
About the Author
Tina McElroy Ansa was born in Macon, GA, the youngest of five children. In 1971, she graduated from Spelman College, the historically black women's college which is part of the Atlanta University Center in Atlanta, GA. Her first job after college was on the copy desk of The Atlanta Constitution, where she was the first black woman to work on the morning newspaper. During her eight years at The Atlanta Constitution, she worked as copy editor, makeup editor, layout editor, entertainment writer, features editor, and news reporter. She also worked as editor and copy editor for The Charlotte (NC) Observer. Since 1982, she has been a freelance journalist, newspaper columnist and writing workshop instructor at Brunswick College, Emory University and Spelman College.
Tina McElroy Ansa's fourth novel, You Know Better, will be published in Spring 2002 by William Morrow Publishers. The novel addresses the contemporary issues of children today, the tenuous ties we are building with them, and how we can reclaim them.
Ms. Ansa's first novel, Baby of the Family, was published in 1989 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. Baby of the Family was also on the African-American Bestseller List for Paperback Fiction. In October 2001, Baby of the Family was chosen by the Georgia Center for the Book as one of the Top 25 Books Every Georgian Should Read. The book also won both the American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults in 1990 Award, and won the 1989 Georgia Authors Series Award. She and her husband, AFI (American Film Institute) Fellow filmmaker Jonee' Ansa, are currently adapting Baby of the Family for the screen as a feature film starring Alfre Woodard, Ruby Dee, Loretta Devine, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Cylk Cozart, Vanessa Williams, Todd Bridges, Pam Grier, and Tonea Stewart. The author is collaborating with her husband on the screenplay for Baby of the Family, which he will direct and shoot in summer 2002 in Macon, GA. Ms. Ansa is executive producer. Patrice Rushen is the film's composer.
Harcourt Brace published Ms. Ansa's second novel, Ugly Ways, in July 1993. The African-American Blackboard List named the novel Best Fiction in 1994. Ms. Ansa was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in 1994 for Ugly Ways and the novel was on the African-American Best-sellers/Blackboard List for more than two years. Award-winning actress Alfre Woodard has entered into a partnership with Ms. Ansa to bring Ugly Ways to the screen.
The Hand I Fan With, her third novel, was published in October of 1996 by Doubleday. This is the beautifully erotic love story of Lena McPherson and the 100-year old ghost — Herman — she calls up to love and cherish her. The novel was awarded the Georgia Authors Series Award for 1996. Ms. Ansa also won this same award for her debut novel, Baby in the Family, and is the only two-time winner of the honor.
Tina McElroy Ansa is a regular contributor to the award-winning television series CBS Sunday Morning with her essays, "Postcards from Georgia." She also writes magazine and newspaper articles, Op-Ed pieces and book reviews for the Los Angeles Times, (New York) Newsday, The Atlanta Constitution, and the Florida Times-Union. Her non-fiction work has appeared in Essence Magazine, The Crisis Magazine, MS. Magazine, America Magazine, and Atlanta Magazine.
Tina McElroy Ansa was a Writer-in-Residence at her alma mater Spelman College in Atlanta, GA in the Fall of 1990 where she also taught creative writing. In addition to touring for her books and giving lectures, she has presented her work at the Smithsonian's African-American Center's Author's Series; the Richard Wright/Zora Neale Hurston Foundation; the PEN/Faulkner Reading Series and fundraisers at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Schomburg Center and the PEN American Center. She is on the Advisory Council for the Georgia Center for the Book and on the host committee for the Flannery O'Connor Awards.
Reflecting her concern with the issue of homelessness in this country, she has participated in fund-raising events including readings at the SOS-sponsored Writers Harvest at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, GA and at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA. She has also volunteered for fundraisers and house-buildings for Habitat for Humanity and has read at Atlanta-based fundraisers for Aid to Children of Imprisoned Mothers.
She and her husband, Jonee' Ansa, have lived on St. Simons Island, GA since 1984. Together they produced and directed the 1989 Georgia Sea Island Festival, a 20-year old grassroots festival that seeks to preserve crafts, music, slave chants, games, food and the spirit of the African-American people who lived and worked as slaves on the rice and cotton plantations along the Georgia coast. Ms. Ansa is an avid birder, amateur naturalist, and gardener. She always has collard greens growing in her garden among the black-eyed Susans and moonflowers.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
"Miss Moses?! Is that you? Good God, I thought you were dead!"
They were the first words that I spoke to that dear old lady. And I did not merely speak them. I shouted them — from across the street — out the window of my automobile.
Can you believe it? That was the first thing out of my mouth: "I thought you were dead!" It was so unlike me. But then again, as my little granddaughter and her contemporaries say, "I was stressed!"
I rolled down the window and shouted it all the way across the street right out of the car. Of course, I was mortified. I was beyond mortified. I had spent my entire life conducting myself in an exemplaryfashion. Any deviation from that role disturbed me.
In my embarrassment over that coarse slip, I almost forgot for a moment that I was out after midnight on a Saturday morning scouting around the streets of Mulberry, Georgia, looking for my almost, nineteen-year-old granddaughter, LaShawndra, my only grandchild.
That was the reason I was in what used to be downtown Mulberry, outside the local nightspot called The Club, located on the corner of Broadway and Cherry Street, looking for LaShawndra even though I knew the establishment had closed at midnight, nearly an hour before. If LaShawndra had gone there, I figured I might still be able to catch her little butt hanging around outside looking for a ride.
But the only little figure I saw on the corner of Broadway and Cherry Street that dark early morning was that of old Miss Moses, Mulberry'spioneering educator. Georgia.
The clouds chose just that moment to shift in the sky, exposing a moon directly over her head that was split right down the middle, like half a pie.
Seeing that old blind lady in the middle of downtown Mulberry at almost one o'clock in the morning more than shocked me.
At first I almost thought I was having a flashback from some bad drugs I took back in the sixties.
I couldn't help myself. I was stunned to see Miss Moses standing right under one of those high-crime, high-intensity streetlamps with an umbrella hanging over her arm — proudly — as if she were fully prepared for anything. I lowered the window on the passenger's side and yelled across the seat, almost expecting her to vanish before my eyes. But I knew I was seeing the old woman's face clearly. There was no mistake about it. It was Miss Moses.
The first reason I was so surprised to see Miss Moses, even in the midst of this crisis with my granddaughter, LaShawndra — besides the fact that it was nearly one o'clock in the morning — was that Miss Moses was all by herself. And I couldn't believe that Miss Moses was the kind of elderly blind person who went off on a jaunt by herself.
I knew a blind masseur I would go to sometimes. Extraordinary man. He told me that as a teenager he regularly jumped the fence of the Mulberry School for the Blind and ventured out at night to buy beer for his dormitory cohorts at the corner 7-eleven. Imagine the nerve that took.
But I could not imagine Miss Moses jumping any fences at night to come out to The Club. My God, she had to have been ninety-five if she was a day.
Miss Moses looked like a dainty little wrinkled urban poppy growing up through a crack in the middle of all that weathered concrete. And between the bright streetlight she was standing under and my increasing farsightedness — you know I can see farther off now that I can close up — I could see her just as clear as day. She was dressed in this red and purple flowered voile dress that nearly came down to her ankles. And it had a high neck with some grayish-looking crocheted cotton lace around the collar. The sleeves of the dress were long, all the way past her wrists, but you know how you can see through voile, so I could see her little stick arms through the sleeves.
Planted on top of her head was a small, round, pink straw pillbox hat — I had not seen one of them in thirty years — with a strip of hot pink grosgrain ribbon for a band. And planted on top of the pillbox hat was a huge — I mean huge — lavender cabbage rose.
All of which made her gray nappy hair, kind of tucked in in some places and sticking up in other places, look like a tuft of dried but living grass sprouting around the pillbox.
You know she had on a sweater. In fact, she had on two sweaters. One on top of the other. But she didn't have either one of them completely on. Both sweaters were merely thrown around her shoulders. And I was worried about her standing out there on a street corner in the cool. Her little gray sweater with yellowed satin ribbon woven throughout was just wrapped around her bony shoulders, and the two top buttons were fastened to keep it on. And another buttercup yellow cotton sweater with pink and blue flowers embroidered on it was tossed on top of that first one. And its top two buttons were fastened, too.
The second reason I was surprised to see her there was I was almost sure I had seen the notice of Miss Moses's death in the Mulberry Times a few months before. I read the local newspaper cover to cover each weekday morning before I leave for work and in the afternoons on the weekend. Most mornings I'm up to hear the thump of the paper on my front porch. I could have sworn I'd seen Miss Moses's obituary! GRACE MOSES, LOCAL EDUCATION PIONEER, DEAD AT 95. Or something like that. The death notice had...
You Know Better. Copyright © by Tina Ansa. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.Reading Group Guide
Summary
It is the spring weekend of the Peach Blossom Festival in the tiny middle Georgia town of Mulberry, but things are far from peachy for the Pines women. LaShawndra, an eighteen-year-old hoochie-mama who wants nothing more out of life than to dance in a music video, has messed up ... again. But this time she isn't sticking around to hear about it.
Not that her mother seems to care; after all, Sandra is busy working on her real estate career and on the local minister. It's LaShawndra's grandmother, Lily, a former schoolteacher, principal, school board administrator, and highly respected cornerstone of the Mulberry community, who is scouring the streets at midnight looking for her granddaughter.
Over the course of one weekend these three disparate but connected women, guided by a trio of unexpected spirits, will learn to face the pain in their lives and discover that with reconciliation comes the healing they all desperately seek.
In this magical, deeply resonant novel, Tina McElroy Ansa goes straight to the heart of family, women's relationships, and the generational divide to reveal the soul that bonds us all.
For Discussion
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Tina McElroy Ansa is the author of the novels Baby of the Family, Ugly Ways, The Hand I Fan With, and You Know Better. She has contributed the essays "Postcards From Georgia" to CBS News Sunday Morning. An avid gardener, birder, and amateur naturalist, she is married to Jonée Ansa, a filmmaker. They reside on St. Simon's Island, Georgia. She and her husband are currently producing the film adaptation of her first novel Baby of the Family.