Pride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color

In a moving, resonant self-portrait of growing up black and female in America, Ione focuses on the three very different women who raised her. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1937, her childhood and youth were divided between a breezy grandmother, a chorus-line dancer who ran a soul food restaurant catering to the racing set in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.; a dignified great-aunt, one of the first black women doctors in Washington; and a tough, tenacious mother who carved out a career as a journalist and writer of murder mysteries in New York City after divorcing her husband, a sociologist. Ione, a psychotherapist in upstate New York, writes of her two failed marriages--the first to a quasi-noble Frenchman, the second to ``a gay man living a heterosexual life''--which taught her hard lessons of motherhood. Her discovery of the diary of her great-grandmother, an abolitionist and feminist in 19th-century Boston, helped Ione unearth family secrets and finally achieve a sense of rootedness. (Aug.)