A Special Thanks...

"When Ursa Corregidora is five years old and questions the truth of her great-grandmother's stories, her great-grandmother tells her, "I'm leaving evidence. And you got to leave evidence too. And your children got to leave evidence. And when it come time to hold up the evidence, we got to have evidence to hold up. That's why they burned all the papers, so there wouldn't be no evidence to hold up against them." Ursa's great-grandmother was raped and then used as a whore by her white slave owner, Corregidora, as was her daughter after her. Ursa had a black father, but her skin more closely resembles the color of Corregidora, the man who is both her grandfather and great-grandfather. Ostracized by darker-skinned women who resent the added value her light skin gives her among black men, and unable to trust any man, black or white, because of the stories she was raised on, Ursa Corregidora sings the blues and fights both the past and the present to maintain mental and physical autonomy. Internal monologues, dreams and remembered stories intermingle with present-day reality until it becomes difficult for the reader or Ursa to draw the lines between them, a task made doubly difficult when black men echo the proprietary attitudes (and sometimes words) of dead slave owners. Gritty and full of pain, a combination of snarl and moan, Corregidora presents a searing denunciation of racism and sexism in both white and black communities." - Erica Bauermeister

"Corregidora is the most brutally honest and painful revelation of what has occurred, and is occurring, in the souls of Black men and women."— James Baldwin

Now this book, which I read my senior year of college in my Black Women Writers course, touched me in so many ways, in so many places I never knew I could be moved...to tears, to joy, to anger, to happiness, to ACTION ~ a call for change for the Black woman, wherever she is.

a SPECIAL THANK YOU to Ms. Janis A. Mayes! You made it tough, but you DEFINITELY made it worth it!