Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine

In these twelve deeply personal connected essays, Bernard details her experiences growing up black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop, marrying a white man from the North and bringing him home to her family, adopting two children from Ethiopia, and living and teaching in a primarily white New England college town.

Each of these essays sets out to discover a new way of talking about race and of telling the truth as the author has lived it.