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Norris unearthed painful family secrets that compelled her to question her own self-understanding: from her father’s shooting by a Birmingham police officer weeks after his discharge from the navy at the conclusion of World War II to her maternal grandmother’s peddling pancake mix as an itinerant Aunt Jemima to white farm women in the Midwest. In what became a profoundly personal and bracing journey into her family’s past, Norris traveled from her childhood home in Minneapolis to her ancestral roots in the Deep South to explore the reasons for the “things left unsaid” by her father and mother when she was growing up, the better to come to terms with her own identity. Along the way she discovered how her character was forged by both revelation and silence.
Extraordinary for Norris’s candor in examining her own racial legacy and what it means to be an American, The Grace of Silence is also informed by rigorous research in its evocation of time and place, scores of interviews with ordinary folk, and wise observations about evolving attitudes, at once encouraging and disturbing, toward race in America today. For its particularity and universality, it is powerfully moving, a tour de force.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 21, 2010 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780307748942
- File size: 167410 KB
- Duration: 05:48:46
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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NPR reporter Michelle Norris adeptly blends the personal, the journalistic, and the scholarly. She uses family experiences as starting points to investigate topics such as police violence in Birmingham and the image of Aunt Jemima. She brings both the intimate and the dry alive with a versatile voice that gives insight into the characters of the people she has talked with and studied. Her emotion brings alive her father's grace in illness and her mother's reaction to white flight. The book hits hardest in its chapters about Birmingham. There she researches the incident in which her father was shot by police, visits a now-dilapidated black neighborhood, and considers attitudes past and present toward race. J.A.S. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine -
July 19, 2010
In this eloquent and affecting memoir, Norris, co-host of NPR's All Things Considered, examines both her family's racial roots and secrets. Spurred on by Barack Obama's campaign and a multipart NPR piece she spearheaded about race relations in America, Norris realized that she couldn't fully understand how other people talked about race until she understood how her own family dealt with it, particularly with their silence regarding two key events. She intersperses memories of her Minneapolis childhood with the events that shaped her parents' lives: her maternal grandmother's short career as a traveling "Aunt Jemima," which always embarrassed her mother, and her father's shooting by a white policeman in Alabama in 1946. It is the shooting, which occurred soon after Belvin Norris Jr. was honorably discharged from the navy, that forms the narrative and emotional backbone of Norris's story, as she travels to Birmingham to try and piece together what happened. Though the quest is a personal one, Norris poignantly illuminates the struggle of black veterans returning home and receiving nothing but condemnation for their service. The issue of race in America is the subject of an ongoing conversation, and Norris never shies away from asking the same difficult questions of herself that she asks of others because "all of us should be willing to remain at the table even when things get uncomfortable."
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