Darkest Child: A Novel

Evils regenerative powers and one girls fierce resistance. . . . A book that deserves a wide audience.The Cleveland Plain Dealer Filled with grand plot events and clearly identifiable villains and victims . . . lush with detail and captivating with its story of racial tension and family violence.The Washington Post Book World An exceptional debut novel. . . . Has a depth and dimension not often characteristic of a first novel.Library Journal (starred) Phillips writes with a no-nonsense elegance. . . . As a vision of African-American life The Darkest Child is one of the harshest novels to arrive in many years. . . . Phillips buttresses those harsh episodes with a depth of characterization worthy of Chekhov pitch-perfect dialogue and a profound knowledge of the segregated South in the 50s.The New Leader Rozelle Quinn is so fair-skinned that she can pass for white. Her ten children are mostly light too. They constitute the only world she rules and controls. Her power over them is all she has in an otherwise cruel and uncaring universe. Rozelle favors her light-skinned kids but Tangy Mae 13 her darkest-complected child is the brightest. She desperately wants to continue with her education. Her mother however has other plans. Rozelle wants her daughter to work cleaning houses for whites like she does and accompany her to the Farmhouse where Rozelle earns extra money bedding men. Tangy Mae shes decided is of age. This is the story from an era when lifes possibilities for an African-American were unimaginably different. Delores Phillips was born in Bartow County Georgia in 1950 the second of four children. She graduated from Cleveland State University with a bachelor of arts in English and works as a nurse at a state psychiatric hospital. Her work has appeared in Jeans Journal Black Times and The Crisis. She has lived in Cleveland Ohio since 1964. From the Trade Paperback edition.