"In this evocative memoir, Cassandra Lane deftly uses the act of imagination to reclaim her ancestors’ story as a backdrop for telling her own. The tradition of Black women’s storytelling leaps forward within these pages—into fresh, daring, and excitingly new territory." —Bridgett M. Davis, author of The World According to Fannie Davis
Cassandra Lane grew up hearing fragments of the story of her great-grandfather Burt Bridges, who was lynched by white men in his Southern town. When she learns that she is pregnant at thirty-five, the knowledge forces her into a new reckoning with this family history, reexamining the legacies of Black love and loss that has endured through generations.
We Are Bridges is a memoir written against the void of
official memory. Lane confronts the limits of the archive as she waves together
the present day with the imagined lives of her great-grandparents Burt Bridges
and Mary Magdalene Magee in Bridges twentieth-century rural South, reclaiming a
history effaced by the afterlives of violence. With this haunting, poetic
debut, Lane dares to construct a new story for herself and her family—one that
encapsulates both the brutal inheritances of the past and the hope of Black
futures to come.
About the Author
Cassandra Lane is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles.
Lane received her MFA from Antioch University LA. Her stories have appeared in
the New York Times’s Conception series, the Times-Picayune, the Atlanta Journal
Constitution, and elsewhere. She is editor in chief of L.A. Parent magazine and
formerly served on the board of the AROHO Foundation.
0 comments:
Post a Comment