J. Alfred's Reviews > Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

"We are all the captives of our origins, especially when we do not fully know and understand them."
This is the best book about race in America I've ever read-- it's a kind of reverse To Kill a Mockingbird, where, instead of black man being guilty for a crime that never happened, here a white society is studiously innocent of a crime that happens in broad daylight
in public
in 1970 North Carolina.
It is able to give an account of how Dr King's message was both wholly needed and useful and also not quite enough; there's a frightening realpolitik in here that we can take only because the author is clear that it is very close to unendurable. And the Black Power movement and the white backlash that confronted it don't seem so very distant after you read this book.
It also, somehow, manages to be actually guffaw-level funny, which gives a harder edge to the race violence, and the hard core of hope that there might be something redemptive hovering over all of this somewhere.

"And we ask your help, Lord," Daddy continued, lifting his thick hands, "that we not become prejudiced against those who are prejudiced, or whose prejudices may not be our own."