Black Girl / White Girl

Excerpt

I have decided to begin a text without a title. It will be an exploration, I think. An inquiry into the death of my college roommate Minette Swift who died fifteen years ago this week: on the eve of her nineteenth birthday which was April 11, 1975.

Minette did not die a natural death nor did Minette die an easy death. Every day of my life since Minette's death I have thought of Minette in the anguish of her final minutes for I was the one to have saved her, yet I did not. And no one has known this.

The coroner for Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, declared with no ambiguity the precise medical reasons for Minette's death and who the agent of her death was, such "facts" are not the object of my inquiry.

For "facts" can be made to distort, to lie. The most insidious of lies is through omission.

Many facts were omitted, and other facts obscured, at the time of Minette's death. I was one of those who obscured facts for there was the wish to protect my name and there was the wish to protect Minette after her death.

There was the unvoiced wish to protect Minette's family, and there was the unvoiced wish to protect Schuyler College. There was the wish—unvoiced, desperate—to protect the white faces surrounding Minette.

Fifteen years! All this time, I have been alive. 1 have been living, I have even acquired a professional reputation in my field, and Minette Swift has been dead. I have been aging, and Minette Swift has remained nineteen. I am a woman of middle age, Minette is still a girl.

I wonder at the strangeness of this! Who deserves to live, and who deserves to die. I wonder at the justice.

Some truths are lies my father Maximilian Meade has said. My father was a man who acquired fame and notoriety for such inflammatory statements, that fill some of us with rage. No truths can be lies is my preferred belief

And so I begin, my text without a title in the service of justice.

Reviews

• Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2006, p. 597
• Publishers Weekly, June 19, 2006, p. 35
• Library Journal, July 2006, p. 69
• Booklist, July, 2006, pp. 7-8
• TLS, Times Literary Supplement, October 6, 2006, p. 23
• Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 15, 2006, p. 9
• New York Times Book Review, October 15, 2006, p. 16
• San Francisco Chronicle Book Reveiw, October 15, 2006, p. 2
• Sunday Telegraph (London), October 15, 2006, p. 52
• Christian Science Monitor, October 24, 2006, Books, p. 17
• Irish Independent (Ireland), October 28, 2006
• Hobart Mercury (Australia), October 28, 2006, p. B13
• Herald Sun (Australia), November 4, 2006, p. W26
• Financial Times (London), November 4, 2006, p. 31
• The Boston Globe, November 6, 2006, p. E5
• Buffalo News (New York), November 12, 2006, p. G5
• The Independent (London), November 17, 2006, Arts & Books Review, p. 22
• The Guardian (London), November 18, 2006, p. 16
• Chicago Sun Times, November 19, 2006, p. B12
• St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri), November 19, 2006, p. F10
• Washington Post Book World, November 19, 2006, p. T07
• USA Today, November 22, 2006, p. 4D
• Weekend Australian, November 25, 2006, Books / Review, p. 9
• The Baltimore Sun, November 26, 2006, p. 4F
• The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC), December 17, 2006, p. H14
• New York Sun, February 14, 2007, p. 15
• Chattanooga Times Free Press (Tennessee), April 1, 2007, p. d4

Notes

Working Title: "Blood at the Root"

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