Booklist-Rezension

Gordon has gathered together eight writers who manage to shed a radiant light upon contemporary southern culture and mores. Stories selected for this anthology include Elizabeth Spencer's "First Dark," a sympathetic expos{{‚}}e of genteel, small-town life: although the narrator reveals "something so recklessly fecund about a south Mississippi spring," nature's extravagance is shown to be stultifying when the lovers choose to walk away from the place where they sought "connection with the past." Family relationships figure prominently in these works, along with the repercussions that result from tense relations between races. In Toni Cade Bambara's story "Madame Bai," the protagonist lives in the racially charged atmosphere of Atlanta, in the time before Wayne Williams was charged with murdering black children there. Alice Walker's "A Sudden Trip Home in the Spring" follows Sarah Davis from her college dorm (where white girls thoughtlessly compare her black-skinned beauty to "a poppy in a field of winter roses") back to her rural Georgia hometown for a funeral. And Ntozake Shange's spirited young heroine learns, on becoming a woman, an unfortunate lesson that leads her mother to instill extreme caution into Indigo's trusting, rather fantastic approach to life. With clear and resonant voices these collected stories assume a penetrating stance on issues of class, race, and gender. (Reviewed Sept. 15, 1991)0872497844Alice Joyce