Alice Childress

Blacks and whites during the summer of 1918 in Charleston, South Carolina.

A Love/hate Story in Black and White

Wedding Band

Rainbow Jordan

Famed dramatist and author Alice Childress portrays her protagonist's "short walk" through life. During the early half of the twentieth century, Cora James experiences political movements, the easy life of dealing poker in a Harlem card parlor, and the more grueling demands of the vaudeville circuit. She emerges as the woman of stature she always vowed to become.

Short Walk

Like One of the Family, which provides historical context for Kathryn Stockett's novel, The Help, is comprised of a series of conversations between Mildred, a black domestic, and her friend Marge. They create a vibrant picture of the life of a black working woman in New York in the 1950s.Rippling with satire and humor, Mildred’s outspoken accounts capture vividly her white employers’ complacency and condescension—and startled reactions to a maid who speaks her mind. As Mildred declares to a patronizing employer that she is not just like one of the family, or explains to Marge how a tricky employer has created a system of “half days off” to cheat her help, we gain a glimpse not only of one woman’s day to day struggle, but of her previous ache of racial oppression. A domestic who refuses to exchange dignity for pay, Mildred is an inspiring conversationalist, a dragon slayer in a segregated world. The conversations in the book were first published in Freedom, the newspaper edited by Paul Robeson, and later in the Baltimore Afro-American. The book was originally published in the 1950s by in Brooklyn–based Independence Press, and Beacon Press brought out a new edition of it in 1986 with an introduction by the literary and cultural critic Trudier Harris. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Conversations from a Domestic's Life

Like One of the Family

The life of a thirteen-year-old Harlem Afro-American boy on his way to becoming a confirmed heroin addict is seen from his viewpoint and from that of several people around him.

A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich

THE STORIES: MOJO. Paying a surprise visit to her former husband, Irene, aware that she is ill with cancer, reveals that she must shortly go back into the hospital but wanted to see Teddy just once more first. From their random conversation it is e

Alice Childress

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