African American English

Step into a world of ancient wisdom and mystical practices, where the secrets of self-transformation and holistic wellness await your discovery. Immerse yourself in the forgotten remedies and lost traditions that have guided black women and curious others towards deep inner health and cultural empowerment for centuries.

Summer has an invitation to ‘Black America’s Wedding of the Decade’ and wouldn’t miss it for the world. Deuce Scaife is finally marrying his college sweetheart Zora Diallo (an outcome that was never in doubt, by the way, except maybe to the two people getting married) and since there’ll be celebrities all over the event, it’s in an expensive, remote location and all very hush-hush.

In 1992, the deadliest year in Chicago’s history, seven-year-old Dantrell Davis was shot and killed in front of his elementary school inside the public housing complex Cabrini-Green. What happened to Dantrell led to a truce among Chicago’s gangs, but it also ignited a national panic about poverty and violence in America’s cities. Dantrell’s name would soon be used to demolish all of Chicago’s high-rise public housing, displacing tens of thousands of low-income families.

Mia thinks her life is completely normal. She has a loving boyfriend, great and supportive friends, and a close relationship with her mother. Things take an interesting turn, however, when she is almost run down by a car one day. Then come the messages from an untraceable number. Not to mention the heartbreaking secret that is revealed shortly thereafter. Suddenly, everything that Mia thought was right in her life goes wrong. She has no idea why, but she needs to find out before her secret stalker decides her time is up.

In this book, Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. Working against conventional scholarship, Hazzard-Donald argues that Hoodoo emerged first in three distinct regions she calls "regional Hoodoo clusters" and that after the turn of the 19th century, Hoodoo took on a national rather than regional profile.

Playwright, poet, and novelist Ntozake Shange originally composed for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf in as a mesmerizingly original choreopoem. The New York Post called it "rich with the author's special voice: by turns bitter, funny, ironic, and savage; fiercely honest and personal." Now a new audiobook, it chronicles the interconnected lives of a group of women facing shatteringly difficult issues, and evokes the indomitable power of enduring hope and joy.

Aaliyah is determined to celebrate her thirtieth birthday with a boyfriend. And after a failed blind date, the local bartender, Ahmad, suggests she joins a dating app. Filled with lies, catfish, and fetishizing, the wild world of online dating makes Aaliyah think she’s in over her head. And she is. But with her two best friends and a protective bartender by her side, what could go wrong?

This is a novel in the guise of the tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who has lived 110 years, who has been both a slave and a witness to the black militancy of the 1960s. Miss Jane Pittman has "endured," has seen almost everything and foretold the rest.

Tina Knowles, the mother of iconic singer-songwriters Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Solange Knowles, and bonus daughter Kelly Rowland, is known the world over as a Matriarch with a capital M: a determined, self-possessed, self-aware, and wise woman who raised and inspired some of the great artists of our time. But this story is about so much more than that. Matriarch begins with a precocious, if unruly, little girl growing up in 1950s Galveston, the youngest of seven.

A chorus of extraordinary voices comes together to tell one of history’s great epics: the 400-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present - edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire.

Even as feminism has become increasingly central to our ideas about institutions, relationships, and everyday life, the term used to diagnose the problem - patriarchy - is used so loosely that it has lost its meaning. In Vexy Thing Imani Perry resurrects patriarchy as a target of critique, re-centering it to contemporary discussions of feminism through a social and literary analysis of cultural artifacts from the Enlightenment to the present.

When two English brothers arrive at a Barbados sugar plantation, they bring with them a darkness beyond what the slaves have already known. Washington Black - an 11-year-old field slave - is horrified to find himself chosen to live in the quarters of one of these men. But the man is not as Washington expects him to be. His new master is the eccentric Christopher Wilde - naturalist, explorer, inventor and abolitionist - whose obsession to perfect a winged flying machine disturbs all who know him.

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.

Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black Southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, Mothers of Massive Resistance explores the grassroots workers who maintained the system of racial segregation and Jim Crow. For decades in rural communities, in university towns, and in New South cities, white women performed myriad duties that upheld white over black: censoring textbooks, denying marriage certificates, deciding on the racial identity of their neighbors, celebrating school choice, canvassing communities for votes, and lobbying elected officials.

Here in his own words are the revolutionary ideas that made Malcolm X one of the most charismatic and influential African-American leaders of the 1960s. These speeches document Malcolm's progression from Black nationalism to internationalism, and are key to both understanding his extraordinary life and illuminating his angry yet uplifting cause.

African American Slave Medicine offers a critical examination of how African American slaves' medical needs were addressed during the years before and surrounding the Civil War. Drawing upon ex-slave interviews conducted during the 1930s and 1940s by the Works Project Administration (WPA), Dr. Herbert C. Covey inventories many of the herbal, plant, and non-plant remedies used by African American folk practitioners during slavery.

William Pepper was James Earl Ray's lawyer in the trial for the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., and even after Ray's conviction and death, Pepper continues to adamantly argue Ray's innocence. This myth-shattering expose is a revised, updated, and heavily expanded volume of Pepper's original best-selling and critically-acclaimed book of the same name, with 26 years of additional research included. The result reveals dramatic new details of the night of the murder, the trial, and why Ray was chosen to take the fall for an evil conspiracy.

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Is love really the only thing O'Asia needs to save the waters? Or, is that just the tip of the iceberg? O'Asia and Zale need to fall in love, but they're currently surrounded by angry guards ready to uphold the law. Can Odessa succeed in protecting them both? With Emperor Seera now back in open waters, they quickly become more dangerous for one merm in particular, and O'Asia soon realizes that the prince and his love aren't the only things she needs to protect. She has to protect them all.