Unafraid of the Dark: A Memoir

""I am living proof of the 78% of African-American women who are raised on welfare but never return to the system,"" proclaims Bray, who grew up poor in Chicago, attended Yale on scholarship and graduated in 1976, after which she went on to hold editorial positions at Essence, Ms. and the New York Times Book Review. In this quietly affecting memoir, Bray traces her quest for identity as a writer, a feminist, a wife, a mother and an African American. Along the way, she imparts a visceral sense of what it meant to be poor and black in Chicago's South Side in the 1960s, loving her easygoing, nurturing mother but terrified of a wife-beating, obsessively jealous father whom she grew to hate and whose strictures to stay away from white people she flouted. Bray, who lived in Harlem in the mid-1980s, where she became embroiled in neighborhood politics, now raises two sons in suburban, integrated Montclair, N.J. This gracefully written memoir is framed by Bray's forceful attack on the ""disastrous"" 1996 welfare reform act which, she predicts, will force millions of children and workfare mothers into the ranks of the poor, denying them the opportunity of which Bray made so much. Author tour. (Mar.)