Flat-Footed Truths

Rather than solicit autobiographical essays, Bell-Scott, a professor of child, family and women's studies at the University of Georgia, and Johnson-Bailey, an assistant professor of adult education at the same university, sought contributors who could comment on the process of how black women relate their stories in their writings and art. The book, organized in three sections--""Telling One's Own Life,"" ""Claiming Lives Lost"" and ""Telling Lives as Resistance""--succeeds admirably in examining the difficulties and rewards of autobiography. The tone is beautifully set with a piece by bell hooks on the uncertain quality of memory and the struggle to capture the past with the lens of the present. An interview with Sapphire highlights the danger of reductionism as she recounts the story of people who wanted to meet her not because of her work but because she had once been a prostitute. The collection's least pensive but most touching essay is provided by Alice Walker, who writes about her quest to buy a gravestone for writer Zora Neale Hurston. Other pieces include Senate testimony by Anita Hill, the stellar ""Poetry Is Not a Luxury"" by Audre Lorde, a brief biography of Sojourner Truth by Nell Painter and uplifting poems by Ruth Forman, Elaine Shelly and Becky Birtha. Several essayists discuss not just how to write autobiography but why and when. Bell-Scott and Johnson-Bailey have gathered together a formidable group of women who write with power and grace. (June)