Primary Lessons

Ripped from middle-class life in Philadelphia, and transplanted to a single-parent household in the segregated south, Sarah, a precocious black child struggles to be the master of her fate. She refuses to accept the segregation that tries to confine her—a system her mother accepts as the southern way of life. A brave memoir that testifies to the author’s fiery spirit and sense of self that sustained her through family, social, and cultural upheavals. It also puts her at the forefront of the change that Martin Luther King dreamed about.

A southerner transplanted to New York, Sarah Bracey White mines her past in memoir, essays and poetry. Her published works include Primary Lessons: A Memoir; The Wanderlust: A South Carolina Folk Tale; and Feelings Brought to Surface, a poetry collection. Her essays have been anthologized in Children of the Dream; Dreaming in Color, Living in Black White; Aunties: 35 Writers Celebrate Their Other Mother and numerous other publications. The New York Times, the Afro-American Newspapers and the Journal News have published her essays. Sarah is a frequent contributor and performer with Read650. Visit her website www.onmymind.org for more information.

“In Primary Lessons, Sarah White recounts her childhood years in the 1950s and early 60s, from a brief, idyllic-seeming stay as a very young child with a beloved aunt in Philadelphia, to a return home to South Carolina to live with her siblings and her single mom, who was doing her best to hold the family together. Although the author chafed at the restrictions imposed by the Jim Crow South, she grows close to her mother and comes to understand the tough choices that had been made, but that doesn’t dampen the author’s determination to leave those limitations behind and forge her own, more independent path.”
— Amy Nathan, author of Round and Round Together and Take a Seat—Make a Stand

I first met Sarah Bracey White when she shared a portrait of her enterprising, entrepreneurial Aunt Susie. Though Susie shows up again in Primary Lessons, it is Sarah’s voice that pulls the reader in. It’s also the story of the author’s legacy, so enriched by her aunt and her indomitable mom who, because of their flair and despite their flaws, imparted wisdom and dispensed love that helped Sarah become the amazing person revealed in this warm-hearted, truth-telling life journey.
— Ingrid Sturgis, author of Aunties: 35 Writers Celebrate Their Other Mother

September 2013
243 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$21
ISBN: 978-1-933880-38-9
Memoir