By femaleness I do not mean femininity, in its traditional codes of behavior and dress. Rather, I mean an embrace of what it means to live as a woman in America in the millennium, of the emotional and experiential arcs this can entail, and of how for many women it requires a perpetual decision-making process about how to engage with the male realm.
It’s a book designed to appeal to anyone like you or me, the proverbial common reader, who has been reading books for longer than we can remember, yet who perhaps knows next to nothing about the history of the fleuron or the architectural origins of the epigraph and the frontispiece (from medieval Latin, meaning ‘looking at the forehead’ and referring originally to ‘the front of a building’).
During the Jim Crow era and beyond, travel for African Americans was frequently yoked to humiliation or terror. Black travelers knew that even a simple road trip required props and a plan. Part of that essential prep included “The Negro Travelers’ Green Book,” a travel guide first published in 1936.
Taylor’s new book revisits the nesting stories behind the “Green Book,” which helped black tourists navigate racial minefields implicit in a road trip — whether across counties or cross-country.
Evenings, I would sit
on a moldy, high-back couch
and watch the light outside go mauve, then die.