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Four generations of black life in America.

Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child--the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment--weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult. At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest...

Trying to shape a new life of freedom in Philadelphia after having been a slave, Addy finds inspiration from a new friend.

In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro college to New York's Harlem, an African-American man becomes involved in a series of adventures.

A chorus of extraordinary voices tells one of history's great epics: The four-hundred-year journey of African Americans from 1619-- a year before the Mayflower dropped anchor off Cape Cod, when the White Lion disgorged "some 20 and odd Negroes" onto the shores of Virginia-- to the present, when African Americans, descendants of those on the White Lion and a thousand other routes to this country, continue a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary...

When Herald Loomis arrives at an African-American Pittsburgh boardinghouse, after seven years' impressed labor on Joe Turner's chain gang, he is a free man--in body.

Mrs. Lucy finds graffiti painted on her garage two nights in a row, but as Tasha, a lonely neighbor girl, helps her paint over it the two become friends, despite their age difference. Features cut-out illustrations.

"Newlyweds Celestial and Roy, the living embodiment of the New South, are settling into the routine of their life together when Roy is sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. An insightful look into the lives of people who are bound and separated by forces beyond their control"-- Provided by publisher.

"'It is staggering that there is no date commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.' -Annette Gordon-Reed. The essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth's integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Texas native. Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, recounts...

Retold Afro-American folktales of animals, fantasy, the supernatural, and desire for freedom, born of the sorrow of the slaves, but passed on in hope.