Mama's Child

Summary

A stunning tale about the deeply entrenched conflicts between a white mother and her biracial daughter. Mama' s Child is story of an idealistic young white woman who travelled to the American South as a civil rights worker, fell in love with an African American man, and started a family in San Francisco, where the more liberal city embraced them-- except when it didn' t. They raise a son and daughter, but the tensions surrounding them have a negative impact on their marriage, and they divorce when their children are still young. For their biracial daughter, this split further destabilizes her already challenged sense of self--" Am I black or white?" she must ask herself, " Where do I belong?" Is she her father' s daughter alone? As the years pass, the chasm between them widens, even as the mother attempts to hold on to the emotional chord that binds them. It isn' t until the daughter, Ruby, herself becomes a wife and mother that she begins to develop compassion and understanding for the many ways that her own mother' s love transcended race and questions of identity.