The Song and the Silence
A Story About Family, Race, and What Was Revealed in a Small Town in the Mississippi Delta While Searching for Booker Wright
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
In this moving memoir, Yvette Johnson travels to the Mississippi Delta to uncover true the story of her late grandfather Booker Wright whose extraordinary act of courage would change both their lives forever.
“Have to keep that smile,” Booker Wright said in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time, Wright spent his evenings waiting tables for Whites at a local restaurant and his mornings running his own business. The ripple effect from his remarks would cement Booker as a civil rights icon because he did the unthinkable: before a national audience, Wright described what life truly was like for the Black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.
Four decades later, Yvette Johnson, Wright’s granddaughter, found footage of the controversial documentary. No one in her family knew of his television appearance. Even more curious for Johnson was that for most of her life she’d barely heard mention of her grandfather’s name.
Born a year after Wright’s death and raised in a wealthy San Diego neighborhood, Johnson admits she never had to confront race the way Southern Blacks did in the 1960s. Compelled to learn more about her roots, she travels to Greenwood, Mississippi, a beautiful Delta town steeped in secrets and a scarred past, to interview family members and townsfolk about the real Booker Wright. As she uncovers her grandfather’s compelling story and gets closer to the truth behind his murder, she also confronts her own conflicted feelings surrounding race, family, and forgiveness.
Told with powerful insights and harrowing details of civil rights–era Mississippi, The Song and the Silence is an astonishing chronicle of one woman’s passionate pursuit of her own family’s past. In the stories of those who came before, she finds not only a new understanding of herself, but a hopeful vision of the future for all of us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Johnson's memoir (inspired by her 2012 documentary film, Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story) recounts the complicated life of her uncle, Booker Wright, and his hometown of Greenwood, a racially divided town in the Mississippi Delta. During the height of the civil rights movement, Wright worked as a waiter at Lusco's, an upscale restaurant with a white clientele, and was the owner of Booker's Place, a thriving restaurant serving the black community. In a short segment for a TV documentary on Greenwood, produced in the 1960s, Wright described with stark honesty the racism of Greenwood that terrorized his family and community, causing shock among his white customers at Lusco's, who thought he was happy to serve them. The footage inspired Johnson to look deep into her family's history. With profound insight and unwavering compassion, Johnson weaves an unforgettable story of her family and a nation distressed by racism. Her quest leads her deep into the lives of both black and white Americans who have suffered from racism's isolating effects. She interviews the former leader of Greenwood's White Citizens' Council, whom she describes as "a tortured man." Johnson brilliantly constructs a complex and empathetic look at racism in the South.