That Mean Old Yesterday
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- 15,99 €
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- 15,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
An astonishing coming-of-age memoir by a young woman who survived the foster care system and went on to become an award-winning journalist.
On a rainy night in November 1999, a shoeless Stacey Patton, promising student at NYU, approached her adoptive parents' house with a gun in her hand. She wanted to kill them. Or so she thought.
No one would ever imagine that the vibrant, smart, and attractive Stacey had a childhood from hell. After all, with God-fearing, house-proud, and hardworking adoptive parents, she appeared to beat the odds. But her mother was tyrannical, and her father turned a blind eye to the years of abuse his wife heaped on their love-starved little girl.
Now in her unforgettable memoir, Stacey links her experience to the legacy of American slavery and successfully frames her understanding of why her good adoptive parents did terrible things to her by realizing they had terrible things done to them. She describes a story of how a typical American family can be undermined by their own effort to be perfect on the surface while denying emotional wounds inflicted—even generations before—that were never allowed to heal.
Unflinching and powerfully written, That Mean Old Yesterday ultimately brings light and gives a voice to children who have experienced mistreatment at the hands of those who are meant to help.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Patton, a graduate student at Rutgers, was a baby when she entered New Jersey's foster care system. Five years later, she was placed with a middle-class New Jersey couple eager to adopt. Myrtle and her husband, "G," were both African-American, like Patton, but also deeply committed Pentecostals. While G was laid-back, Myrtle was a mean woman who believed she needed to beat and whip Patton to make her "submissive," to prepare her "for the modern realities of being a little black girl growing up in America." All the black children Patton knew "got whipped whenever, wherever, and with whatever. This was part of our identity as black children." Patton believes this behavior came from the slave experience: "It was what their parents knew and what their parents' parents knew. It was a behavior that had deep roots in the plantation legacy." Patton intercuts the story of Myrtle's abuse with vivid descriptions of the torture and beating of antebellum slaves. Unfortunately, G, "helpless and emasculated... like many slave men," couldn't stop Myrtle's abuse. Eventually, Patton ran away, lived in youth shelters and won a scholarship to a good prep school. Patton's account is brutal and will likely become controversial, as her racial stereotypes, particularly her assertion that most black children are abused by their parents, may raise eyebrows.
