Black Indian, searing and raw, is Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club
and Alice Walker's The Color Purple meets Leslie Marmon Silko's
Ceremony-only, this isn't fiction. Beautifully rendered and rippling
with family dysfunction, secrets, deaths, alcoholism, and old
resentments, Shonda Buchanan's memoir is an inspiring story that
explores her family's legacy of being African Americans with American
Indian roots and how they dealt with not just society's ostracization
but the consequences of this dual inheritance.
Buchanan was raised
as a Black woman, who grew up hearing cherished stories of her
multi-racial heritage, while simultaneously suffering from everything
she (and the rest of her family) didn't know. Tracing the arduous
migration of Mixed Bloods, or Free People of Color, from the
Southeast to the Midwest, Buchanan tells the story of her Michigan
tribe-a comedic yet manically depressed family of fierce women, who
were everything from caretakers and cornbread makers to poets and
witches, and men who were either ignored, protected, imprisoned, or
maimed-and how their lives collided over love, failure, fights, and
prayer despite a stacked deck of challenges, including addiction and
abuse. Ultimately, Buchanan's nomadic people endured a collective
identity crisis after years of constantly straddling two, then three,
races. The physical, spiritual, and emotional displacement of
American Indians who met and married Mixed or Black slaves and
indentured servants at America's early crossroads is where this
powerful journey begins.
Black Indian
doesn't have answers, nor does it aim to represent every American's
multi-ethnic experience. Instead, it digs as far down into this one
family's history as it can go-sometimes, with a bit of discomfort.
But every family has its own truth, and Buchanan's search for hers
will resonate with anyone who has wondered "maybe there's more
than what I'm being told."