The enlightening memoir of one multiethnic family's struggles and triumphs

A Place to Be Someone (cloth)

Growing Up with Charles Gordone

Shirley Gordon Jackson, with introduction by Maceo C. Dailey, Jr.

What happens when even the family color compass compounds the burdens of childhood?Before playwright Charles Gordone became a Texan, he became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama, for No Place to Be Somebody. Now, in her family memoir, Gordone’s younger sister Shirley covers the years prior to his geographical and psychological journey west, an Indiana childhood that deeply informed his pilgrimage.“Here is the drama that permeates not just the lives of blacks who grow up among whites but of countless blacks who find themselves living and working between worlds. Fanon refers to this as ‘certain uncertainty,’ Du Bois calls it ‘double consciousness,’ Bernard Bell refers to it as ‘socialized ambivalence, Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall call it ‘living in the interstices.’ Whatever we call it, this unbelongingness is a painful liminal space—destabilizing terrain. Jackson captures the essence of being stuck in the middle. The schism she reveals in her community resonates in other underrepresented groups. Jackson gives voice to people everywhere who have ever felt invisible and different.” — playwright Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, author of When the Ancestors Call and The Break of Day“Both Shirley and Charles are real and as recognizable as the drumbeat of Africa and the melodies of a Beethoven sonata, or, more precisely put, the New World Symphony of Dvořák.” —Maceo C. Dailey, Jr., from the introduction



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