Ntozake Shange Books In Order

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf

‘If there are shoulders modern African-American women’s literature stands upon they belong to Ntozake Shange, who revolutionized theatre and literature with her iconic work for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf in the 1970s. Any of us writing today are inheritors of her genius.’ -SAPPHIRE, AUTHOR OF PUSH From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it meant to be of color and female in the twentieth century. First published in 1975, when it was praised by The New Yorker for ‘encompassing…
every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,’ for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Here is a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world. ‘Extraordinary and wonderful…
Ntozake Shange writes with such exquisite care and beauty that anyone can relate to her message.’ -THE NEW YORK TIMES

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo

Ntozake Shange’s beloved Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is the story of three sisters and their mother from Charleston, South Carolina. Sassafrass, the oldest, is a poet and a weaver like her mother before her. Having gone north to college, she is now living with other artists in Los Angeles and trying to weave a life out of her work, her man, her memories and dreams. Cypress, the dancer, leaves home to find new ways of moving in the world. Indigo, the youngest, is still a child of Charleston ‘too much of the south in her’ who lives in poetry and has the supreme gift of seeing the obvious magic of the world. Shange’s rich and wondrous story of womanhood, art, and passionately lived lives is written ‘with such exquisite care and beauty that anybody can relate to her message The New York Times.

Betsy Brown

This is a unique and vividly told novel about a girl named Betsey Brown, an African American seventh grader growing up in St. Louis, Missouri. While rendering a complete portrait of this girl, author Ntozake Shange also profiles her friends, her family, her home, her school, and her world. This world, though a work of fiction, is based closely and carefully on actual history, specifically on the nationwide school desegregation events of the Civil Rights movement in America’s recent past. As such, Betsey Brown is a historical novel that will speak to and broaden the perspectives of readers both familiar with and unaware of America s domestic affairs of 1950s and 1960s. Shange has set her story in the autumn of 1959, the year St. Louis started to desegregate its schools. In May of 1954, in its ruling on Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka a verdict now seen by many as the origin of the Civil Rights movement the United States Supreme Court outlawed school segregation. The novel is firmly located in the wake of this landmark ruling; the plot of Shange s novel and the history of America s quest for integration during the Civil Rights era are fundamentally entwined. Thus textual references abound to the watershed events at Little Rock s Central High School in the September of 1957, for example, and to ‘fire bombings and burningcrosses’ in the South as well as ”battalions of police and crowds of crackers” at a demonstration in St. Louis. Betsey is the oldest child in a large, remarkable, and slightly eccentric African American family. Her father is a doctor who wakes his children each morning with point blank questions about African history and Black culture while beating on a conga drum; her mother is a beautiful, refined, confident, and strong willed social worker who is overwhelmed by the vast size of her young family and who cares very little for all that nasty colored music. Indeed, Betsey s whole existence can be seen as a perceptive, adventuresome, and still developing hybrid of her parents most distinctive qualities. Her feelings of internal conflict are often clearer or easier to identify when seen as the collision of her father s dreams and her mother s manners, or her father s music and her mother s cosmetics. There are several fascinating characters in this novel and encountering, describing, and trying to figure out these characters will appeal to students of all backgrounds but the two characters who, after Betsey, most influence the directions, themes, and issues of this tale are Betsey s mother and father, Jane and Greer. Their her parents’ difficult marriage, like the difficult era of desegregation that has only begun in St. Louis and the rest of America, is the realistic, conflicted, yet ultimately hopeful backdrop before which Betsey s lip synching, poem reciting, soul searching, truth seeking, tree climbing, and fact finding take place. In fact, her parents’ stubborn disagreements, heartfelt reconciliations, past glories, and future worries are all, at various times in the book, anchored or else set adrift by the activities of theireldest daughter and first teenager!. Betsey s running away sends her parents into a vicious fight, while her subsequent return seems to bring them closer together if only temporarily. As a novel, Betsey Brown is panoramic yet personal. It tells us what being a Black student in the early days of American desegregation was like by showing us what being Betsey Brown is like. This is an episodic, character driven saga of the Black experience in St. Louis at the end of the Fabulous Fifties, but it is also a story about the many and various and basically familiar growing pains of a precocious, passionate, spunky young protagonist. We see Betsey fall in love; make friends; say prayers; argue with, look after, inspire, and ignore her younger siblings; run away from home; return to those who love and value her above all else; and switch from a school she knows and enjoys to a school on the other side of town where she is a minority and an outcast. We see Betsey outside the very door of her womanhood, we are told all about the steps and path that have brought her to this door, and we are left to wonder at what she will find beyond it.

Liliane

Through the polyphonic voices of Liliane Lincoln’s childhood friends, lovers, and conversations with her psychoanalyst, Ntozake Shange weaves the life of a remarkable young woman. Liliane Lincoln is an artist who exposes what she knows of herself to the world through her bold and colorful artwork. Gradually, however, Liliane realizes that in order to survive, she must come to terms with what she has kept hidden even from herself. Liliane is extraordinary vision of a woman learning to be who she really is.

Some Sing, Some Cry

Award winning writer Ntozake Shange and real life sister, award winning playwright Ifa Bayeza achieve nothing less than a modern classic in this epic story of the Mayfield family. Opening dramatically at Sweet Tamarind, a rice and cotton plantation on an island off South Carolina’s coast, we watch as recently emancipated Bette Mayfield says her goodbyes before fleeing for the mainland. With her granddaughter, Eudora, in tow, she heads to Charleston. There, they carve out lives for themselves as fortune teller and seamstress. Dora will marry, the Mayfield line will grow, and we will follow them on an journey through the watershed events of America’s troubled, vibrant history from Reconstruction to both World Wars, from the Harlem Renaissance to Vietnam and the modern day. Shange and Bayeza give us a monumental story of a family and of America, of songs and why we have to sing them, of home and of heartbreak, of the past and of the future, bright and blazing ahead.

Daddy Says

‘Do you really think she rides with us, Lucie? I mean, when we want to win so bad we can taste it in the back of our mouths and our throats go dry? Is Mama watchin’ over us when it’s our turn at the gate?’ Annie Sharon and Lucie Marie, daughters of two African American rodeo stars, have been raised by their loving but remote father, Tie Down, since their mother, Twanda, was killed by an out of control horse. The girls feel their mother’s absence terribly, especially now that they are beginning to get older, but Tie Down misses her too much to talk about her. Now Tie Down has started dating Cassie, and the girls resent her intrusion into their lives. But after a close call at the rodeo, it is Cassie who finally brings this family together.

I Live in Music

Shange’s lyrical poem is a tribute to the language of music and the magical, often mystical, rhythms that connect people. Music defines who we are as individuals, the places where we live, and how we exist within our communities. Music is life.

Written in a syncopated style that has its own melody, the poem is perfectly married to twenty one extraordinary and diverse works from Romare Bearden who once said, ‘I paint in the tradition of the blues.’

Here is a unique and visionary book that speaks, indeed sings, to both children and adults and is, at once, compelling, profond, and entertaining.

Whitewash

A young African American girl is traumatized when a gang attacks her and her brother on their way home from school and spray paints her face white. Based on a true story.

Ellington Was Not a Street

In a reflective tribute to the African American community of old, noted poet Ntozake Shange recalls her childhood home and the close knit group of innovators that often gathered there. These men of vision, brought to life in the majestic paintings of artist Kadir Nelson, lived at a time when the color of their skin dictated where they could live, what schools they could attend, and even where they could sit on a bus or in a movie theater. Yet in the face of this tremendous adversity, these dedicated souls and others like them not only demonstrated the importance of Black culture in America, but also helped issue in a movement that ‘changed the world.’ Their lives and their works inspire us to this day, and serve as a guide to how we approach the challenges of tomorrow.

Coretta Scott

Walking many miles to school in the dusty road, young Coretta knew, too well, the unfairness of life in the segregated south.

A yearning for equality began to grow.

Together with Martin Luther King, Jr., she gave birth to a vision and a journey-with dreams of freedom for all.

This extraordinary union of poetic text by Ntozake Shange and monumental artwork by Kadir Nelson captures the movement for civil rights in the United States and honors its most elegant inspiration, Coretta Scott.

We Troubled the Waters

Jim Crow; Brown v. Board of Education; Bull Connor; KKK; Birmingham; the Lorraine Motel; Rosa; Martin; and Malcolm. From slavery to the separation of ‘colored’ and ‘white’ and from horrifying oppression to inspiring courage, there are countless stories both forgotten and immortalized of everyday and extraordinary people who acted for justice during the civil rights movement that changed our nation. Award winning poet Ntozake Shange and illustrator Rod Brown give voice to all those who fought for their unalienable rights in a triumphant book about the power of the human spirit.

Freedom’s A-callin Me

Award winning poet Ntozake Shange and artist Rod Brown reimagine the journeys of the brave men and women who made their way to freedom on the Underground Railroad. Fleeing on the Underground Railroad meant walking long distances; swimming across streams; hiding in abandoned shanties, swamps, and ditches, always on the run from slave trackers and their dogs. ah might get hungry ah may get tired good Lawd / ah may be free The Underground Railroad operated on secrecy and trust. But who could be trusted? There were free black and white men and women helping, risking their lives, too. Because freedom was worth any risk. Celebrated collaborators Ntozake Shange and Rod Brown pay tribute to the Underground Railroad, a universal story about the human need to be free. ah am a livin bein & ah got to be free

If I Can Cook/You Know God Can

Acclaimed artist Ntozake Shange offers this delightfully eclectic tribute to black cuisine as a food of life that reflects the spirit and history of a people. With recipes such as ‘Cousin Eddie’s Shark with Breadfruit’ and ‘Collard Greens to Bring You Money,’ Shange instructs us in the nuances of a cuisine born on the slave ships of the Middle Passage, spiced by the jazz of Duke Ellington, and shared by all members of the African Diaspora. Rich with personal memories and historical insight, If I Can Cook/You Know God Can is a vivid story of the migration of a people, and the cuisine that marks their living legacy and celebration of taste.

Float Like a Butterfly

Muhammad Ali, considered by many to be the finest athlete of the twentieth century, is also one of the most famous Americans of his time. Here is a compelling testimony to his courage, resilience in the face of controversy, and boxing prowess by Obie Award winning author Ntozake Shange. In her own words, Shange shows us Ali and his life, from his childhood in the segregated South, to his meteoric rise in boxing to become the Heavyweight Champion of the World. Edel Rodriguez’s stunning artwork combines pastels, monoprint woodblock ink linework and spray paint on colored papers to capture Ali’s power, spontaneity, and energy. A time line and list of additional resources and Web sites help make this a standout picture book biography of the man known around the world as ‘The Greatest’.

Lost in Language & Sound

A vibrant and vital collection that celebrates the three most important muses in the life and work of Ntozake Shange language, music, and dance. In this deeply personal book, the celebrated writer reflects on what it means to be an artist, a woman, and a woman of color through a beautiful combination of memoir and essay. She describes where her love for creative forces began in her childhood home, a place where imagination reigned and boredom wasn’t allowed. The essays tell stories ranging from the poignant origin of her celebrated play ‘for colored girls’ to why Shange needed to deconstruct the English language to make that production work, from the intensity of the female experience and the black experience as separate entities to the difficulty of living both lives simultaneously; from the intense love of jazz bestowed on her by her father to a similar obsession with dance, which came from her mother. With deep sincerity, attention, and her legendary candor, Shange’s collection progresses from the public arena to the private, gathering along the way the passions and insights of an author who writes with such exquisite care and beauty that anybody can relate to her message Clive Barnes, The New York Times.