Farah Jasmine Griffin’s literary memoir is at once a love letter to her father, Emerson Maxwell Griffin, the man who instilled in her a love of reading, learning, and the Black community, and to African American literature itself, for its ability to pose the important questions of the “us” of Black people in America: our creativity, our ingenuity, our loves, grievances, and experiences of betrayal—particularly betrayal of the nation we call home.
Griffin’s father, like many Black men of his generation, was a lifelong learner and organic intellectual, known by his family and neighbors to always have a paperback in his pocket and a stack of black-and-white composition books containing notes on what he read stashed in a closet. A steelworker at the Sun Shipbuilding Company in Chester, Philadelphia, Griffin’s father would take his daughter on outings on his days off to the Philadelphia public library, Black-owned bookstores, and Philadelphia’s...
