Research Catalog

Title

Go back and get it : a memoir of race, inheritance, and intergenerational healing / Dionne Ford.

Author

Ford, Dionne, 1969-

Publication

• New York, NY : Bold Type Books, 2023.
• ©2023

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 240 pages : illustrations, genealogical table; 22 cm

Summary

"One-third of Black Americans descended from slavery are related to the slave masters who bought and sold their ancestors. In other words, one-third of Black Americans descended from slavery are descended also from sexual exploitation. Dionne Ford, whose great-grandmother was the last of six children born to a Louisiana cotton broker called the Colonel and the enslaved woman he received as a wedding gift, is among them. What shapes does this kind of intergenerational trauma take and how to root it out of the body? In Go Back and Get It, Ford's debut memoir, she tells us: it manifests as alcoholism and depression and post-traumatic stress; it finds echoes in Ford's own experience of rape at the hands of a relative, and in the ways in which, much later, she builds an interracial family and manages the heartache of her daughters' racial confusion; it wracks her insides, stalling both her pregnancies. Meanwhile, Ford's preoccupation with healing is what truly sets this book apart. She tries eye-movement therapy, visits to a medium, twelve-step recovery, capoeira, a sugar- and wheat-free diet. "Anything," she writes, "to keep from going back there." But what she learns is that she needs to go back there, to return to her female ancestors and uncover what about them she can to begin to feel whole. Thus begins a journey that's anguished and hopeful and strange, one that brings Ford to long-lost cousins both Black and white, to forgotten newspaper articles about her great-uncle's lynching and to abandoned gravesites, to an eBay sword that belonged to the Colonel and that she considers using as a way into the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Go Back and Get It combines the story of her inner life with research and reflections on how racial trauma is generated, repeated, stored, and processed, what the cycle looks like and how it might be broken. It is a memoir about how, in the search for belonging, family can be a source of loneliness and even danger and also a true home"--

Subject

• Ford, Dionne, 1969-
• African American women authors > Biography
• Generational trauma > United States
• African Americans > Social conditions
• Race discrimination > United States > History
• African American women authors
• Generational trauma
• Race discrimination
• Race relations
• African Americans
• United States > Race relations
• United States

Genre/Form

• Biographies.
• History.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references.

Contents

Prologue: a relation -- Black on the inside -- Borrowing history -- Beating back the future -- Everything the mouth eats -- Paradise lost -- Passing strange -- United daughters -- The pecan and how it grows -- The fire this time -- Spirits -- Heretic -- Good as cousins -- Juneteenth -- Plantation diaries -- Tempy's lot -- Crowd of sorrows -- Meeting the Stuarts -- Coming to the table -- Monuments -- Epilogue: altars.

Call Number

Sc D 23-460

ISBN

• 9781645030133
• 164503013X
• 9781645030157 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

2022030082

OCLC

1340740402

Author

Ford, Dionne, 1969- author.

Title

Go back and get it : a memoir of race, inheritance, and intergenerational healing / Dionne Ford.

Publisher

New York, NY : Bold Type Books, 2023.

Copyright Date

©2023

Edition

First edition.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references.

Local Note

Schomburg copy with dust jacket.

Local Subject

Black author.

Research Call Number

Sc D 23-460