MIGRATIONS OF THE HEART(ISBN=9781400078318) 英文原版 下载 pdf 百度网盘 epub 免费 2025 电子书 mobi 在线

　　In her classic memoir, distinguished author, television

executive, and activist Marita Golden beautifully recounts an

astounding journey to Africa and back.

Marita Golden was raised in Washington, D.C., by a mother who was

a cleaning woman and a father who was taxi-driver. For all their

struggles, with life and each other, her parents instilled her with

spirit and aspirations. Swept up in the heady Black Power movement

of the sixties, Marita moved to New York to study journalism at

Columbia--and fell in love with Femi Ajayi, a Nigerian architecture

student..

Their passion led them to start a life together in Africa--a

place Marita was eager to understand. Exhilarated by a world free

of white racism, Marita quickly found work as a professor and

embraced motherhood. But Femi's increasing expectations that she

snap into the role of the submissive Nigerian wife were shocking

and dispiriting. Her struggle to regain her footing and shape a

black identity that was true to her spirit is suspenseful and

inspiring, an uncommon tale of race, identity, and Africa.

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　　Marita Golden has written both fiction and

nonfiction, including Migrations of the Heart, The Edge

of Heaven, A Miracle Every Day, and Saving Our

Sons. She is the editor of Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues:

Black Women Writers on Love, Men and Sex and the coeditor of

Gumbo: An Anthology of African American Writing and of

Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write About Race. She

is the founder and CEO of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, which

supports African American writers, and lives in Maryland. Please

visit Marita at www.maritagolden.com.

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　　1

　　　My father was the first man I ever loved. He was as assured as a

panther. His ebony skin was soft as the surface of coal. The

vigorous scent of El Producto cigars was a perfume that clung to

him. The worn leather seat of his taxi, a stubborn aroma, had

seeped into his pores, and like a baptism the smells rubbed onto me

from the palms of his hands.

　　　In school he went as far as the sixth grade, then learned the

rest on his own. Part of the rest he bequeathed to me--gold nuggets

of fact, myth, legend dropped in the lap of my mind, shiny new

pennies meant to be saved. By his own definition he was "a black

man and proud of it." Arming me with a measure of this conviction,

he unfolded a richly colored tapestry, savored its silken texture

and warned me never to forget its worth.

　　　Africa:"It wasn't dark until the white man got there."

　　　Cleopatra: "I don't care WHAT they tell you in school, she was a

black woman."

　　　Hannibal: "He crossed the Alps with an army of five hundred

elephants."

　　　The Sphinx (pointing with a tobacco-stained index finger to a

page in the encyclopedia): "Look at the nose, see how broad it is?

That's your nose. That's my nose too."

　　　Bitter, frightening tales of slavery dredged by his

great-grandparents from memories that refused to be mute. Passed to

him. Passed to me. And when he recounted the exploits of Toussaint

L'Ouverture, pausing to remind me that L'Ouverture meant "The

Opener," inside his eyes I saw fire and smoke float over the hills

of Haiti, and his voice stalked the room amid the clanging of

swords, the stomp of heavy boots.

　　　Our most comfortable stage was his taxicab. On frigid winter

Saturday afternoons and warm summer evenings, I rode in the front

seat with him. Always, it was an adventure. As much as anything

else in his life, my father cherished the look of surprise and

unease that invaded the faces of white passengers as he regaled

them with quotes from Jefferson, Tolstoy or Frederick Douglass.

Pouncing on them unawares with the sharpness of his intellect, he

brought their blanched faces from behind The Wall Street Journal or

the New York Times. Their baffled respect, blooming in the form of

a generous tip or an awed, "Mister, you're pretty smart," sealed

his victory.

　　　Together we visited the homes of women, who plied me with

Kool-Aid and cookies and spoke to him in a language of double

meanings and invisible but obvious desire. Women adored my father.

He took them seriously enough to strip his fantasies before them.

He listened as intensely as he spoke, and his reactions confirmed

the legitimacy of their dreams. All of his women were like my

mother, women who had turned daydream desire into tangible reality

through houses, cars, money. All theirs. And, like my mother, these

women, who had flexed their muscles in the face of fate and

circumstance, looked at him with eyes that said, "I will give this

all to you." My father never refused anything. He accepted their

allegiance or a loan of money with equal ease as his due. He was a

hard, nearly impossible man to love when love meant exclusive

rights to his soul. Yet he relied on their steadfastness to enhance

the improvisational nature of his life. Hearing their screen doors

slam behind us as we walked to my father's cab, I trembled as

though implicated in a crime. For, returning home, I met my

mother's worried interrogation and watched her large hands tie

themselves in knots after I helplessly nodded in assent when she

asked if we'd visited Dorothy or Mamie that day.

　　　My father's friends were men with names like Lucky and Sweets,

men whose eyes rendered other verdicts on their lives. I watched

them develop potbellies and saw gray sprout at their hairlines as

they stood, year after year, before the fire-engine-red Coke

machine in Sam's Sunoco gas station, waiting for the number to come

out. In a shifting, eternal circle, they parried and joked, voices

edgy, cloaked in gruff humor as they stood wondering if 301 or 513

would come out that day and "make them a man." Because of his luck

with women and money, they called my father Goldie.

　　　They were not his real friends--they feared him too much.

Shuddered in the wake of his determination, which cast

consideration aside. And they trembled, windswept and lost, in the

face of his poorly hidden belief that he was and always would be

better than the rest. Much like the characters who peopled the

Africa he created for me, and for whom he felt an unbridled

affinity, my father viewed his life as a stage. Those around him

were an audience from whom he demanded total loyalty but to whom he

gave mere lightning flashes of his soul. And I loved him with blind

faith. Could never imagine having to forgive him anything. So when

I had to, I could not.

　　　My father grabbed life by the arm and wrestled it into squealing

submission. My mother cleared the same terrain with a faith and

self-possession that both fueled and ruined some of her

dreams.

　　　Greensboro, North Carolina, must have fit her like a coat too

small, buttons missing, hem unraveling and torn. The town, steeped

and cured in humility and patience, could never have imagined her

hopes. So at nineteen she fled. One summer night, while her parents

and younger brothers slept, she crept out of bed. Crouching on the

floor, she retrieved a cardboard suitcase wrapped in string that

had been hidden beneath her bed for three days. After pinning a

note to her pillow, she walked out into the full-moon night.

Standing on the porch, she felt her heart hacking a path out of her

chest. Placing the suitcase on the porch, she rubbed her sweating

palms on the side of her dress. Crickets echoed in the night air

and fireflies illuminated the web of knee-high front-yard grass.

And, as on every evening of what had been her life up to then, the

pure, heartfelt country silence reached out for her. Struggling out

of its grasp, she picked up the suitcase. Licked her lips for

courage. And, imagining her mother's face the next morning

discovering the empty bed and her wizened hands reaching for the

letter, she scurried down the steps. It was 1928 and she was headed

north.

　　　Washington, D.C., was as far north as she got. There she settled

with a cousin who'd arrived the year before. Her first job was

cleaning government office buildings. But soon she discovered more

gratifying outlets for her industry. Driven by caution, she

scrupulously saved her earnings yet daringly, shrewdly bet small

amounts on the numbers. She hit them regularly and plowed the

winnings into property. Soon she owned four boarding houses and

leased two others, a material affluence which at that time equaled

a virtual empire for a black woman. Indeed, my mother was blessed,

for she had her own. Each month, when she wrote her parents, she

slipped a money order between the pages of the folded letter. And

seven years after her arrival in the city dotted with historical

monuments and scarred by Jim Crow laws, my mother drove, prosperous

and proud, back to Greensboro in her own 1935 Ford.

　　　Her mother sat on the porch in a rocking chair, stringing beans

that afternoon. Her feet touched the splintered boards and she set

the bowl of beans on the table beside her, stood up and clutched

the banister. "Be-A-trice, whose car that you drivin?" she called

out with only modest interest.

　　　"It's mine, mama," her daughter called back, parking the car

before the house with considerable skill.

　　　"Yours?"

　　　"Yes, mama, mine."

　　　My mother was now walking dramatically up the steps to the

porch. She wore a dark-purple suit and a hat that resembled a box

was perched on her head. Her hands held white gloves and a small

brown leather clutch bag.

　　　"You want to go for a ride?" she asked, delighted to be offering

such a treat.

　　　Her mother, who had witnessed greater miracles than this every

Sunday in church, merely folded her arms and shook her head in

disgruntled amazement. "Be-A-trice, can't you write your own folks

no more? It's been three months since we last heard from

you."

　　　If she'd had her way, my mother would have been an actress. Like

the best of them, her presence was irresistible. My father used

words to control and keep others at bay. For my mother language was

a way to reassure and reward. My father demanded loyalty. My mother

inspired it in the host of friends whom she cared for and melded

into her life. She was a large, buxom woman, with caramel-colored

skin and a serene face that gave little indication of the passion

with which she imbued every wish, every commitment. Her hands were

large, long-fingered. Serious hands that rendered punishment

swiftly and breathlessly, folded sheets and dusted tables in a

succession of white folks' homes long after she was mistress of

several of her own. Hands that offered unconditional shelter and

love. In every picture of her there is freeze-framed a look of

sadness rippling across her glance, as though there is still just

one more thing she wants to own, to do, to know. She wore perfume,

fox fur throws casually slung over her shoulders and lamb coats, as

though born to wear nothing less. My father confided to me

offhandedly once, "When I met your mother I thought she was the

most beautiful woman I'd ever seen."

　　　She had been married once before. That husband had loved her

with a precision and concern my father could never imagine. But

after ten years she divorced him, his spirit routed, mauled by

years of drinking into a shape she could barely recognize.

　　　My father was her Armageddon. The thirteen years of their

marriage, a music box wound too tight, played an off-key song of

separation and reunion. The arguments and fights were nearly always

murderous. Sculpted like hot wax around the dry bones of their

unyielding wills was a love that joined and informed them of each

other in ways that were unbearable and soothing. They fought over

my father's women. But mostly, with a special viciousness, over

power, symbolized by my mother's property. Her will shimmered with

so much eloquence and strength that my fat...

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媒体评论

　　"It is a book all women will find useful and compelling and

all men who love women will find disturbing, painful, and

instructive." --Alice Walker

　　"Golden's book reads like a lyrical and well-balanced novel, but

it is all the more difficult to put down because the story is

true." –

Newsday

　　“The book is exquisitely written.”

—

Los Angeles Times

　　"A marvelous journey . . .

powerful imagery. . . . Distinctly drawn characters come alive,

events pulsate with energy."--

The Washington Post Book

World

书籍介绍

In her classic memoir, distinguished author, television executive, and activist Marita Golden beautifully recounts an astounding journey to Africa and back.

Marita Golden was raised in Washington, D.C., by a mother who was a cleaning woman and a father who was taxi-driver. For all their struggles, with life and each other, her parents instilled her with spirit and aspirations. Swept up in the heady Black Power movement of the sixties, Marita moved to New York to study journalism at Columbia--and fell in love with Femi Ajayi, a Nigerian architecture student..

Their passion led them to start a life together in Africa--a place Marita was eager to understand. Exhilarated by a world free of white racism, Marita quickly found work as a professor and embraced motherhood. But Femi's increasing expectations that she snap into the role of the submissive Nigerian wife were shocking and dispiriting. Her struggle to regain her footing and shape a black identity that was true to her spirit is suspenseful and inspiring, an uncommon tale of race, identity, and Africa.