My Family and I: A Mississippi Memoir

Summary

What has happened to the dream of beloved community embraced by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement of the early 1960s—the vision of a just, humane, and colorblind America, a nation of "black and white together" animated by mutual respect and strengthened by the bonds of brotherly love? As Adam Gussow shows, the dream, although pressured on every front, remains alive.

At the heart of My Family and I is Gussow's determination to live out the meaning of America's creed—a quest for transracial brotherhood that takes him from a blues partnership forged on the streets of 1980s Harlem through graduate training at Princeton and, decades later, a transformative course on the blues literary tradition that he shares with inmates at Mississippi's notorious Parchman Farm. Anchoring Gussow's quest is a story of enduring love: an interracial romance between the newly hired professor at Ole Miss and his soon-to-be-wife that blossoms with the birth of a musically gifted son. As America explodes with protest and riots in 2020 after the death of George Floyd, as social justice fundamentalists insist on stigmatizing whiteness and hardening the color line rather than healing divisions, Gussow is forced to fight for what he loves.

My Family and I gifts the listener with hope for a future beyond America's seemingly insoluble racial dilemmas.