This book is not about me.
Yet I lived through the same time and in the same place.
So some of the things that happen to Shelly have happened to me, And others like me.
I was born in the city but moved to a small town.
We became the first blacks in our neighbourhood.
And then of course, like Shelly, I was the only black kid in my class.
Brushing racism aside was the done thing.
As good “negroes” we knew our places as second-class citizens.
‘Work harder, expect less,’ we were told.
‘Just pretend that didn’t happen,’ we were told.
Lucky for you, dear reader, I remember enough of what happened to write Shelly’s story.
Shelly Nacre is the brown face in a sea of white, washed up on the rocky shores of Long Island. Life changes suddenly when tragedy befalls her family, leaving Shelly to make sense of what has happened in the only way she knows how. Her father, an armchair activist, feeds her plenty by way of philoso...
