“But unlike the television Jeffersons, it was no situation comedy with canned laughter, but a daily push for acceptance and upward movement.” Although grounded in her parents’ American dreams for her to be the first in her family to attend top schools and recite Proust in Parisian French, Harris would create her own destiny.īy the early 1970s, Harris was teaching French at New York’s Queens College when Samuel Clemens Floyd III walked into her life. “My parents could have been poster children for movin’ on up,” she writes. Harris was raised by what she calls “Edwardian-era parents” during a time when women of a certain class were shaped to hold “lady-like” conversations and be a “helpmate” for well-vetted husbands.
My Soul Looks Back chronicles Harris’s life from an aspiring young journalist to an internationally recognized scholar. Harris, pioneering food scholar, legendary griot, and award-winning writer has released a captivating memoir. As she reads from her illustrious memoir, she shares precious moments from a well-lived life, telling stories of triumphs, intimate friendships, heartbreaks, grand trips around the world, and shared meals with some of the most revered Black intelligentsia in American history. Familiar faces smile at the guest of honor as she pours a glass of red wine. Nina Simone On a rainy afternoon in June, a small crowd gathers in the lobby of the Garden District Book Shop in Uptown New Orleans. If (('gtm=off') const isAppRedirect = ('appRedirect') Ĭonst isAndroid = /Android/i.test(erAgent) Ĭonst isIphone = /iPhone|iPad|iPod/i.test(erAgent) More than a memoir of friendship and first love My Soul Looks Back is a carefully crafted, intimately understood homage to a bygone era and the people that made it so remarkable.
The book is framed by Harris’ relationship with Sam Floyd, a fellow professor at Queens College, who introduced her to Baldwin. Harris describes her role as theater critic for the New York Amsterdam News and editor at then burgeoning Essence magazine star-studded parties in the South of France drinks at Mikell’s, a hip West Side club and the simple joy these extraordinary people took in each other’s company. Harris paints evocative portraits of her illustrious friends: Baldwin as he read aloud an early draft of If Beale Street Could Talk, Angelou cooking in her California kitchen, and Morrison relaxing at Baldwin’s house in Provence. My Soul Looks Back is her paean to that fascinating social circle and the depth of their shared commitment to activism, intellectual engagement, and each other. Harris debated, celebrated, and danced her way from the jazz clubs of the Manhattan’s West Side to the restaurants of the Village, living out her buoyant youth alongside the great minds of the day-luminaries like Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. In the technicolor glow of the early seventies, Jessica B.
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