Robin M. Boylorn’s Sweetwater left me astonished at the ways in which Black women’s truth-telling has always offered a profound and resourceful documentation of history. By giving readers the ability to interact with and meditate on her lived experiences, Boylorn exposes the unique, important, and familiar stories of Sweetwater women. Like stories told by many Black women scholars, the resilient lives of Sweetwater women are individual yet familiar to Black women’s collective memory. This kind of storytelling has kept generations of Black women interconnected and comes with a sense of belonging, allowing Black women to see themselves not only in the story but in the characters as well; this stuck with me as I read Sweetwater. I was quickly submerged in the book, seeing myself standing in the doorways of rooms, sitting in on conversations that my imagined self was way too young for.
As the pages turned, I...
University of California Press