Description

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Award-winning writer Ntozake Shange and real-life sister, award-winning playwright Ifa Bayeza achieve nothing less than a modern classic in this epic story of the Mayfield family.

Opening dramatically at Sweet Tamarind, a rice and cotton plantation on an island off South Carolina's coast, we watch as recently emancipated Bette Mayfield says her goodbyes before fleeing for the mainland. With her granddaughter, Eudora, in tow, she heads to Charleston. There, they carve out lives for themselves as fortune-teller and seamstress. Dora will marry, the Mayfield line will grow, and we will follow them on an journey through the watershed events of America's troubled, vibrant history—from Reconstruction to both World Wars, from the Harlem Renaissance to Vietnam and the modern day.

Shange and Bayeza give us a monumental story of a family and of America, of songs and why we have to sing them, of home and of heartbreak, of the past and of the future, bright and blazing ahead.

About the Author

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Ntozake Shange (1948-2018) was born in Trenton, New Jersey and educated at Barnard College and the University of Southern California, where she received an MA in American Studies. Her choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf brought her Broadway success and international recognition. She is the author of an acclaimed adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children and has written three novels: Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo; Betsey Brown; and Liliane. Her poetry includes nappy edges, A Daughter's Geography, Ridin' the Moon in Texas and From Okra to Greens. Her first collection of plays was published by Methuen Drama in 1978.

Ifa Bayeza is an award-winning playwright, producer, and conceptual theater artist. Her works for the stage include Amistad Voices, Club Harlem, Kid Zero, Homer G & the Rhapsodies, and The Ballad of Emmett Till, winner of the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Play and a 2007 Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference fellowship. A graduate of Harvard University, Bayeza is a board member of the SonEdna Literary Foundation. She lives in Chicago.

Praise For…

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“Lyrical... Think of it as Roots with a treble clef—a confident, lively account of love, art and what falls between.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Vibrant... Some Sing, Some Cry is Shange and Bayeza at their poetic best.” —Essence

“Solid gold... Ntozake Shange and her sister, Ifa Bayeza, partner to write a lyrical and epic novel.” —Ebony

“Revered poet, playwright, and novelist Shange teams up with her award-winning playwright sister Bayeza in this encompassing historical saga of African American life. In its riveting dramatization of the promise of emancipation, the brutality of the Reconstruction, the baroque cruelty of the Jim Crow era, all the way to the possibilities of the digital age, this bittersweet tale of seven generations in a family of mixed blood and musical genius weaves together essential historical facts and profound emotional truths. ” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred)

“A sweeping African-American saga animating 200 years of history through the voices of seven generations of the Mayfield family's women, beginning with Elizabeth (Ma Bette), a freed slave, and her granddaughter Eudora. Their fate and that of their progeny follows historical events from the Jim Crow South to the civil rights movement with tragedy and triumph. This is a complex poetic treatise on race, culture, love, and family, the use of regional vernacular, dialect, and pure song, resulting in a provocative fictional history.” —Publishers Weekly

“If there are shoulders modern African-American women's literature stands upon they belong to Ntozake Shange who revolutionized theater and literature with her iconic work for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf in the 1970's. Any of us writing today are inheritors of her genius. Some Sing, Some Cry will show her to be as potent and irrepressible a force as she was thirty years ago.” —Sapphire, author of Push

“In this epic saga, the sister-sister author combination of Bayeza and Shange offers a richly detailed and boldly colored account of one family's experience in slavery and its legacies for the generations that followed. Some Sing, Some Cry is both moving and arresting.” —Annette Gordon-Reed, author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family