An edition of Roadwalkers (1994)

Roadwalkers

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Last edited by MARC Bot
July 25, 2024 | History
An edition of Roadwalkers (1994)

Roadwalkers

  • 1 Want to read

In this amazing odyssey of two black women from the 1930s to the present, all the storytelling gifts of a brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning writer are abundantly displayed.

When we first meet Baby, she's one of six black children abandoned by their parents during the Depression. They are roadwalkers - homeless wanderers across the rural South, leading a dangerous, almost enchanted life. One by one they are saved, lost, or simply disappear, until only Baby and a brother are left, living off the land - a primitive gypsy existence hauntingly described.

Finally Baby is captured - almost like a wild animal - by the white farm manager of an old plantation where the children have been hiding. He sends her to an orphanage in New Orleans, where she guards the rich mythic content of her wandering against the invasive kindness of the nuns by covering the walls with strange, brilliant drawings of flowers and animals.

.

We next see Baby decades later, through the eyes of her daughter, Nanda, who at thirty-six looks back at her own childhood. Baby and Nanda move into the middle class through Baby's eccentrically successful career - first as a seamstress, then as a designer of dresses for rich white women. Raised a princess in the protective circle of Baby's magic, Nanda in her teens is suddenly catapulted into the white world when she is sent off to integrate a white Catholic girls' school in the East.

Seeing herself - as her mother saw herself - alone in an alien place, Nanda finds an entirely different means of survival. A rich and wonderfully fresh - often astonishing - evocation of the black experience in the South, seen through the lives of two fascinating women.

Publish Date
Publisher
Knopf
Language
English
Pages
292

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Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: Roadwalkers
Roadwalkers
Aug 09, 2016, Audible Studios on Brilliance, Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio
mp3 cd
Cover of: Roadwalkers
Roadwalkers
2012, Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
in English
Cover of: Roadwalkers
Roadwalkers
2012, Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
in English
Cover of: Roadwalkers
Roadwalkers
2012, Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
in English
Cover of: Roadwalkers
Roadwalkers
2012, Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
in English
Cover of: Roadwalkers
Roadwalkers
2003, Louisiana State University Press
in English
Cover of: Roadwalkers
Roadwalkers
1994, Knopf
in English

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Book Details


Edition Notes

Published in
New York
Genre
Fiction.

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
813/.54
Library of Congress
PS3557.R283 R63 1994

The Physical Object

Pagination
292 p. ;
Number of pages
292

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL1426202M
Internet Archive
roadwalkers00grau
ISBN 10
0679432337
LCCN
93037262
OCLC/WorldCat
29030317
Library Thing
1954379
Goodreads
2034630

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History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON / OPDS | Wikipedia citation
July 25, 2024 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
December 4, 2022 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
November 17, 2020 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
August 18, 2020 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
April 1, 2008 Created by an anonymous user Imported from Scriblio MARC record