Staples on Sharfstein: “Escape Into Whiteness”

Brent Staples reviews Dan Sharfstein's The Invisible Line in the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books.  From Staples' powerful last paragraph:

One suspects that the young Walls would have fared far better—and been given a setting for their lives—had the family embraced its ancestry and sheltered among colored elites … . But Stephen was beyond retreat by the turn of the 1920s.  By then he had abandoned the Wall name and turned his back finally on the colored ancestral past.

Read the entire review here (subscription required).

1 Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *