“Not only is your story worth
telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes
a song.” – Gloria Naylor
The daughter of Mississippi
sharecroppers who migrated to New York City’s Harlem area to escape southern
segregation, Naylor was born on this date in 1950. She grew up keenly aware of life in “the mean
streets” and kept track of those stories in a daily journal that became a
wonderful resource for her writing.
While her parents had little
education, they encouraged their daughter’s writing and further
study. She earned her bachelor’s degree
in English at the City University of New York in 1981, and master’s in African
American Studies from Yale University in 1983 sandwiched around her first
novel, the award-winning The Women of
Brewster Place. That 1982 work also was
made into a movie.
She had a long and
award-filled career in university teaching while also writing 6 more novels,
drawing frequently on both her own life and the lives of African American women
from the communities in which she lived. She died in the Virgin Islands in 2016.
“I
don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or make you feel
miserable either,” she said. “Life is
just supposed to make you feel. Life is accepting what is and
working from that.”
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