The Black Girl Next Door

September 15, 2008
Baszile grew up in an affluent Southern California suburb (she was a first-grader in 1975), a postsegregation child in a not quite integrated world and “the only black girl in my class, my grade, and my school besides my sister.” In this craftily structured memoir, Baszile carries the reader at a leisurely, but in no way slack, pace through her girlhood and adolescence, maintaining both her young vulnerability and her sophisticated adult perspective. In trips to her parents’ childhood homes—big city Detroit for her mother, deep country Louisiana for her father—she sees their (and her own) African-American pasts. A cruise, on which her parents challenge the two girls “to introduce yourselves to every black kid on this boat” before dinner, offers fresh dimensions of her African-American present. Taken together, they contribute to the path that led her to Yale’s history department (its first black female professor). In elegant prose, Baszile shares enlightening observations throughout: “Dad never complained about being a black man... but he couldn’t disguise its particular perils.” Proud and comfortable in her skin, as well as clearheaded about its hazards, Baszile has written a classic portrait of that girl next door.