Books with author Lori Yarborough

This is the first novella about the life of Bernice, an urban girl who went from being Colored to Negro to Black. She was brought up in a segregated Los Angeles where codes dictated where you could live and go. Bernice always thought she was okay, but the world didn't. She was always stared at because she did not have any hair. She pulled it out by the fingers full. But, her mother told her she had a pretty face, and that was enough to keep her going. By today’s standards, Bernice may have been abused in some ways, but she is a product of the 1950s, and that’s just the way it was. Bernice begins her story with a story. She stated:When I was about eleven years old, my cousin told me a joke about an angry bird that flew over all the green grass it could find, just to defecate and mire the landscape with itself. I remembered thinking that the bird was evil. Then I landed at the crossroads where the bird arrived years before I did. The realization produced a whirlwind in my head and quaked my very self with the awareness that the bird was paying back all the wrongs, imaginary or real, it had endured. The angry bird’s action was an attempt to cover a world that threw rocks at him, hurled objects at his head, and pocked him with gun pellets. Believe me, it was all I could do to keep my pants up.