Guy, Rosa (Cuthbert) - Alice Walker

ALICE WALKER

I feel especially blessed when reading the books of Virginia Hamilton, Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Louise Merriweather, Toni Morrison and other fine engagé black women writers; for I am thinking of a young black girl who spent the first 20 years of her life without seeing a single book in which the heroine was a person like herself….

[Now, with books like] Rosa Guy's heart-slammer, "The Friends," I relive those wretched, hungry-for-heroines years and am helped to verify the existence and previous condition of myself….

[The] struggle that is the heart of this very important book [is] the fight to gain perception of one's own real character; the grim struggle for self-knowledge and the almost killing internal upheaval that brings the necessary growth of compassion and humility and courage, so that friendship (of any kind, but especially between those of notable economic and social differences) can...

[The entire page is 234 words long]

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