Falling Up to Grace

In 1955, a three-year-old girl sets sail with her family from New York bound for Belgium, uprooted to allow her father to study medicine abroad, a privilege denied African-Americans at home. So begin Linda Mabry’s school years, a curiosity among white, French-speaking, children. Upon the family’s return to America, her father preaches, “Education will be your salvation,” sending his children to private school. Linda commutes between poverty, violence and upheaval at home in Harlem, to the privilege, status, and affluence of the Upper West Side. In 1993, a graduate of Mount Holyoke, Johns Hopkins, and Georgetown, accomplished in her field, Linda becomes a professor of international law at Stanford. In 1998, an act of betrayal convinces Linda to abandon the “alien, unnatural way of being” she once thought necessary for a “colored girl” to fit in. She finds purpose fighting for gender equity and volunteering in a literacy program. Coming to terms with life after ending her professional career, Linda returns to the empty family house in Harlem, (abandoned after her father's practice had failed 20 years earlier), finding insight among the ghosts and echoes of her past – only to have her life interrupted by pancreatic cancer. Her friends find an unfinished memoir in her drawer after her death and with her husband's support bring her story to publication with “Falling Up to Grace.”