The Black Wife

At once a radical black-white marriage history and a radical U.S. history, written in Alan Goldfein s uniquely poetic, and witty prose, The Black Wife finds its focal point in Baltimore, the most northern of the Southern cities, the most southern of the North - the Nation itself becoming a kind of solar system through which The Black Wife travels in success, in failure, in success. Torn by the inescapable ironies of race, the passionate hopes of race and the divisions, Carol Poussaint Polson marries a white man, has his son, who struggles within a lineage tug-of-war, reaching for salvation in a spirit life bizarre and strangely pure. Carol reports from Vietnam and from Iraq. She has grown up in Baltimore at the same time that Nancy Pelosi has grown up in Baltimore, one a daughter of the ghetto, one a daughter of the mayor: they meet in a violent way, symbolic of the Sixties, and their lives obliquely parallel until they meet for a final tragic time, symbolic of the Nineties. And symbolic of Now.