Payback

<p><strong>Award-winning author Penny Mickelbury takes readers on a beautiful and complicated journey through Harlem in 1953. This captivating story is passionate and alive teeming with the contradictory joy and pain of Black life in America.</strong></p><br><p>World War II ended less than 10 years ago and the Korean War less than one. But no one has recovered from wartime privations especially the Colored soldiers who fought a ruthless enemy on foreign lands expecting to return home with all the rights and privileges of American citizenship.</p><br><p>But those rights and privileges remain few and far between and Mickelbury's cast of characters find themselves reflecting on the Harlem they call home: they are educated and unschooled; wealthy and desperately poor; committed to improving circumstances for Negroes and abjectly hopeless. They create a family of and for themselves--women men children gays and the proudly self-named. They commit themselves to helping create a world to benefit their people based on hard work artistic expression and faith in their community.</p><br><p>They have learned to live in the larger world by two guiding principles: Each One Teaches One and Harm to One is Harm to All--because in this neighborhood payback will always be swift and painful.</p>