Some Sing Some Cry: A Novel

Award-winning writer Ntozake Shange and real-life sister award-winning playwright Ifa Bayeza achieve nothing less than a modern classic in this epic story of the Mayfield family. . Opening dramatically at Sweet Tamarind a rice and cotton plantation on an island off South Carolinas coast we watch as recently emancipated Bette Mayfield says her goodbyes before fleeing for the mainland. With her granddaughter Eudora in tow she heads to Charleston. There they carve out lives for themselves as fortune-teller and seamstress. Dora will marry the Mayfield line will grow and we will follow them on an journey through the watershed events of Americas troubled vibrant history―from Reconstruction to both World Wars from the Harlem Renaissance to Vietnam and the modern day. . Shange and Bayeza give us a monumental story of a family and of America of songs and why we have to sing them of home and of heartbreak of the past and of the future bright and blazing ahead.