This is one of the better books I have read that mixes a personal memoir with a foray into past history. The author did a fantastic job blending the two into each other, a cohesive and moving story about a young woman trying to come to terms with her blackness and learning about the grandfather she never knew. She was raised in San Diego, her father played for the Chargers, a privileged upbringing as far as money, but she never felt loved by her mother and never realized nor understood the barriers of her race.

The Mississippi Delta, the town of Greenwood, where her mother and father came from, where her grandfather was one of the few blacks that not only had money but owned his own restaurant called Booker's Place. He was also a waiter at Luscos, a preeminent restaurant in the Jim Crow south. Does an amazing job describing the genesis of the Delta and what life was like for the blacks who resided there. Some of this is very difficult to read, even after the civil Rights movement things were not any better, in fact trying to shove these new laws down the throats of many resistant whites made things even more difficult. But, as she finds out when she travels down there searching for her roots, information about her grandfather, things were not clear cut, she found some goodness even in those she felt were evil, or acted in evil ways.

The writing is very good and I applaud the author in what I felt was some very fine and fair story telling, her trying to understand both sides of the movement. Not being southern myself I learned much from this book, and from many different viewpoints. The book mentions a documentary that her grandfather was in that opened the floodgates, making real what blacks actually thought of how they were treated and bringing the problems in this town into the light. Need to see if I can find that anywhere. ( )

A friend of mine just came back from a memoir-writing workshop. We talked about it on a walk around the duck pond near our houses. You need to have a narrative, my friend said. You need to have yourself as a character. You need to have a focus and a lens and a frame and basically, you can't be all rambly (like I often am).

The Song and the Silence is rambly. It's a unfocused. Neither means that it isn't compelling, but it's muddled. Johnson discovers her grandfather appeared in a 1960s television documentary about desegregation attempts in Mississippi. Her grandfather, a black singing waiter at a white's only restaurant, detailed how no matter what, around the white restaurant patrons, he smiles. He smiles but that doesn't mean he's happy. As the book's blurb says: he described what life was truly like for the black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.

Except the book isn't about Johnson's grandfather. It's about Johnson discovering about her grandfather, and maybe it would just be better about her grandfather. I'm rarely a fan of making the discoverer the protagonist rather than the person who is being discovered. As an example, I don't really need to read about Johnson having a fight with her mother about whether her kids can watch some Disney movie or not. If that fight could somehow be tied back into the struggle Johnson's grandfather endured, then maybe. But the clumps where Johnson writes about her own life are not deftly woven in to her grandfather's story. Johnson works hard to make this a memoir, when maybe this was better suited as a non-fiction about her grandfather's life. Her writing is stronger not writing about herself.

I just don't know what I was supposed to take away from this experience.

The Song and the Silence by Yvette Johnson went on sale May 2, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. ( )