Authors:

  • Julia McKenzie Munemo
Cover of The Book Keeper: A Memoir of Race, Love, and Legacy

When a stack of pulpy paperback novels written by her long-dead father landed on Julia McKenzie Munemos kitchen table, she - a white woman - had been married to a Black man from Zimbabwe for six years and their first son was a toddler. Her alarm at the covers, which promised interracial pornography set during slavery--some of it even taking place in Africa--was matched only by her shame about her fathers secret career. All shed previously known about him was that hed suffered from depression and delusions and had killed himself when she was five. So she did what she always did with details about her dad, and hid the books from herself, and from her growing mixed-race family. But then, a decade later, when police shootings of African American men were more and more in the public eye, she realized that understanding her own legacy seemed like the only way to begin to understand what was happening in her country. The Book Keeper is equal parts love story, family interrogation, and racial reckoning as Munemo comes to terms with her whiteness, and with her history. --Publisher description.

Citations

Munemo, Julia McKenzie. The Book Keeper: A Memoir of Race, Love, and Legacy. Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2020.