Maud Martha Brown is a little girl growing up on the South Side of 1940s Chicago. Amid the crumbling taverns and overgrown yards, she dreams: of New York, romance, her future. She admires dandelions, learns to drink coffee, falls in love, decorates her kitchenette, visits the Jungly Hovel, guts a chicken, buys hats, gives birth. But her lighter-skinned husband has dreams too: of the Foxy Cats Club, other women, war. And the 'scraps of baffled hate' -- a certain word from a saleswoman; that visit to the cinema; the cruelty of a department store Santa Claus -- are always there .
A perfect, sadly underread classic, like just about every mid-century novel by a US Black woman writer. All the semi-realized and failed promises of freedom in the postwar US as told in crisp prose through the aspirations and disappointments of one Black woman's life.
