Uncovering Race by Amy Alexander

Author:Amy Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Several weeks after I’d cleared the first trimester, I began phoning friends and family members with the news. My mom said, “That’s great, Amy! How do you feel?”

Then I phoned my agent in New York, who said, “Welcome to the club!” She also advised me on how to broach the topic with the editors at the publishing house where my next book was on tap—Beacon Press, in Boston. I had written a proposal for a third nonfiction book, this one on African Americans and suicide, and in February 1998 Beacon had bought it. For many years I had wanted to write a book about my older brother’s suicide and the larger subject of blacks and mental health. In researching the issues involved, including the history of blacks and the medical and mental health establishments in the United States, I kept encountering the name of a Harvard psychiatrist who was a leader in the field: Alvin F. Poussaint, MD.

My agent had suggested I write to him, and I did. And during a meeting with Dr. Poussaint in his office near Children’s Hospital in Boston, early in 1998, not only had he agreed with the premise of my book—that black Americans face bigger challenges in dealing with mental health and emotional distress than the general population—but he’d also agreed to be my coauthor. After I learned I was pregnant and Beacon and I worked out a new delivery date for the manuscript, Dr. Poussaint agreed to keep the project moving forward by writing the final chapter—the solutions portion—on his own.

He was proving to be a Good Doctor on many important fronts.

My daughter was born in early spring 1999 at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, by cesarean section. The birth took less than two hours. Afterward, looking down at her tiny peach-colored face and pink mouth, I joked with Hubby. “I figure she’s bound to have a great sense of humor,” I told him.

It was April Fools’ Day in the last year of the century. Privately, I wasn’t sure how I would ever return to journalism full-time.

Little by little I wrote the mental health book, having completed the interviews and travel during the second trimester of my pregnancy. Being a new mother focused my concentration in a way that I found surprising but which Dr. Poussaint assured me was common. I had developed an easy rapport with him and came to relish our talks and working relationship. My time for writing articles and reviews had all but vanished, but I occasionally checked in with editors at the Globe to let them know of ideas that sometimes popped up.

In the summer of 2000, we bought a house in a small, out-of-the-way Boston neighborhood called Hyde Park. Greg Moore, the Globe’s managing editor, lived nearby in Milton. All of a sudden, I was a suburban stay-at-home mom.

In October 2000, Beacon published Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis among African-Americans. A Globe features writer, Bella English, interviewed me and Dr. Poussaint in

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