10 Classic Books by Black Women Every Reader Should Know
Classic usually means a book someone assigned you and you never finished. These are the ones worth going back for, by Black women who were writing at the highest level while being reviewed as a category rather than as writers.
Three Morrisons, because she earned it and because people ask which one to start with. The answer is Sula if you want short and Song of Solomon if you want the whole cathedral. The rest of the list runs back to 1929 and forward to Katrina, and several of them are shorter than you expect.
Sula
Two girls in an Ohio town called the Bottom, one who leaves and one who stays, and the friendship that survives an unforgivable thing. Under two hundred pages and the best door into Morrison.
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Song of Solomon
Milkman Dead goes south looking for gold and finds his family's history instead. The novel that won Morrison the National Book Critics Circle Award and put her on the path to the Nobel. Her most expansive.
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The Bluest Eye
Her first novel, about a girl who prays for blue eyes because she has correctly understood what the world rewards. Brutal and brief. Morrison's afterword about why she wrote it is worth the price by itself.
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Sister Outsider
The essay collection that gave us the master's tools line, along with the uses of anger and the uses of the erotic. Lorde is quoted constantly and read less often. Go to the essays themselves.
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Passing
Two light-skinned childhood friends meet again in 1920s Harlem, one living as white, and the tension between them turns lethal. Barely a hundred and fifty pages, and the ending is still argued over.
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for colored girls who have considered suicide
Shange called it a choreopoem: twenty poems for seven women named only by the colors they wear. It ran on Broadway in 1976 and reads aloud better than it reads silently. Try it out loud.
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Corregidora
A blues singer carrying four generations of instruction to make generations and bear witness to a Portuguese slaveholder. Morrison edited it. Jones writes desire and inherited harm as one thing, and it is uncompromising.
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The Women of Brewster Place
Seven women on one dead-end street, each with her own chapter, connected by the wall at the end of the block. Won the National Book Award for first fiction. The last chapter will take the wind out of you.
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Brown Girl, Brownstones
Barbadian Brooklyn in the 1930s, a daughter caught between a mother chasing property and a father dreaming of going home. One of the first novels to put Caribbean immigrant life in America on the page.
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Salvage the Bones
Twelve days in a Mississippi family's life as Katrina approaches, narrated by a pregnant fifteen-year-old with a brother, a dog, and no adults worth the name. Won the National Book Award. A modern classic already.
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