Excerpt from I Just Keep Talking by Nell Irvin Painter, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

My parents, Frank and Dona, fell in love at first sight in the library of the then Houston College for Negroes (now Texas Southern University), so I come by my bookishness from my very beginnings. They married and moved to Oakland, California, in 1942. For their migration, I remain eternally grateful. I never was meant to be a Southerner. Frank and Dona didn't escape right away; I was born in the Houston Hospital for Negroes, an institution that Texas had named specifically to let everyone know it was meant to be lesser, as in separate not intended to be equal, one of many Southern institutions created after the Second World War against Nazi Germany had given outright, unmitigated racism unsavory connotations. My parents knew these hastily created institutions, having met in one of them, as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund was harrying the South over the lying, mean-spirited state of its public education. Texas jerry-built my parents' college, the Houston College for Negroes, under another discounting name. Frank and Dona escaped to the San Francisco Bay Area. They stayed married. I stayed bookish.

Excerpted from I JUST KEEP TALKING by Nell Irvin Painter. Reprinted by Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Nell Irvin Painter.