Betty Jean Grant

Falling Through the Crack Betty Jean Grant

Falling Through the Crack is more than a book of poems; it is a book about African Americans living, loving, crying and dying in this place called America. It is about the struggle of a proud and strong race of people who survived the inhumane period of that ´peculiar institution´ the world knows as the enslavement of people of African descent. It is also about the pain that we, as African Americans, have inflicted on ourselves with our community´s proliferation of drugs, guns, homicides and immoral/criminal behaviors. It is about the epidemic level of incarceration that is wreaking havoc on family stabilization. It is about the thousands of young,dead, black boys who died at the hands of those thousands of imprisoned young,black men. It is about the ´lost young men´ of yet another generation. This book, the life´s work of the author, is also a factual, eyewitnessed account to the old,southern way of dealing with racism, Jim Crowism, segregation and lynchings and the effect these events had on both black and white America. Experience the pain, and the pride, emanating from poems such as ´Four Little Girls, (that records the murder of four innocent girls in that famous church bombing) to,´This is my Country´, a poem that shows how embedded the free and enslaved Africans were in the first fabrics of this former English Colony and newly independent country; and ´Southern Style Bar-b-cue´, the sad and brutual documentation of a KKK lynching of a black man by fire (as witnessed by an innocent nine year old white child). The pages of this book will take you, the readers, on a fantastic literary journey that will educate, enlighten, frustrate, engage and motivate you to learn more about the many people of African descent who help to build, through both stolen and freedmen´s labor, this great nation of ours. Take a moment to click the excerpt bar at the bottom of this page to read seven randomly selected poems from the book. There are over 110 poems of various subjects and si