With And It Begins Like This, McQueen explores the legacy of America’s racist past in hopes of making sense of the future.

She also visits the Whitney Plantation, the only plantation museum to focus on slavery. McQueen visits the land her ancestor, Leanna, owned in an effort to discover her story. McQueen seeks to discover the story of Leanna, her great-great grandmother, an enslaved woman who demanded that her children bore the name of their white father after she was set free. She examines the impact of centuries of psychological trauma upon the black community. In her book, McQueen explores racist stereotypes of African-Americans, particularly black women. Her collection of linked essays reminds me of taking that guided tour. I’ve thought of that incident often since I read LaTanya McQueen’s And It Begins Like This. They laughed to think of how some white people had had to make these ugly images to keep black people down. The children nodded their heads and smiled. “Do you see what they did? That’s how powerful we are, that they had to show these ugly images over and over everywhere to try and keep us down, but we didn’t let them.” She just leaned down to those children and smiled. Yet the woman leading the tour defused the moment.

I felt horrified I knew I could only begin to imagine the horror they felt. I’m a school librarian I watched the children staring. At one point our group, which included several small black children, stopped at a display showing historic racist depictions of African-Americans: the minstrel characters, the Aunt Jemimas, the golliwogs and the pickaninnies, caricatures with bulging eyes, large lips, crinkly hair, many of them depictions from children’s books. It’s located in the original Woolworths where the lunch counter sit-ins began. Two summers ago, my family and I took a guided tour of the International Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro, NC.

Leopardia by LaTanya McQueen