There is no bond like that of family. It is the foundation upon which each of us are built, its stability or unsteadiness providing the emotional bedrock on which we stand. For George M. Johnson, the bestselling author of 2020’s groundbreaking “memoir-manifesto” All Boys Aren’t Blue, the story really began with a childhood spent primarily in the company of their male cousins under the guidance and unconditional love of family matriarch Nanny, born as Louise Kennedy Evans Elder and also affectionately known as “Big Lou.”
Three Black Women Open Charlotte’s Only Skating Rink—And It’s Outdoors
As the 2020 The Root 100 honoree told us last year when appearing on The Root Presents: It’s Lit!, it was those years and the early lessons they imparted that inspired their second book, We Are Not Broken, published Tuesday, Sept. 7. As described by publisher Little, Brown for Young Readers, Johnson’s second memoir “tenderly captures the unique experience of growing up Black in America, and their rich storytelling is interspersed with touching letters from the grandchildren that pay tribute to Nanny,” who died in late 2019.
Johnson further explained the impact of their late grandmother’s love and legacy to us last fall, noting: “[what] I noticed is that a lot of people were quoting me from my [first] book, like pulling quotes and like, ‘Oh, I love that George said this; I love that George said that.’ And for me, it was interesting because I thought about like, well, how many people get quoted that we don’t ever learn about or hear about? How many people do we hear about that never get quoted about? Like we always know the MLK quotes, we know all of the Malcolm X quotes. We know Fannie Lou Hamer and Toni Morrison. But I was like, but my grandmother had quotes too. And that was our wisdom. That was our connection. That was our everything.”
