Dear Mr. Geder and Afrigeneas Writers:

George, I thought of you as I read Teresa Barnes' incredibly poignant article, "WHEN APPLES GROW ON LILAC TREES". Why? Because you've shared several first person narratives from "Black Nerd" to remembrances of your family.

Teresa Barnes is a wonderfully gifted writer who searched " through my family's forests of secrets."

She writes about her search for truth in family history. "When I was young, I faithfully believed what my mother and Daisy told me. Later, I looked for facts to buttress their stories. But the stories have twists and turns where there are no facts. Mother and Daisy might have told me things that were wrong sometimes, too, but none of that, in the end, contradicts what I know in my heart. And so it turns out that Princess's castles were not barriers to finding the past. Like the apples on lilac trees, they were history."

The url below will take you to the website of Contours: A Journal of the African Diaspora" which presents the prose and poems of "WHEN APPLES GROW ON LILAC TREES".

Write Away