BLACK AND UGLY LIFE

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33887, 5 July 1975, Page 10

BLACK AND UGLY LIFE

There's Nothing I Own That I Want. By Harrisene Jackson. Prentice-Hall. 168 pp. N.Z. price $6.25 approx. This autobiography of the hopes, fears and miseries of a black woman in the United States seems curiously anachronistic. It describes how she surmounts adversity: what happens to her is influenced by her colour, but seems to be inevitable in terms of her own searching, disturbed personality. Mrs Jackson, as a small child watches her mother slowly and brutally murdered by a drunken bovfriend. later marries a possibly homosexual Air Force officer who has no real interest in her or the children he insists he wants, and has various boyfriends who father children and then depart. Numerous physical debilities make her life a misery. Also she has a schizophrenic daughter who spends most of her life in psychiatric institutions, and other children who are emotionally disturbed in various ways. She endures constant poverty and substandard living conditions.

works for employers whose main interest is to seduce her. and in spite of everything desperately seeks some purpose in life. Mrs Jackson's literary therapy leaves us wondering what degree of influence the colour of her skin has had. Certainly she is constantlytreated as a second-rate citizen, and her children are beaten up when they come to a better suburb because they are different. Because of her colour she finds causes to fight for and has curiously little affinity with her own people. Her tenacity in her struggle evokes admiration. She refuses to bow down and accept her fate, which would have been all too easy’ at various times of suffering. But it is questionable whether this would have been conveyed at all in print had Mrs Jackson been an intelligent underprivileged white woman. Mrs Jackson is self-educated, and writes well. It is understandable that she was encouraged to write her book as a therapeutic exercise rather than a valued communication.