Payback - by Penny Mickelbury (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Award-winning author Penny Mickelbury takes readers on a beautiful and complicated journey through Harlem in 1953. This captivating story is passionate and alive, teeming with the contradictory joy and pain of Black life in America.

World War II ended less than 10 years ago, and the Korean War less than one. But no one has recovered from wartime privations, especially the Colored soldiers who fought a ruthless enemy on foreign lands, expecting to return home with all the rights and privileges of American citizenship.

But those rights and privileges remain few and far between, and Mickelbury's cast of characters find themselves reflecting on the Harlem they call home: they are educated and unschooled; wealthy and desperately poor; committed to improving circumstances for Negroes and abjectly hopeless. They create a family of and for themselves--women, men, children, gays, and the proudly self-named. They commit themselves to helping create a world to benefit their people based on hard work, artistic expression, and faith in their community.

They have learned to live in the larger world by two guiding principles: Each One Teaches One, and Harm to One is Harm to All--because in this neighborhood, payback will always be swift and painful.

Review Quotes

"Original, skillfully crafted, memorably entertaining, Payback by Penny Mickelbury is an extraordinary novel that while a work of fiction, accurately presents a very particular segment of 20th Century African-American history--Americans of color who served at their peril in America's wars and still were subject to racism and discrimination upon their return home. One of those novels that will linger in the mind and memory long after the book is finished and set back upon the shelf." --Midwest Book Review

"The combination of Mickelbury's skilled storytelling and complex characters makes Payback a rich, fast-moving, feminist adventure." --Judith Katz, Sinister Wisdom

About the Author

PENNY MICKELBURY is a trailblazing journalist, author, and award-winning playwright. She is a two-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, was a writer in residence at Hedgebrook Women Writers Retreat, and a recipient of the Audre Lorde Estate Grant. In 2020 she was awarded the Alice B. Medal for her body of work. Before focusing on literary pursuits, Penny was a pioneering newspaper, radio, and television reporter based primarily in Washington, D.C. In 2019 she joined other Washington Post Metro Seven members as an inductee into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame.