So, you've met the man of your dreams...but he comes with one scary string attached: his ex, the mother of his children, and she isn't happy to meet you. Welcome to the world of 'Baby's Mama', a place where an ex-wife or girlfriend isn't quite ready to let go of her former man. Jealous and insecure, Baby's Mama knows just how to puch your buttons and like nothing more than to see you lose your cool - her goal to see your relationship with her ex go down in flames. Using first-hand experience, Gallion offers a no-holds-barred guide to this difficult situation.

A stunning tale about the deeply entrenched conflicts between a white mother and her biracial daughter. Mama’s Child is story of an idealistic young white woman who travelled to the American South as a civil rights worker, fell in love with an African American man, and started a family in San Francisco, where the more liberal city embraced them—except when it didn’t. They raise a son and daughter, but the tensions surrounding them have a negative impact on their marriage, and they divorce when their children are still young. For their biracial daughter, this split further destabilizes her already challenged sense of self—“Am I black or white?” she must ask herself, “Where do I belong?” Is she her father’s daughter alone? As the years pass, the chasm between them widens, even as the mother attempts to hold on to the emotional chord that binds them. It isn’t until the daughter, Ruby, herself becomes a wife and mother that she begins to develop compassion and understanding for the many ways that her own mother’s love transcended race and questions of identity.

Full Length, Drama Characters: 1 male, 3 female, chorus. Interior The early life cycle of a girl growing up with her sister and her mother in a lower class black neighborhood, with scenes switching back and forth in time to show her both as she is now and as she was when a little girl. Her mother was an evangelist, and her father a very likeable but contentious alcoholic. Her sister became a whore early in life. One night after the father has left the family, mother plans a pilgrimage to another town; and so this is the night that sister decides to bring home a white man and initiate the younger girl in the rites of sex. Sensing trouble, however, mother returns unexpectedly and discovers all. Ever since that night, sister has disappeared, and the girl has gone searching for her everywhere, ending up a prostitute herself. Her one remaining hope is her lover, who has made her pregnant. "Complex but moving, well written, compassionate Black play." N.Y. Times.

In Soul Babies, Mark Anthony Neal explains the complexities and contradictions of black life and culture after the end of the Civil Rights era. He traces the emergence of what he calls a "post-soul aesthetic," a transformation of values that marked a profound change in African American thought and experience. Lively and provocative, Soul Babies offers a valuable new way of thinking about black popular culture and the legacy of the sixties.

A master storyteller of the Xhosa people of South Africa, Nongenile Masithathu Zenani gives us an unprecedented view of an oral society from within. Twenty-four of her complex and beautiful tales about birth, puberty, marriage, and work, as told to the renowned collector of African oral tradition, Harold Scheub, are gathered here. Accompanying the stories are Zenani’s detailed commentaries and analyses and Scheub’s striking photographs of her in performance. The combination of these historical and cultural observations with a richly symbolic collection of tales from a single traditional storyteller make The World and the Word a remarkable document. “The storyteller’s materials are simple,” Zenani told Scheub, “the world, and the word.” She presents to us the entire world of the Xhosa people, how they first came to be, the origins of their customs, how they order their world and deal with transgressors, how they manage all of life’s transitions from birth to death. She depicts both the world as it exists and as it is shaped in the words of the storyteller. Inheriting tales from the Xhosa tradition, Zenani has transformed them into imaginative new stories marked by her own artistry. Scheub’s introduction to The World and the Word discusses Xhosa oral tradition and Zenani’s particular characteristics as an artist within that tradition; Zenani’s personal history and her work as both a storyteller and a healer; and Scheub’s friendship with her and his role in recording her legacy.