Miss Zib-the title of Miss Zib came from a story Ellen told me years ago. She said, "Rich, when I was in grade school, a teacher could not pronounce my name, Zbyszynski, so he called me Miss Zib!" When writing the book, looking for an unusual title, I thought back to the time she told me that story. I envision in my mind that sweet little Polish girl in grammar school in the 1940s. I wanted to create the image of her from our wonderful "Salem village" Polish community of the 1940s. Miss Zib personifies all that is good in womanhood. To me it combines that wonderful little Polish girl making her first Holy Communion and learning from that time on what "true love" was all about and continuing to practice it to everyone through her entire life! She would say to me, "I didn't like the fact that I was called on last because my name started with the letter Z!" Later, when kidding around, she said, "You know, I married you for your name!"

The title Walking with Miss Zib came from emotions I experienced during a three-year period, succeeding my wife's, Ellen's, death, from Alzheimer's disease. We met when I was fifteen and she was sixteen. Try and visualize what a loss that was for me. It changed my life forever. It's not an easy task to go on without her, as you can imagine. The suffering remained intense, penetrating deep into my soul. Contemplating my anguish, it's clear to me now that the pain was from the soul, not the body. After a great deal of reflection, I conclude, Ellen's body had Alzheimer's disease; her soul didn't. Our souls communicated directly, circumventing her body with Alzheimer's disease; two souls connected for over sixty-seven years. As a result, Ellen knew me till her last day on earth! Focusing on my grieving and putting into words the manner in which I survived, I will provide a true account of my experience with grief over a lifetime. Covering from the age of nineteen to the passing of Ellen, revealing my most inner emotions each time. One needn't have a medical or scientific background, like sporting a PhD, to write about their emotions while suffering through a heartbreaking life experience. All one requires is courage to reveal their true feelings and eagerness to help others. I walk with Miss Zib's spirit guiding me home and end with a quote taken from a headstone in Ireland, which I find so grand: "Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal!"

Beginning in the 1830s, the white actor Thomas D. Rice took to the stage as Jim Crow, and the ragged and charismatic trickster of black folklore entered—and forever transformed—American popular culture. Jump Jim Crow brings together for the first time the plays and songs performed in this guise and reveals how these texts code the complex use and abuse of blackness that has characterized American culture ever since Jim Crow’s first appearance. Along with the prompt scripts of nine plays performed by Rice—never before published as their original audiences saw them—W. T. Lhamon, Jr., provides a reconstruction of their performance history and a provocative analysis of their contemporary meaning. His reading shows us how these plays built a public blackness, but also how they engaged a disaffected white audience, who found in Jim Crow’s sass and wit and madcap dancing an expression of rebellion and resistance against the oppression and confinement suffered by ordinary people of all colors in antebellum America and early Victorian England. Upstaging conventional stories and forms, giving direction and expression to the unruly attitudes of a burgeoning underclass, the plays in this anthology enact a vital force still felt in great fictions, movies, and musics of the Atlantic and in the jumping, speedy styles that join all these forms.