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Informationen zum Autor Cassandra Jackson Klappentext "Equal parts investigative and deeply introspective, The Wreck is a profound memoir about recognizing the echoes of history within ourselves, and the alchemy of turning inherited grief into political activism. There is a secret that young Cassandra Jackson doesn't know, and it's evident in the way her father cries her name out in his sleep. It's not until she meets her extended family for the first time that she realizes she is named after-and looks eerily like-her father's niece, who was killed in a car wreck along with her father's beloved mother, his only sister, and-as she soon discovers-his first wife. In this compelling memoir, Jackson retraces her and her family's past and finds a single common thread: the medical malpractice and neglect whose effects have caused needless loss and suffering in her family. It's as she steps back further that she realizes this single thread touches every single Black family in America, turning this deeply personal memoir into a political call to action. Jackson offers an eye-opening look at how administrative procedures and political maneuvers that seem far from our everyday lives dictate life-or-death consequences for individuals, highlighting this as a piece of American history we still have the chance to course correct"-- Leseprobe CHAPTER 1 My father knocks on the door of a house, and when the door opens, he waves for me and my mother to get out of the car. We hesitate for a moment. The house we're parked outside of looks more like a trailer whose wheels have been stolen than someone's home. But we walk across the patchy yard, go up a few steps, and follow him into a dim living room with bumpy linoleum floors and air thick with the smell of Noxzema and fried pork chops. An old brown woman walks up to me and points. "This the baby?" My father nods, but I am not a baby. I am five years old. The old woman tries to smile, but the edges of her brown lips refuse to turn all the way up. Her eyes dart across my ashy knees, my long noodle arms, and the hook nose that is way too big for my narrow face. I already know what she will say-the same thing the last two old ladies we visited today did. "Humph . . . She just like 'em. Ain't she?" The old woman shakes her head and goes into the kitchen while we sit down. She comes back with a piece of chocolate cake and a glass of icy red Kool-Aid. She puts both on the table in front of me and nods for me to eat. I have to take a bite, even though the last old lady, the one who cracked her neck when she looked at me, already gave me sugar cookies and lemonade, and the tall one before her who whistled when she said my name gave me a dish of homemade caramels. I press a fork into the cake and it gives like warm pudding. I put a small piece in my mouth. Now the old lady's eyes watch my throat to make sure that I swallow. I know what she is doing. She wants to make sure that I am a real girl who eats and not a ghost. One time, when we visited another old lady in the country, I didn't eat or drink anything, and she started telling my parents to watch out for ghosts that she called "haints," who slip out of their graves and into new bodies. My mother began to nod her head like she always does when old people are talking. But then she stopped. My father told that lady that there's no such thing as ghosts. And later in the car, my mother said the same thing to me. You know that's just old people's nonsense, right? I nodded, but I do not know this for sure. Some of the old ladies we visit talk about bad hips and gas prices and those are real. I hold the sweet chocolate in my mouth for as long as I can without swallowing and watch the old lady trying to pay attention to my father and keep an eye on me at the same time. He asks her questions about how other old people are doing, and if that storm that came through last week di...
