"An Obsession Revisited": Dinah Brooke on Her Unobtainable Father
Our relationship was one of intense passion, devotion, rage, hatred, anguish, desire, disgust, but it was all on my side. I don’t know what he felt about me. He read the book I wrote about his life, but made no comment. Whenever I made an emotional demand on him he retired rapidly into his madness; otherwise he was polite, humorous and amenable.
Remembering Maxine Clair: An essay by W. Ralph Eubanks on Clair’s Masterpiece, Rattlebone
As the African American literary canon grows and is defined and refined, a few bright sparks of creativity continue that eternal pattern of being obscured, whether by evolving tastes or by brighter lights. Maxine Clair’s coming-of-age novel in stories, Rattlebone, is one of those books that deserves to be brought out of the shadows of African American literature and back into the spotlight it so rightly deserves.