Like Ann Petry, I grew up in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. I, too, worked in the family drugstore during my teen years and graduated from Old Saybrook High School. Instead of pharmacy school, I went to Vassar College on a scholarship where I majored in drama.

I returned to Connecticut after graduation and became the first female and the first African American beat reporter for the Middletown (Conn.) Press, a daily newspaper.

Several years later, I moved to Philadelphia where I received a degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Quitting the law after several years, I became technical director and coordinator for the playwrights workshop at a small theater. Eventually I returned to Connecticut and to journalism, working again for the Press, and at the Meriden Record-Journal and the Hartford Courant.

I had intended to stay in journalism until the summer of 2001 when I was sorting through some of the many papers my mother had left. I found a letter my mother’s mother had received from her brother. (The spelling and punctuation are his).

Jessup, Ga. Nov. 1, 1905

I would not write you but I am in a terrible fix here I got into after leaveing Savannah, Ga.

 While going through this place I shot a white man for bothering me, and tried to get away but they put the blood hounds on my track and they caught me in a swamp, and tried to lynch me, but the sherriff held them from me, and got me to the jail where I am at present but the jail is guarded with white men who have guns and try to get at me. I get tried Monday morning and the sherriff is afraid they will get me when I am taken to trial and he told me if I had any folks I had better write to them at once and try and raise $35.00 before my trial to pay his guards and he would spirit me away in the night over into Florida.

I had been standing next to the window to read the letter. I sat down, hard, and read the letter again. At that point I realized this and other letters in the collection needed to be published. Soon after, I quit my job to research the era and edit what turned out to be four hundred letters written between 1890 and 1910 by the James siblings and their parents. The result is CAN ANYTHING BEAT WHITE? A Black Family’s Letters. It is my love letter to my family.

I live in central Connecticut with my husband, Lawrence Riley, and a half-tame feline.