Award-winning writer Ntozake Shange and her sister, award-winning playwright Ifa Bayeza achieve nothing less than a modern classic in this epic story of theMayfield family. Opening dramatically atSweet Tamarind, a rice plantation on an island off the coast of Georgia, we witness the recently emancipated Elizabeth (Bette) Mayfield saying her goodbyes before embarking for the mainland. With her granddaughter Eudora in tow, she heads to Charleston where they will make lives for themselves as seamstress and fortune-teller. Dora will marry, the Mayfield line will grow, and we will follow them on an journey throughthe watershed events of America's troubled, vibrant historyfrom Reconstruction to both World Wars, from the Harlem Renaissance to Vietnam and the modern day. Shange and Bayeza give us a monumental story of a family and of America, of songs and why we have to sing them, of home and of heartbreak, of the past and of the future, bright and blazing ahead. If there are shoulders modern African American women's literature stand upon they belong to Ntozake Shange who revolutionized theater and literature with her iconic work for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf in the 1970's. Any of us writing today are inheritors of her genius. Some Sing, Some Cry will show her to be as potent and irrepressible a force as she was thirty years ago.” --Sapphire