3 Books Published by Mildred C Smith on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

This book contains stories about African American men and women. They all turned at least 80 years old by May 1, 2008. They have in common membership in a duplicate bridge club—the Washington Bridge Unit where they play the card game bridge. The book contains several stories, with one story for each subject or married couple. The stories are based on taped interviews of the subjects made between May 1, 2007 and May 16, 2008. To help with the time perspective, the date of the interview is at the end of each story. The location point of view is Washington, DC. These people are the trailblazers. They have worked hard. You will find that most of these persons are still active in competitive tournament bridge. Most are currently church members, and most are still quite active in the church. Many are voracious readers, travel extensively, and have other hobbies. They appear youthful and healthy. They are close to their families. The stories in the book tell about the lives of the subjects—when and where they were born, where they grew up, their careers, their families, their struggles, and their philosophies of life. There are pictures of the subjects. The stories include how bridge was introduced into their lives and how they came to be members of the Washington Bridge Unit. Keeping with the bridge tradition, these stories discuss the subjects using their first names. Not only will the reader learn about the lives of the subjects in the book, but also there are interesting parallels in many of the stories about the culture of the US during a certain period. For example, many of the subjects who worked and lived in the south often went north to New York City to pursue advanced college degrees. The Washington Bridge Unit (WBU) is a unit in the Mid-Atlantic Section (MAS) of the American Bridge Association (ABA). In fact, WBU and MAS were forming members of the ABA. The ABA formed in the 1930s. African Americans could not participate at that time in the predominant bridge organization in the US, the American Contract Bridge League or ACBL. ABA came about to fill that void. The stories use either the full name of the bridge organizations or their more commonly used abbreviated forms—WBU, ABA, ACBL. The appendix contains a partial organizational structure of the ABA and the questionnaire used as a basis for the interviews. The names of many bridge personalities can be found in Defining Moments: A 70 Year Chronicle of the American Bridge Association and ACBL’s The Official Encyclopedia of Bridge.

Bios of Family Members of the descendant of Freeman Fenner Foster. This volume includes a bio of AALBC.com’s founder Troy Johnson.

A dazzling first novel about four generations of fear and longing in the deep South
Who’re your people, girl?" It’s the song of the South, the big question, persistent and unforgiving. Helene Strickland, daughter of Lafayette County, Arkansas, and lately of the Northeast, doesn’t have an answer. Instead, she has memories riddled with half-truths, stories heard in fits and starts, a family history from a family that doesn’t know its own past.

In the steamy August of 1976, Helene returns home for her aunt’s funeral determined to learn the truth, but her probing yields more questions than answers: Why did her grandmother, Liberty, a cotton picker turned saloon owner, have no name until she was fourteen? Why does Queen Ester, Helene’s mother, dress like a child, talk to no one, and refuse to see her own daughter? And who was Chess, a man with a terror of water, a man like a honey trap who drew the women and then destroyed them?

In a mesmerizing narrative, April Reynolds seamlessly weaves past and present, intricate flashbacks and interlaced stories to produce an epic novel of one family maimed by the deepest wounds of history. Rich with legend, poetry, and historic events, Knee Deep in Wonder captures the complex humanity of black Southern life.