4 Books Published by Sarah Gordon Weathersby on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Let’s say you’re a people person. You like helping people, taking them soup when they’re sick, inviting their college children for dinner, solving their computer problems, supporting them in their business efforts. Then one day you realize you’re always on the answering end of the phone, and you have no life of your own. So you say to yourself, "I need to get away, and tell nobody where I am." This is what happened to A1QTEE, owner/operator of the social networking site, Blaq-kawfee.com except she left a message, "Tell them I died." Tell Them I Died is a romantic adventure that centers on the loves and lives of Angela and "Bodine" Beaudoin and their friends on the social networking site, Blaq-Kawfee.com. Angela and Bodine are retired and live in Raleigh, North Carolina. Every day they interact with friends all over the world on Blaq-Kawfee.com until Angela receives a phone call from Carlton telling her that his mother, A1QTEE, the owner/operator of Blaq-Kawfee died a month ago. Instantly, Angela smells foul play and finds herself working overtime, much to the chagrin of Bodine, to figure out what happened to her dear friend.

Imagine you gave a baby up for adoption forty years ago, and after years of trying to find her, she finds you. Now come the hard questions. She’s healthy, beautiful, and successful, but she wants to know why you gave her away and why you didn’t marry her father. And there is also the unspoken question of "What kind of black woman gives her baby away?" How do you explain to her that giving her away was the best gift you could offer? This is Sarah Weathersby’s first published work, a coming-of-age-in-the-sixties-single-black-pregnant and on the way to Germany, memoir.

Family stories are easily lost, especially in these times when children leave home and move far and wide from the place where it all began. Family reunions are times when the old stories may be repeated, but the young ones often don’t listen. Some stories are never retold because of embarrassment or feelings of shame, and the failure to recognize that regardless of how dour our circumstances may have been, that was where we came from. Even our mixed heritage should be a source of our strength. My siblings and I often heard the stories of our grandmother, Mattie. My sister LaVerne, as the oldest had the foresight to write down the story as told by our Mother before she died in 1958.