Dancing Between the Raindrops

The stated focus of this book is the journey of the author with her elderly parents dying over a two-year period. Yet there is so much more that the reader learns to appreciate. Braxton’s parents were born in the South under segregation of the Jim Crow laws. As young adults, they move to the northeast to provide their future family with the hope of a Promised Land.  

We learn how the scars of this upbringing both enhance and limit the dreams of these two talented and loving people. Through short essays, we learn of their individual beginnings, how racial bias and discrimination continued in a more subtle way in the north but still continues to cut one’s being. Braxton shows us how their human spirit rose but yet how it hurt in so many ways. Many books on grieving and loss introduce you to the person at the end of life. What makes this so special is how Braxton shows us the richness of the young couple as parents. In the very beginning paragraphs, we are shown how both parents contributed their intelligence and skills to assist each other in building a successful business and life. We find out how much they made a difference in their community throughout their life.

Braxton creates small brief chapters, so that we are right in that moment’s memory with the author. Her use of language creates a setting so real that you are there. There is great tension in her family story, not among the family members but in the way society and its bias affect their emotional and actual life choices. It is a story of a generation living with the daily consequence of being African American in a non-welcoming world while being part of the middle class. Yet because of prejudice that is viscerally felt, we see how the harm of racial prejudice has this family limited in their choices. Although they sought to move from their starter home as their finances improved, that wasn’t possible due to the racial profiling and the experience of racial hatred as they looked in the better neighborhoods. This loss recurs as a theme at various stages of their lives. Despite this, lives are well lived.

They chose to move north to “the Promised Land” so their children would not be treated the same. But they are still forced to teach the author and her younger sister how to advocate so that they could become themselves and not be held back by people/society that use race as a means of control and disrespect. One would like to say it was more subtle for the author than her parents, but it didn’t feel like that. The author describes it in referring to her mom as “a hurt that lives on forever.” A hurt that forces the family to decide over and over again not to move to a larger house, in more affluent neighborhoods, as their success grows. A hurt that still has life decades later when his wife lay dying, and her husband tries to buy her a new home to try and lessen that hurt as a final gift to her.

Brief prose chapters are interspersed with poems and the creative use of news reports when the author’s father with dementia and Parkinson is missing. Braxton also creatively chronicles the changing role of a daughter becoming caretaker through use of formats of a resume and and annual evaluation report. This variation makes difficult exposition easier to absorb as a reader.

Braxton is successful at telling and honoring the lives of her parents while sharing it as her own story and how it influenced her life. One ends the book changed by the author’s honesty of her family’s life as Black Americans who remain loving and caring.