Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic

by Valerie Boyd (Editor)

An anthology of Black resilience and reclamation, with contributions by Pearl Cleage, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Tayari Jones, Kiese Laymon, Imani Perry, Deesha Philyaw, Khadijah Queen, Jason Reynolds, Alice Walker, and more

Born of a desire to bring together the voices of those most harshly affected by the intersecting pandemics of Covid-19 and systemic racism, Bigger Than Bravery explores comfort and compromise, challenge and resilience, throughout the Great Pause that became the Great Call. Award-winning author and scholar of the Black archive Valerie Boyd curates this anthology of original essays and poems, alongside some of the most influential nonfiction published on the subject, inviting readers into a conversation of restorative joy and enduring wisdom.

Bigger Than Bravery captures what Boyd calls the “first draft of history,” with poems serving as deep breaths between narrative essays to form a loose chronology of this unprecedented time. Karen Good Marable cranks “Whip My Hair” from the car windows during quarantine joyrides with her daughter. Deesha Philyaw ponders loneliness as she sorts Zoom meetings into those that require a bra and those that don’t. Writing in the moment though not of it, Pearl Cleage reflects on what has and hasn’t changed since the AIDS epidemic. Jason Reynolds harnesses heat and flavor to carry on his father’s legacy.

Sorrow and outrage have their say, but the stories in these pages are bright with family, music, food, and home, teaching us how to nourish ourselves and our communities. Looking ahead as much as it looks back, Bigger Than Bravery offers a window into a hopeful, complex present, establishing an essential record of how Black people in America insist on joy as an act of resistance.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

Published September 20, 2022

About the author

Valerie Boyd was the author of Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston and Spirits in the Dark: The Untold Story of Black Women in Hollywood.

She was an associate professor and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Grady College of Journalism at the University of Georgia, where she taught magazine writing, arts reviewing and narrative nonfiction. She also taught creative nonfiction in the graduate writing program at Antioch University in Los Angeles.

Boyd earned a bachelor’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1985 and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Goucher College in 1999.

Boyd was an arts editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and she was published in numerous anthologies, magazines and newspapers.

She founded EightRock, a cutting-edge journal of black arts and culture, in 1990. In 1992, she co-founded HealthQuest, the first nationally distributed magazine focusing on African-American health.

Wrapped in Rainbows—the first biography of Zora Neale Hurston in 25 years—was published to wide critical acclaim. It was hailed by Alice Walker as “magnificent” and “extraordinary”; by The Washington Post as “definitive”; by the Boston Globe as “elegant and exhilarating”; and by the Denver Post as “a rich, rich read.”

For her work on Wrapped in Rainbows, Valerie received the Georgia Author of the Year Award in nonfiction as well as an American Library Association Notable Book Award. The Georgia Center for the Book named Wrapped in Rainbows one of the “25 Books That All Georgians Should Read,” and the Southern Book Critics Circle honored it with the 2003 Southern Book Award for best nonfiction of the year.

Reviews

[Glenda Nelms · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bigger Than bravely is a heart-wrenching, human and powerful anthology of poems and essays. It was edited by the late great Valerie Boyd. Black Writers explore the courage, the fear and the emotions in between that ruled us during the most uncertain days of the pandemic. This collection provides readers comfort and joy we need to overcome.

"Racism is terrible. Blackness is not."-Dr. Imani Perry

"I still want to write an essay about intimacy, a stranger's touch. A quiet celebration of life, not death. not yet. A story about meaningful transactions, absent of violence, brimming only with love. Love of self, of other, of life."-Emily Bernard

"We must find our beauty in the system's claim of unworthiness. We must listen to the elders who already showed us the way. we must remain in the energy of love and care."

[Eric Grote · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eye opening perspective from BIPoC writers on what it was like living through a pandemic while black. Raw and emotional and took me down roads I didn’t realize were there.

[Camille McCarthy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book two years ago and probably should have read it right away because it feels a little dated now. It is a series of essays and poems by Black writers about their experiences during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and the aftermath of George Floyd's murder. It was painful to read and remember those first few months of lockdown, the fear that everyone had every day, the injustices of that moment which have had lasting repercussions, and the days before the vaccine. I felt a little bogged down when reading a few of these in a row and probably should have spaced it out with something a little lighter. I enjoyed the different perspectives, but it was a heavy book, especially since the editor, Valerie Boyd, passed away before it was published.

[ColumbusReads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essays and poems centered around the global pandemic and edited by the marvelous Valerie Boyd (rest in power) from some incredible writers: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Deesha Philyaw, Alice Walker, Pearl Cleage. Standouts were the pieces by Imani Perry, Jason Reynolds, Tayari Jones, and Kiese Laymon. Some writers I was unfamiliar with turned in some fantastic pieces and I will be checking out their work going forward.

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

vraiment un livre magnifique !! beaucoup d'écrivains incroyables que je ne connaissais pas :)

[Jalisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm happy that I took my time coming to and sitting with this book. I needed the distance of time to have some perspective on the pandemic and coming back to this collection was a reminder of all we've lost and survived. How joy and pain sat vigil together. Or how as Deesha Philyaw says we "do what Black folks have always done: let a shout of celebration and a wail of sorrow live side by side in my throat."

For me this collection was a necessary reminder of all the grief we've held over these last handful of years and how we made it through, even if we didn't always make it through whole. Since its publication we've even lost its editor Valerie Boyd. What hurts is that since 2020 our country looked in the mirror at all that hurt, all that injustice, and decided to go deeper, uglier. I see in these essays a calling out of injustice, a hoping that all that loss would call us to be something different - better. In "Pandemics and Portals: Listening That Breaks Us Open" Daniel B. Coleman references Arundhati Roys writing about pandemics as portals - "gateways between worlds that have forced humans throughout history to break with the past." Pearl Cleage says "that is how we got through the horrible early days and weeks and months of the last epidemic I lived through. We stayed close. We made art. We made love. We celebrated every friendship, every glass of wine, every fleeting, irreplaceable, not-promised-to-you precious moment. We laughed a lot. And we loved each other. We loved each other fiercely. Just like now."

I wonder what these writers would say about where we are in 2024. How little of the lessons of the pandemic about closeness and interconnectedness stuck. After months and years of "Listening and learning" our country has walked back most efforts at equity, diversity, and inclusion, forgotten the horror of the Black death that triggered a movement in 2020, and in fact extended our commitment to murder on a global scale. I am keen to land where Kiese Laymon did in his essay "What We Owe and Are Owed." Because indeed "there was nothing new I could say to white Americans about their investments in Black suffering. It wasn't only that it had all been said, made, and written; it had all been said, made, and written by the greatest sayers, makers, and writers in history...I decided I'd rather write to us and for us...instead of explaining something that has already been explained and making a spectacle of Black death, I decided to write something that makes me feel good about a man from Winona, Mississippi who has loved me whole and halted my premature death." Ultimately this collection was a reminder that my investment is in Black thriving.

I was reintroduced me to some favorite writers - Jason Reynolds, Deesha Phillyaw, Pearl Cleage, and Kiese Laymon's essays in particular stuck out for me in the collection - while introducing me to some new to me writers including Rosalind Bentley, Latria Graham, and Imani e Wilson. Their passages were reminders of the depths of my sorrow, fears, joys, and triumphs during that time and this one. Though sometimes uneven - the collection was an overall powerful and emotional one. I wish there was a bit more thematic pacing and flow from essay to essay - the breadth of the essays captured the feeling of the pandemic well. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the collection:

"and maybe the hem of the garment is what human love is: flustered sometimes, yes, and flawed, but adjacent to the Divine, made by hands that will one day die, but took time out of their allotted years to make a meal that fills you with something that will keep you alive." - Destiny O. Birdsong

"I have come to treat my body like the food I prepare: perishable and precious." - Destiny O. Birdsong

"I remembered that I am neither a machine nor a slave and therefore do not have to live as such." - Daniel B. Coleman

"Poetry - our capacity to continue to search for the divine in the chaos" - Daniel B. Coleman

"Even when hope doesn't reside within me - those days happen, too - I know that it is safely in the hands of fellow Black adventurers to hold until I am ready to reclaim my share of it...you are not alone in doing this big, monumental thing. You deserve a life of adventure, of joy, of enlightenment...for every new place I visit, and the old ones I return to, my message to you is that you belong here too."- Latria Graham

"Multitudes are seeing their own freedom through you...you are not just the lens, you are the whole existence beyond it. Uncontainable as air." - Alexis Pauline Gumbs

"Families are their stories, both fact and lore. The utterings bind. They fill where the "official" record gapes...just as important as the stories we tell are the artifacts we pass down. They are reminders of storms weathered, of faith that landed me on this shore." - Rosalind Bentley

"We fill the air with our laughter and some tears
Almost forgetting that we work too much
and hurt too much
But holy fuck, this weather
Holy fuck, look at you
Beautiful & glistening, fully pulling air into your lungs,
down past your shoulder blades
fully resting on you rback.
This sky is perfect. This ocean is perfect.
This crystalline moment is perfect.
It is a Saturday."
- Samaa Abdurraqib

"music was the thing that held me together, a tight embrace. Whether vinyl spun in a lounge, banging on a car stereo or played and sung live in church, sound and movement made me whole, where glue stick, rubber cement, gum, and bakery box twine could not. Music is my extreme measure, all over me and keeping me alive...under its sway, I discover that I too am mutable, liable to be made over, overcome, to weep, take off running, brace my dancing self on a wall with my fingertips." - Imani e Wilson

"If spared, I swear
to savor sacred time
on my small patch
of borrowed earth," - Kamilah Aisha Moon

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bigger Than Bravery is a collection of pandemic-experience essays written by Black authors. I LOVED Lolis Eric Elie's parallels of antiBlack racism and Covid, and a few other stories: The Women Who Clean, and What We Owe and Are Owed. Mostly, reading these reminded me of how different my experience of the pandemic was, how much i can never understand about my privilege of safety.

[Sarah Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A walk in someone else’s shoes. This anthology about the Black experience during the pandemic is eye opening and insightful. Everyone should hear the voices behind these stories. Thank you, Valerie.

[Yasmin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of essays, poems and short stories. Best read over several sittings.

[Sequella Coleman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent writings about a very difficult time. Wonderful authors bringing comfort about the pandemic.

[Sayantani Dasgupta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb! Such a magnificent anthology. I especially loved the essays by Latria Graham and Rosalind Bentley.