Benjie can stop using heroin anytime he wants to. He just doesn't want to yet. Why would he want to give up something that makes him fell so good, so relaxed, so tuned out? As Benjie sees it, there's nothing much to tune in for. School is a waste of time, and home life isn't much better. All Benjie wants is for someone to believe in him, for someone to believe that he's more than a thirteen-year-old junkie. But Benjie can't kick heroin for his mother or for his teachers. He needs to do it for himself.

As the first African American woman to have a play professionally produced in New York City (Gold Through the Trees, in 1952) and the first woman to win an Obie for Best Play (for Trouble in Mind, in 1956), Alice Childress occupies an important but surprisingly under-recognized place in American drama. She herself rejected an emphasis on the pioneering aspects of her career, saying that it s almost like it s an honor rather than a disgrace and that she should be the fiftieth and the thousandth by this point a remark that suggests the complexity and singularity of vision to be found in her...

A new edition of Alice Childress's classic novel about African American domestic workers, featuring a foreword by Roxane Gay

First published in Paul Robeson's newspaper, Freedom, and composed of a series of conversations between Mildred, a black domestic, and her friend Marge, Like One of the Family is a wry, incisive portrait of working women in Harlem in the 1950's. Rippling with satire and humor, Mildred's outspoken accounts vividly capture her white employers' complacency and condescension--and their startled reactions to a maid who speaks her mind and refuses to...