A long time before cultural anthropology was a popular subject, dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham went to the West Indies, South America, and Africa to study African-derived dance styles. She used her studies to choreograph a number of praised shows, including Tropics and Le Jazz Hot. Her fame led to work in the film Stormy Weather. Despite this fame, however, Dunham's memoir of her childhood is bittersweet. Beginning with her birth in 1909 to an African father and French-Canadian-Native American mother, and continuing through the first 18 years of her life, this memoir details her upbringing in a white Illinois suburb, her struggles with her strict father, and being raised by her aunts while her father was away on business. Dunham discusses the struggles and triumphs of her childhood that provided the base for her later rise to fame.

320 pages