Buying Options

Digital List Price:	$20.99
Print List Price:	$17.99
Kindle Price:	$2.99 Save $18.00 (100%)

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

Enter a promotion code or Gift Card

Share <Embed>

Say I'm Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love by [E. Dolores Johnson]

Follow the Author

E. Dolores Johnson

Say I'm Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love Kindle Edition

by E. Dolores Johnson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

185 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$2.99

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$17.39

$13.25

$3.92

Paperback

"Please retry"

$17.99

$13.49

Audio CD, MP3 Audio, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$22.99

$18.81

$7.50

Great on Kindle

Great Experience. Great Value.

Enjoy a great reading experience when you buy the Kindle edition of this book. Learn more about Great on Kindle, available in select categories.

Say I'm Dead is the true story of family secrets, separation, courage, and trans-formation through five generations of interracial relationships. Fearful of prison time—or lynching—for violating Indiana's antimiscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's black father and white mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo, New York.

When Johnson was born, social norms and her government-issued birth certificate said she was Negro, nullifying her mother's white blood in her identity. Later, as a Harvard-educated business executive feeling too far from her black roots, she searched her father's black genealogy. But in the process, Johnson suddenly realized that her mother's whole white family was—and always had been—missing. When she began to pry, her mother's 36-year-old secret spilled out. Her mother had simply vanished from Indiana, evading an FBI and police search that had ended with the conclusion that she had been the victim of foul play.

Print length

230 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Lawrence Hill Books
Publication date

June 2, 2020
File size

9556 KB
Page Flip

Enabled
Word Wise

Enabled
Enhanced typesetting

Enabled
See all details

Gail Lukasik
1,034
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $11.30
Bliss Broyard
294
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $11.99
Allyson Hobbs
228
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $9.99
Martha A. Sandweiss
185
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $13.99
June Cross
682
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $12.99
Sarah Valentine
109
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $11.99

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

E. Dolores Johnson has consulted on diversity for universities, major corporations, and nonprofits and has served as a panelist for the Harvard Faculty Seminar on Inter-racialism. A former Fortune 500 marketing vice president, she later oversaw the digitization of John F. Kennedy’s presidential papers.

Allyson Johnson began her entertainment career as an Emmy Award-winning child news anchor. A graduate of Brown University, she is a working actress, singer, and audiobook narrator. She currently resides in the New York City metropolitan area. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

Review

"Powerfully important and deeply moving, Say I’m Dead is a story of race, family, and identity. Dolores Johnson is the daughter of a black man and a white woman—but how and why it took her years to realize that, and to unearth the secrets that defined her family along the way, testifies to the complicated his-tory of race relations in America. Johnson lived the changes our country has gone through and continues to wrestle with, and her story will both inspire and educate.” —Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

“Say I’m Dead is not only a candid, compelling, and ultimately hopeful story of one woman’s quest to understand her family and herself through the lens of identity, it is also the story of an American identity riddled with secrets, lies, grievance, and thinly veiled shame. In telling her own alternately painful and exhilarating history, E. Dolores Johnson is subtly asking us all to turn the mirror on ourselves.” —Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men

"Say I’m Dead is a beautiful and probing family history of a woman’s deep secret: she left behind her White family in 1940s Indiana to marry a Black man in New York. Decades before the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case overturned anti-miscegenation laws, Ella and Charles affirmed Du Bois’s prescient theory that the problem of the twentieth century was indeed the problem of the color line. Their mixed-race daughter lives on the color line, a Black woman who comes to question her White background. This compelling story with related themes of race, class, education, and history furthers the exigent discussions of biraciality in the United States."
—Dr. Donavan L. Ramon, Kentucky State University, author of Betraying Their Colored Descent: Psychoanalysis and Racial Passing

"During the 1940s, it was better to disappear or die than break anti-miscegenation laws. When Dolores wants to search for her White mother’s estranged family, 'Say I’m dead,' is what her mother tells Dolores to say should she find them. The prose is clear, sharp, and insightful, and the writer’s quest to find the truth about her family is as gripping as any mystery. Through one family’s story, the memoir explores the tragedy of how racism divides us and also how one family moves beyond fear and bias. A must-read memoir for readers interested in a daughter’s courageous search for her history, which is inextricably intertwined with the story of race in America." ―Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers, winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing in Nonfiction

"With unflinching honesty, E. Dolores Johnson shares an enthralling story of identity, independence, family, and love. This timely and beautifully written memoir ends on a complicated yet hopeful note, something we need in this time of racial strife." —De'Shawn Charles Winslow, author of In West Mills

"With protests since the killing of George Floyd pushing the issue of racial justice to the fore, this timely book tells a Buffalo story with powerful appeal." —The Buffalo News

“Say I'm Dead is a compelling tale about the legacy of racism in America, family and the power of love.”—WBUR’s The ARTery --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07XSH73GK
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Lawrence Hill Books (June 2, 2020)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 2, 2020
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 9556 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 230 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #612,135 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #730 in Discrimination & Racism Studies
- #1,164 in Dysfunctional Families (Books)
- #3,039 in Parenting & Relationships (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
185 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

E. Dolores Johnson

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

About E. Dolores Johnson

E. Dolores Johnson is the author of “Say I’m Dead”, a multigenerational memoir that shows America’s changing attitudes toward mixed race through the courageous journeys of the women in her family.

Dolores was born in Buffalo, NY. She earned degrees from Howard University and Harvard Graduate School of Business in Boston. After a career in tech, she took an MFA equivalent course to learn creative writing. Johnson is a published essayist focused on inter-racialism, and now her first book, “Say I’m Dead” will be published in June 2020.

Dolores lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To learn more about her and her work, visit her website at edoloresjohnson.com or follow her on Twitter @elladolo and Instagram at edoloresjohnson

Customer reviews

5 star		83%
4 star		12%
3 star		4%
2 star 0% (0%)		0%
1 star		1%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all customer images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Ian Schneiderman

Important Book For Everyone To Read Especially Right Now

Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2020

Verified Purchase

I loved this book because E. Dolores Johnson has a unique perspective on race. With powerfully written scenes, she tells how her black father and white mother ran away to secretly marry in a time when race-mixing was punishable by imprisonment and even lynching. Throughout “Say I’m Dead” Johnson educates and enlightens the reader by vividly portraying racially formative experiences as a girl in the 1950s, a Howard and then Harvard University student, and a professional who watched from her window as a cross burned on her front lawn. Not one to be victimized, Johnson bought a gun and learned how to use it. I saw what life was like during the latter half of the 20th century for a smart, ambitious mixed-race woman hell-bent on achieving both personal and professional goals. But Johnson’s story goes deeper. She confides honest and complicated feelings about being raised black with a white mother, and the life-changing events that unfolded when she discovered ancestry she didn’t know existed. I came away from “Say I’m Dead” with a better understanding of the disparities mixed-race people in America have lived with, and sadly continue to experience. Yet the end gives us hope, finishing with the affection and healing that can take place if given the opportunity.

13 people found this helpful

Helpful

Amazon Customer

Poignant, direct, necessary Memoir that will speak to all genders, all races, all human hearts

Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2020

Verified Purchase

I've read a lot of memoirs, both for pleasure and professionally, and SAY I'M DEAD, is one of ones that will always remain with me. Johnson has a uniquely direct voice and manages to cut through to the heart of every experience. She captures the heartbreaking stress and conflict of being mixed race as a young girl in Buffalo, NY, and as an adult woman in America. In one of my favorite scenes--riding home on the "Ghetto Express", her black classmates, who nicknamed her "Madame Butterfly", asked what she was up to, reading on the bus. When she told them she was reading Shakespeare, they cracked up--incomprehensible, transgressive even, for someone like her to be reading something like that. The feeling of this moment carries throughout the book--a strong, determined girl (and then woman), caught between worlds, determined to define her own self and life as the world repeatedly negates who she knows herself to be, as she silently absorbs the slurs and abuses society throws at her. SAY I'M DEAD is an inspiring and universal story about what it is to come into one's own identity, how much suffering it can involve, and yet how imperative.

10 people found this helpful

Helpful

Priscilla F Bourgoine

ADD THIS MOVING LOVE STORY TO YOUR ANTIRACIST EDUCATION

Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2020

Verified Purchase

Add this artful love story to your antiracist education. Johnson is a master storyteller. Imagine learning that your white mother and black father endured the threat of lynching or arrest and prison in our United States in the very recent 20th century. Their crime? Love and marriage. Johnson chronicles not only our country’s tragic racist history but her own journey of identifying black to mixed. She holds up a mirror to our country’s browning reality. A must-read. I’ve bought additional copies to gift. It's THAT good.

8 people found this helpful

Helpful

Natalie

Beautifully written memoir about love, racism, and identity

Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2020

Verified Purchase

This is by far the best book I've read this year and one of the most well-written memoirs I've read of all time. It is written with so much care, authenticity, and vivid language that it takes the reader on a story of falling in love, living in constant danger, and teetering between identities as a biracial child many years before being biracial was "accepted" by most. E. Dolores Johnson paints pictures of two Indiana's, one that is full of beauty, tight-knit and homogeneous communities that live an honest life and raise their children in a white world with limited mixing with Black people. And another where Black people struggle to make an honest living and are regularly terrorized and sometimes lynched for being Black. And somehow, a white woman and a Black man find their way to each other and are able to fall in love, relocate to New Jersey, start a family and stay together through racism, being rejected by Black and white people alike, and having all odds against them.

Then E. Dolores paints the picture of growing up biracial and having situations where people mistake her for being white and speak with open disgust about Black people in front of her. The isolation of growing up in a family that predates the legality of interracial marriage is a huge burden to carry but she overcomes it anyway and thrives despite it all. It really opened my eyes to the experience of multiracial children and adults and the many challenges and frustrations they face in having to constantly explain or defend their identities, or be forced to choose a side.

I enthusiastically recommend this book, it gives a very personal take on the lived experience of racism in America and how love can be the strength one needs to overcome any obstacle or challenge.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Rvwgirl

Why "Say I'm Dead"?

Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2020

Verified Purchase

This is truly a memoir appropriately written for the times. Amid today's increasing exposure of our racial divide, its impact on our separate communities and an renewed desire for more racial understanding and acceptance, this story fits right in. With all the intrigue of a mystery, the author tells the interracial love story of her mother and father, which began in the 1940s. She addresses how that story uniquely touched and influenced so many lives, including her own, under the cloud of racism. With personal clarity and feeling, Ms. Johnson guides the reader through the life experiences this marriage brought to those who lived it. She shares the destined isolation, family dynamics, questions, growth and love her parent's union created because of and in spite of racial attitudes. With skillful inclusion of history, remembered dialogue and personal interactions she takes the reader on a full circle ride in understanding the meaning of " Say I Am Dead". Well done. Well done, indeed.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful