FINALLY HAVING THEIR SAY

By Jill Smolowe

Too often, middle-class women of color are either airbrushed from America's literary canvas or painted with hackneyed strokes. While a smattering of books have attempted to redress this problem, among them Jill Nelson's 1993 memoir, Volunteer Slavery, the lives of these women beg for further elaboration. Happily, Nelson's new memoir, Straight, No Chaser (Putnam; 225 pages; $23.95), and Gwendolyn M. Parker's Trespassing (Houghton Mifflin; 209 pages; $23) provide some of the missing detail.

Though both writers were raised in black middle-class communities by parents who emphasized education and achievement, the sensibilities and sensitivities that inform their respective journeys are markedly different. Where journalist Nelson is angry and agitated, attorney Parker is searching and painfully revealing. Nelson seeks common cause with all black women, whom she sees as suffering from a collective case of "invisibility and erasure"; Parker strives to delineate individuals, appreciating the "thousands of moments that [make] us fundamentally different from each other." Nelson remonstrates, with fist-in-the-air rhetoric leavened by wry humor; Parker demonstrates, depicting each moment with searing clarity.

"We have a collective obsession with fronting and posturing for white people, not airing dirty laundry," Nelson asserts. Determined to air "race secrets," she takes a sledgehammer to black men, holding them accountable for most of the "everyday violence" that hounds black women into silence. Nelson is at her rousing best in her vivisection of the 1995 Million Man March, to which, she complains, women were not invited, "as if black women remaining in the community and quietly taking care of business while the men are elsewhere is anything new." Though Nelson argues convincingly that black women need to raise a collective howl of rage, her disorganized mix of social and political commentary, personal story and random musings on everything from menopause to high heels produces a whiplash effect.

Parker's memoir, by contrast, is a carefully constructed and subtle rendering of a richly textured life. The "first black woman" wherever she went--prep school, Radcliffe, a tony law firm--Parker deftly mines the universal in experiences that bear both the good fortune and freight of a privileged birthright. Her warm evocation of her childhood in Durham, N.C., where she ate several dinners each day to satisfy the neighbors who beckoned, "Gwennie Mac, come on in," makes you hunger for a time when children were everyone's responsibility.

The sting of the white teachers who refuse to acknowledge Parker's raised hand, the blacks who see her as extensions of their own agendas, and the white attorneys who question her presence at meetings are all equally palpable. In the end, Parker succeeds where Nelson fails: she shows what it means to be invisible and erased.

--By Jill Smolowe