Their joy in one another, the fierceness of their intellectual pursuits, and their absolute dedication to civil rights and to the righting of civil wrongs of all sorts made their names hallmarks of honesty and totems for truth that influenced the world. However, the real reason that I identify with the Woody Allen character is that it was my privilege to spend part of my youth with Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and their circles of friends as they were becoming icons of twentieth-century America. I lived and studied in Paris when Les Halles was still going strong and the buildings were gray, I’ve supped with Sembène in Senghor’s Senegal, and I’ve danced in the Candomblé ring in Jorge Amado’s Bahia. I’ve been known to say that I am the Zelig of the second half of the twentieth century because it has been my great good fortune to turn up in multiple special spots. I’ve been rereading Angelou’s poetry recently because her passing has brought memories of my youth vividly back, like Léon Damas’s long-held-in hiccup. Instead, ignorant, trusting, believing in love, and woefully too young, I raced in. If I’d read those lines back in the 1970s, this story would never have happened. More than a memoir of friendship and first love, My Soul Looks Back is a carefully crafted, intimately understood homage to a bygone era and the people that made it so remarkable. At the center is Harris’s relationship with Sam Floyd, a fellow professor at Queens College, who introduced her to Baldwin. Harris describes her role as theater critic for the New York Amsterdam News and editor at then-burgeoning Essence magazine star-studded parties in the South of France drinks at Mikell’s, a hip West Side club and the simple joy these extraordinary people took in each other’s company. With “simmering warmth” ( The New York Times), Harris paints evocative portraits of her illustrious friends: Baldwin as he read aloud an early draft of If Beale Street Could Talk, Angelou cooking in her California kitchen, and Morrison relaxing at Baldwin’s house in Provence. My Soul Looks Back is her tribute to that fascinating social circle and their shared commitment to activism, intellectual engagement, and each other.

Harris debated, celebrated, and danced her way from the jazz clubs of the Manhattan’s West Side to the restaurants of Greenwich Village, living out her buoyant youth alongside the great minds of the day-luminaries like Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. In the Technicolor glow of the early seventies, Jessica B. Harris recalls her youth “surrounded by some of the most famous creative minds of the seventies and eighties…James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Nina Simone” ( New York magazine)-in a vibrant, lost era of New York City.

In this captivating new memoir, award-winning writer Jessica B.

Jessica b harris my soul looks back