In the Garden of Our Dreams: Memoirs of Our Marriage - Softcover

She was an African American princess, raised in a racially mixed Connecticut neighborhood and taught by her father "to go after whatever I thought I could do." He came from a poor section of Washington, D.C., and supported his brilliant academic career with scholarships and part-time jobs. But when they met in 1957, their shared aspirations to "uplift the race" and force white America to accept them on their own terms drew them together. Married in 1959, the Haizlips held various socially conscious jobs while experiencing the tumult of the 1960s from an unusual vantage point; when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Shirlee Haizlip notes, "I stopped wearing white gloves." They lived in a privileged, integrated world but never wavered in their commitment to help less fortunate black people. And their joint memoir sketches the evolution of both a marriage between very different personalities and the racial landscape in America. Pungent political awareness leavens the sentimentality of the couple's family portrait, and alternating first-person narratives give the story a "he said, she said" completeness, doing justice to two powerful individuals who quarreled but maintained an unshakeable bond. --Wendy Smith

"Transcends time and bigotry. . . . A gem and well worth reading." --Los Angeles Sentinel

"Their marriage is enviable, and luckily for us they have chosen to write about it in their richly detailed memoir." --The New York Times Book Review

"Refreshing in its focus on the positives of African-American family life--told with an eloquence that reflects the Haizlips' charmed life." --Emerge

"A welcome antidote . . . provides a counternarrative for a reading audience exhausted by the automatic link of blackness with poverty, social woes, and family dysfunction." --Chicago Tribune