Cassandra Lane - We Are Bridges : A Memoir

PRAISE FOR WE ARE BRIDGES

In this narrative, Lane seeks an origin story, searching for what facts are available and wondering about the legacy she is passing on. A multiangled exploration of family trauma and the forging of an identity.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

In this evocative memoir, Cassandra Lane deftly uses the act of imagination to reclaim her ancestors story as a backdrop for telling her own. She renders each interior life with such tenderness and toughness that the tradition of Black womens storytelling leaps forward within these pagesinto fresh, daring, and excitingly new territory. Lanes compelling voice couldnt be more timely.

BRIDGETT M. DAVIS, author of The World according to Fannie Davis

We Are Bridges is a book of history, and as such, it uncovers and recovers the truths no classroom teacher will ever reveal to the children who need to know them most: Let the dead bury the dead, Jesus said, but here I am: guilty of pining after my dead. Not knowing ones story is like being buried alive. More than that, it is a love story, a book of howin spite of every obstacleBlack people still make themselves vulnerable enough to take the leap and fall in (and survive!) love.

JERICHO BROWN, author of The Tradition

Cassandra Lane approaches motherhood, generational trauma, and hope (and fear) for the future from a multitude of angles in a personal story that is utterly captivating. Her writing is beautiful and truly embraces readers.

JENNIFER BAKER, editor of Everyday People

We Are Bridges is a gorgeous memoir that knits together the past and present with Cassandra Lanes fierce and beautiful prose. Each sentence pulls readers through the generations, like a song with haunting lyrics. Lane shows us that familyBlack familyis a blazing kaleidoscope of legacy and memory, reflections illuminated by this talented writers acuity and tenderness.

DANA JOHNSON, author of Elsewhere, California

This powerful, beautifully written memoir serves to remind us that our yesterdays need not limit our tomorrows, but that our path forward is forever linked to our history.

NORMAN ALADJEM, author of From Me to You

In We Are Bridges, Cassandra Lane boldly investigates the connections between transgenerational trauma, personal love, and the burden of memory. Her heartfelt memoir will stay with you.

YZ CHIN, author of Though I Get Home

We Are Bridges considers all that feeds or fails to feed motherhood. Throughout, Lane weaves personal and historical geographies, lineages, upbringings, and upheavals into a complete tapestry validating her glorious existence as a Black mother. Lanes finger, aimed at herself, digs her introspection so deep that what becomes devastated are all the false notions that limit and confound Blackness, growth, parenting. We Are Bridges is Lanes lifelong walk with responsibility, with riskand most of all, with love. It reminds readers that motherhood is never merely witnessing, but a constant testimony of love. And what we beget into this world, what we truly love, is forever linked to a history of liberation.

F. DOUGLAS BROWN, author of Zero to Three

In We Are Bridges, Cassandra Lane stretches the boundaries of traditional memoir, incorporating aspects of the unknowable past so as to best illuminate how imagination and speculation color and deepen our truths. This is an important, beautiful work.

LOLIS ERIC ELIE, former columnist for the Times-Picayune

Cassandra Lane has written the book we need now more than ever. Part love story, part historical memoir, We Are Bridges explores a legacy of inherited trauma in the context of the authors complicated path toward motherhood. I was engrossed every step of the way.

BRENDA MILLER, author of An Earlier Life

In We Are Bridges, Cassandra Lane expertly weaves together personal history, the pain and wonder of inheritance, and a vision of motherhood most infinite. Lane is an honest and unflinching guide, tenderly urging the essential questions: Who are we? Who can we be?

MICHELLE FRANKE, executive director of PEN America Los Angeles

Cassandra Lane writes like a dream. We Are Bridges is a haunting, absorbing, lyrical, sad, beautiful, and necessary book as we begin to acknowledge the tangible and intangible costs of hundreds of years of slavery.

DEBRA MONROE, author of On the Outskirts of Normal

In pages both lyrical and evocative, Lane paints a world in which the agonies experienced by earlier generations continue down to the current day; and yet, in the act of creation and empathy, she brings readers and her family into a realm of not quite forgiveness, but reluctant acceptance and awe.

BERNADETTE MURPHY, author of Harley and Me

Cassandra Lanes We Are Bridges is a groundbreaking, lyrical patchwork of historical research, imagined pasts and futures, and personal narrative that tethers together multiple generations of the Bridges family, multiple generations of trauma borne from slavery, and multiple simultaneous truths. We Are Bridges is a story that has not yet been told and one that many will feel in their bones.

KAELYN RICH, author of Girls Resist!

In We Are Bridges, Cassandra Lane has written a haunting, lyrical narrative about love, motherhood, and generational trauma, confronting painful truths about her past, her present, and her future. Lane writes with the heart of a poet and the pen of a seasoned journalist as she tells her story with a haunting passion I will never forget. An extraordinary accomplishment.

ELIZABETH L. SILVER, author of The Execution of Noa P. Singleton

Lane weaves a moving and immense narrative of healing intergenerational violence through reportage, witnessing, memory, exhuming the dead, and moving on. Her work illuminates Louise Meriwethers legacy with love and grit. A tour de force filled with the immensity of hope.

LIS P. SIPIN-GABON, editor and cofounder of TAYO Literary Magazine

We Are Bridges

A Memoir

Cassandra Lane

Published in 2021 by the Feminist Press

at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

First Feminist Press edition 2021

Copyright 2021 by Cassandra Lane

All rights reserved.

Parts of this book have been previously published in Everything But the Burden (Penguin Random House, 2003); Daddy, Can I Tell You Something: Black Daughters Speak to Their Fathers (Sela Press, 2005); and TheScreamOnline, and are reprinted with permission in slightly revised form.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.