Set in 1959, Betsey Brown tells the story of a black thirteen-year-old as she confronts racial identity and inequality, developing sexuality, and family life in a middle-class African-American neighborhood of St. Louis. The novel opens by introducing the family and describing the rambling Victorian house where they live. The Brown family - including parents Jane and Greer, grandmother Vida, four children, and cousin Charlie - get ready for a day of school and work. Betsey, Jane's oldest and favorite daughter, practices a poem by the famous black poet Paul Laurence Dun-bar for an elocution contest at school. As the chaotic morning ends and the children go off to their all-black school, Vida airs her disapproval of the rising integration movement and cherishes the fact that her family lives in its "own world."
Betsey arrives at school.....
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