black criminals possess more personal agency
about their choices. While it does not ignore the
impact of the white community on the black com-
munity, it demonstrates that blacks share some
culpability for the devastation of their bodies and
their communities.
Throughout his canon, Donald Goines forces
readers to live in the American ghettos, smell the
stench of drug houses, feel the heroin seep into
a character’s veins, and experience the horrors of
drug withdrawal. Goines has never been out of
print, selling in excess of 5 million books since
his first novel appeared in 1971, because his work
continues to resonate with readers. Two of his
novels have been optioned for cinematic develop-
ment. Black Gangster was the first novel developed
for film and soundtrack, and Never Die Alone was
a major cinematic release starring rapper DMX
in 2004.
Donald Goines and his girlfriend, Shirley Sailor,
were murdered in their home in 1974. Their mur-
ders remain unsolved.
Candace JacksonGolden, Marita (1950– )
A novelist, memoirist, essayist, literary cultural ac-
tivist, poet, educator, and lecturer, Marita Golden
was born on April 28, 1950, in Washington, D.C.
Her parents, Francis Sherman Golden, a taxi driver,
and Beatrice Lee Reid Golden, a property owner,
were her first literary mentors. She credits her fa-
ther for giving her the gift of storytelling and her
mother for giving her the charge to write. An avid
reader as a child and teenager, Golden attended
Western High School (now Duke Ellington High
School). Affected by the assassination of MARTIN
LUTHER KING, JR., during her senior year, a shaken
Golden became a civil rights activist the summer
of 1968. Her activism was to play a major role in
her early life and in her work.
In the fall of 1968 Golden attended American
University on a Frederick Douglass scholarship.
She became a contributing editor for the cam-
pus newspaper, the Eagle. While there, she was
introduced to the works of black American, Afri-
can, and women writers, all of whom shaped her
cultural awareness and identity as a young black
woman coming of age during the CIVIL RIGHTS
MOVEMENT. After receiving her B.A. in journalism
in 1972 and earning an M.S. in journalism from
Columbia University in New York a year later,
Golden worked as an editorial assistant in a pub-
lishing company for a year, wrote articles for the
Amsterdam News and ESSENCE magazine, and was
associate producer of WNET-Channel 13 from
1974 to 1975. She met and married Femi Ajayi, a
Nigerian architect, and moved with him from New
York to Nigeria, where Golden taught English at
the Lagos Comprehensive Girls’ School and jour-
nalism at the University of Lagos. After four years
in Nigeria, Golden returned to the United States;
she divorced Ajayi in 1989.
Golden found her niche as a creative writer in
the 1980s, writing both fiction and nonfiction. She
states: “For me autobiographical writing becomes
a way of resisting the continuing aggression against
my identity inflicted by the culture in nearly all its
forms... [so] I write about my life to rescue it
from those to whom it means nothing and who
casually destroy it because they think they own it”
(Golden). In 1983 Golden published her classic
memoir, Migrations of the Heart: A Personal Od-
yssey, introducing many of the themes that recur
throughout her works, particularly the heroine’s
quest for self-discovery and fulfillment. During
this productive period, she wrote A Woman’s Place
(1986), and her best-selling novel Long Distance
Life (1989). Long Distance Life depicts, through
flashbacks, the life of 80-year-old Naomi Reeves
Johnson, who escapes a sharecropper’s farm in
North Carolina and fights her way into Washing-
ton, D.C.’s black middle class in the 1920s, becom-
ing in the process a self-made woman. Golden’s
And Do Remember Me (1992) was followed by The
Edge of Heaven (1998) and her memoir Don’t Play
in the Sun: One Woman’s Journey through the Color
Complex (2004).
In her anthologies and collections of essays,
Golden also addresses the issues of growing up
black, either male or female, in a racist, sexist so-206 Golden, Marita