the value system the family brings with them from
“back home.” Deemed ugly, even by her father,
Calvin, Phyllisia is desperate to have a friend and
fit in. Her classmates tease her and even beat her
up because of her accent and intelligence. Phyllisia
knows all the answers to the teacher’s questions.
In the end Phyllisia chooses Edith Jackson, the
class misfit. Motherless and surrogate mother to
her siblings, Edith is often absent and, when she
comes to school, she is disheveled. Clearly, Edith
comes from the opposite end of the economic
spectrum from Phyllisia. Edith, who cares deeply
for Phyllisia, protects and defends her when the
others tease and attempt to attack her. When Phyl-
lisia finally invites Edith to meet her family, Cal-
vin does not welcome her. Considering her poor,
jinxed, and a “picky-headed ragamuffin,” Calvin
chases defenseless Edith from the family home,
fracturing the friendship between the two girls.
Phyllisia later admits that she was complicit; like
her father, she, too, held elitist views and, conse-
quently, had thought she was better than Edith.
By the time the two friends reunite and re-
commit to their friendship, their family lives have
changed dramatically. Following their mother’s
death, Phyllisia and Ruby have to learn to accept
their father for who and what he is. Although
they consider him a strict disciplinarian who
imprisons them in their home—they are not al-
lowed to have boyfriends although they are in
high school—they come to see him as hardwork-
ing and responsible. Following Edith’s younger
sister’s death from measles and poverty (they are
too poor to secure the medical care she needs),
the welfare system breaks up the family, placing
them, including Edith, in different foster homes.
Despite these hardships, however, Phyllisia and
Edith recommit to their friendships and love,
promising to stay in touch and be there for each
other. Guy examines the lives of Ruby and Edith
in novels that bear their names.
The central themes of the trilogy are the prob-
lems that young black adolescents faced growing
up in the 1960s, conflicts within families, friend-
ship, quest for identity, prejudice and racism (inter
and intraracial issues of race), conflict between Af-
rican Americans and West Indians in the inner city,
violence, riots, and police profiling, among many
others. Critics almost universally describe the tril-
ogy as powerful and memorable. The trilogy re-
ceived an American Library Association citation,
and The Friends is required reading in many sec-
ondary school systems.
Guy has received the Coretta Scott King Award,
the New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year
citation, and the American Library Association
Best Book Award. Guy continues to live in New
York City.
Wilfred D. SamuelsGuy-Shetfall, Beverly (1946– )
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Guy-Sheftall received
her B.A. at Spelman College, an M.A. at Atlanta
University (now Clark Atlanta University), and
her Ph.D. in 1977 at Emory College. Guy-Sheftall
has been a professor at Spelman since 1971, where
she founded, in 1981, the Women’s Research and
Resource Center. Guy-Sheftall coedited Sturdy
Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature
(1979), a benchmark anthology of African-Ameri-
can women literature. In addition, she coedited
Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers
and Daughters (1992), a collection of prose, po-
etry, and scholarship by 47 black women writers
who explore the bond between black mothers and
daughters.
Her most recent nonfiction works, Words of
Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist
Thought (1995) and Gender Talk (2003), writ-
ten with Johnnetta B. Cole, former president of
Spelman College, are her most notable and en-
during texts. In the preface to Words of Fire, Guy-
Sheftall writes that the anthology “documents the
presence of a continuous feminist intellectual tra-
dition in the nonfictional prose of African-Ameri-
can women going back to the early nineteenth
century when abolition and suffrage were urgent
political issues. It is a rewriting of the familiar nar-
rative of American feminism and a retelling of
African American intellectual history.” The anthol-
ogy has seven chapters and includes the works of
such notable feminists of the early 19th century as220 Guy-Shetfall, Beverly