The Invitation: A Memoir of Hope Amidst Lessons of Race and Place - Tapa dura

"World-renowned author Clifton Taulbert embodies the story of the South in our time. In The Invitation, Taulbert has written the most honest, and perhaps the greatest, book of his storied career." --Sally Dennison, PhD, former publisher, Council Oak Books
"Continuing the conversation inspired by The Help, The Invitation stuns with its eloquence. Taulbert's examples of hope, faith, and humanity invite us to join him in the work at hand--repair of the American soul." --Beth Lieberman, student rabbi, former Executive Editor at Dove/New Star Books
"Startling, painful, sometimes funny, and always insightful." --Nancy Anderson, Associate Professor of English, Auburn University Montgomery
"Taulbert has an open, confiding prose style and those coming to this book without having read any earlier works will have few complaints." --Don Noble, Tuscaloosa News
"What with the damning convolutions of ignorance, disingenuousness, and angst that shadow so much of the discussion of race in the United States, it is heartening when hope glimmers, as it does when Clifton Taulbert in The Invitation unpacks his defensive prejudicial baggage acquired as an African American child growing up in the '40s and '50s in a segregated Mississippi Delta." --ForeWord Reviews

When international lecturer Clifton Taulbert receives an unexpected invitation to supper in Allendale, South Carolina, he brings with him Little Cliff, the colored boy from the Mississippi Delta who is also Clifton Taulbert, carrying all he was taught as a child about staying "in his place" and surviving in the Jim Crow South.Transported back into a setting that looks and feels like the cotton fields and shotgun shacks of his childhood, Taulbert finds himself expected to cross racial barriers he would have been forbidden to cross before. The Invitation is the story of the man and the little boy inside him wrestling with a past they both know so well, while stepping into a future that is still being determined.