The Song and the Silence

In this “beautiful, evocative” ( Booklist , starred review) memoir, Yvette Johnson travels to the Mississippi Delta to uncover the moving, true story of her late grandfather Booker Wright, whose extraordinary act of courage would change his and, later, her life forever. “Have to keep that smile,” Booker Wright said in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait . At the time, Wright was a waiter in a “whites only” restaurant and a local business owner who would become an unwitting icon