Sarah Phillips

Sarah Phillips is a novel written by Andrea Lee in 1984. The novel takes place in Philadelphia in the period after the civil rights movement, and centers the protagonist, Sarah Phillips, born in 1953, a daughter of a black middle class family living in the suburbs of Philadelphia. From a first-person narrative point of view, Sarah offers chronological snapshots of her and her family's lives. She illuminates realities of middle-class Black American life, particularly around the time after the Civil Rights Movement via fictionalized stories. A later version of the book begins with a foreword by Valerie Smith. She talks about her experiences teaching this novel in her own class, and how her students did not take a liking to the protagonist, Sarah Phillips. She then contextualizes the novel, which actually began as a set of short stories debuted in The New Yorker, published during a period in which the black middle class rose in numbers. Sarah Phillips, Smith says, is in a lot of ways everything that her predecessors, both in terms of fictional characters like her and real world individuals who identified with her story, could dream of: being black and middle class, achieving success in the eyes of white America. Plot The vast majority of the novel is Sarah's reflection and retelling of her childhood and young adult experiences. However, the first chapter, "In France", is set in the present day. Here, Sarah is traveling with three French men in Paris, including her primary lover, Henri. A lot of the content of this chapter centers the racialized romance that Sarah—a light-skinned American black woman—and Henri—a white European man—share. For example, (put quote here about the exotic women in Brazil comment Henri makes). Another thing evident from this chapter is that Sarah purposefully escaped her life back in Philadelphia (insert paraphrase or quote here), though while there, she does express a general nostalgia for her old life: "Some chemistry of air, soil, and civilization filled me with unwilling nostalgia, and I kept a sharp lookout in London for certain types of tourists: prosperous black Americans..." The novel consists, from this first chapter on, of Sarah's reflections on her life until the present. The second chapter, taking place in the summer of 1963—recognizable because of the Civil Rights Movement—commences the flashback. Sarah takes readers back to her childhood in "New African", so they see the life and community she misses back in France.