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Say I’m Dead, a memoir of secrets, separation, and transformation chronicles four generations who overturned forbidden race-mixing norms amid America’s persistent bigotry.

EXCERPT: “I was a black woman according to my family, society’s one-drop rule and my birth certificate. It was culturally and legally ridiculous to wonder if I wasn’t. Yet my biological ancestry counted for absolutely nothing. My beloved mother was white.”

 
 

“Powerfully important and deeply moving, SAY I’M DEAD is a story of race, family, and identity. E. Dolores Johnson is the daughter of a black father and a white mother — yet how and why it took her years to claim both heritages, and to unearth the secrets that defined her family, testifies to the complicated history of race relations in America. The family's changes over time mirror what our country has gone through and continues to wrestle with. Her story will both inspire and educate.”

-Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Author, "The Fact of a Body", Lambda Literary Award winner