Francisco

Mills Newman’s freeform autobiographical 1974 novel depicts a soulful young Black woman’s search for self at the height of the Black Arts movement. Growing up a middle class child actor, our heroine has had enough of “working for a man who was makin a fortune off a people he thought so little of.” Eschewing blaxploitation cinema, she has an epiphany talking with an auto mechanic with a smile “like the root of a tree, so deep, so alive.… That old Black man was music.” Enter idealistic documentarian Francisco, with whom she falls intensely in love and whose blazing star she orbits from Hollywood to Berkeley to Malibu, inspired and eclipsed by her longing and devotion to him amidst the fading afterglow of the 1960s as it “seems like almost everybody has been bought.” A new afterword offers a surprising yet perhaps inevitable coda to the author’s spiritual quest.