Wearing Purple - Tapa blanda

In a moving collection of letters, four accomplished African-American women renew their college friendship, look back on the challenges they have met as black women, and encourage readers to take control of their own lives. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

In 1989 we four friends, all living in different parts of the country, decided to form a working circle and write letters to each other to explore our thoughts and feelings about our current life experiences. We were friends holding hands through the experience of growing older, while seeking and finding the emerging possibilities of our lives. This book is a selection of those letters "about our joy, sadness, loss, fulfillment, laughter, and tears."

These four women met in 1954 at Talledega College (one of the country's forty historically black colleges) and began an enduring friendship that continues to sustain them more than forty years later. All with accomplished careers, two in long, joyful marriages, one divorced, one widowed, and each a mother (with six sons-no daughters-among them), their intimate letters discuss everything. E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g!
By sharing their letters in a book, Lydia, Marilyn, Otis, and Mildred reassure us that we are all extraordinary, that we are all spiritual con-querors in our "ordinary" lives--with help from our friends!

Their ever-growing closeness, cultivated since their teens and early twenties, reminds us to value our friendships, whatever our age.
And, as they enjoy their late fifties, these four women not only give voice to a generation no longer young in years, but they also exuberantly redefine what it means to grow older.