Product Description

Dear Self is the penetrating journal of Richelene Mitchell, a young African American mother of seven struggling to raise her children while wrestling with the burden of poverty, callous public policy, and both overt and subtle manifestations of entrenched, institutionalized racism America. Mitchell was born in the rural south, the daughter of an African American sharecropper. She would venture to the northern ghetto of Philadelphia to enhance her educational opportunities. Hence, her early life was shaped by the twin forces defining African America life in the twentieth century: the rural south and the urban north. Mitchell's promising academic career was curtailed by an eventually failed marriage that rendered her a single mother of seven children living in a sprawling public housing project. Forced to deal with the humiliation of public assistance, she chronicled a year of her life, 1973, in this penetrating journal. Though written over twenty years ago, her intimate experience with and intricate insights into the informing and penetrating light on race reality faced by an expanding American underclass are as relevant today as they were then. She sheds light on poverty, mothering, gender relations and many other pertinent issues. This book is a valuable resource for all of those seeking to understand the reality faced by millions of Americans whose plight rarely finds an informed and articulate voice.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1002124 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-23
• Released on: 2008-01-17
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Review
"Richelene Whitaker Mitchell was born in rural Georgia and spent her teen years in South Philly before settling in New Britain, Connecticut. She was more than the sum of her statuses. She faced uncertainty with grace, dignity and a daily page of insight. Through adversity, she sent up flares so her Self could find the way back. A mother of seven and a critical thinker, capsized slowly, left a record. Dear Self is a worthy read." --Foreword Clairon Reviews

"In December 1972, prolific letter writer Mitchell, a divorced African American mother of seven living in poverty in Connecticut, made a New Year's resolution to keep a journal. Here is that diary, her perspective from over 30 years ago. She discusses workaday concerns, including the price of groceries, her children's education, and her anxiety about her daughter's early motherhood. But she doesn't avoid more complex, intellectual matters, e.g., her frustrations with everyday racism, the question of "liberated" womanhood, and her analysis of books she is reading. A good addition to libraries with a focus on African American social history..." --Library Journal Book Reviews

Noreen Kassem, a physician from Vancouver, BC, 09/11/2007
"New Insight on Poverty and the Human Spirit" 5 stars.

Most of us have never ventured to the housing projects or spoken to the disheveled mother at the supermarket removing items from her shopping cart to make sure she can afford it all. Dear Self, provides rare and surprising insight on poverty in America. Sharp witted, faithfully honest and self-critical Richelene Mitchell shares her acute observations on the welfare system, healthcare, politics and the people around her. She presents life in all its loneliness, joy, humor, determination and intense sadness - in other words, its humanity. This book is all the more poignant and absorbing because it was written as a personal diary and found after the author passed away.

Hina Khan-Mukhtar, Thu, May 8, 2008 - 5 Stars
This is a stand-alone book. It's a book I find myself returning to time and time again to learn from the insights of a woman who lived and wrote during the years when I was first learning how to sit up and crawl. Whether it's getting advice on how to raise your children, what a child needs from his mother, what a father needs to do to provide for his family, how spouses need to treat one another, how an orderly home should be run efficiently while on a budget, how the races need to understand one another, how the genders needs to work together, how one should maintain one's dignity even in times of near-despair, how a mother should pray for her children, how one should appreciate the "little blessings" in the beauty of nature all around us...it's all in there.

I often found myself putting down 'Dear Self' and staring off into space as I pondered some little nugget that Richelene Mitchell had penned in her diary three decades earlier. I wiped my own tears as I felt the sorrow and shame of a mother who felt she was never able to do enough. I tried not to let my constricted throat stop me as I read certain heartbreaking passages out to my own sons and husband. I kissed my children as they slept at night, thanking God for giving us carpets under our feet, warm roofs over our heads, and food in our cabinets. I hugged my husband and thanked him for "being a man", for not shirking his duties and responsibilities to his wife and children. I looked out my windows and found a vision of beauty in the trees and grass that greeted my eyes, a new awareness that wasn't there before as I remembered Richelene's fervent prayer for a lawn outside her tenement home so that should could be rid of the mud, mud, mud (and concrete floors) that seemed to be forever her lot in life.

Richelene Mitchell's diary entries aren't just entries --- they're essays worth reading and studying and thinking about again and again. I found myself feeling melancholy after a few nights in a row of reading, and I felt the need to pick up lighter fare. But I was drawn back to this little diary after a week of being away and I couldn't bring myself to shelve it until every last page was digested and understood.

It was at a study circle one evening when one of the young ladies rhetorically asked, "How does one learn not to take one's blessings for granted?"

"Read 'Dear Self'," I suggested casually.

"YES!" two or three enthusiastic voices chorused around the room. "Exactly! That book will do it for you!"

What a gift to leave the world. If Richelene Mitchell hasn't done anything else other than make you grateful for all that has been granted to you in life, she has performed nothing less than a miracle...

Customer Reviews

Beautiful book
I happen to come across this book quite by accident at the library one day. I couldn't check it out at the time, but once I could, I went right back and got that book, and I tell you, this is no ordinary welfare mother, but then again, who is? or who isn't? Richeline was born in Georgia, finished high school in South Philadelphia, got married and ended up in New Britain, Connecticut with seven kids. She resolved for 1973 to write a journal of her life and concerns, and that she did. One of the entries while discussing her financial woes, she muses if she sold this journal what would it profit? sadly, she didn't live to see the results. She speaks of not being able to work for herself(although she does work parttime at a dry cleaners)and giving her body to science as a sort of payback, writing letters to the local newspaper editor and seeing them published as well. She yearns that her children would break the cycle and become better adults, and at the end of the book, there is a section on what happened to her children. She also talks about her health. She suffered from seizures, and she valiantly tried to keep it from her kids. Nevertheless, after reading this book, one would think twice about labeling someone a welfare queen or what have you. Richeline Mitchell may have been a welfare mother, but I believe she was far more than that. A great book and highly recommended for all.

Amazing
The book Dear Self is an excellent book that everyone should read. It really draws the reader into never wanting to put it down. It appeals to people of every upbringing, age, and culture. The reader will feel as though they have experienced what the very writer has gone through. The emotions of sadness, happiness, and times of struggle have an immense affect on any person who reads this book. Superbly put together, Dear Self proves that with struggle there is ease. Richelene Mitchell, who documents these stories in a diary, proves that, although everyone has struggles or difficulties in life, with determination, patience, and acceptance of those struggles, one will succeed. What I found amazing about the writer was the fact that she never expressed pain throughout her illness of epilepsy. She continued to provide for her seven children, with endless love and support. This is most definitely a book that everyone can learn at least one lesson from, especially through the writer's strength, patience, and courage.