Some Sing, Some Cry

Elizabeth Mayfield begins her life as a newly freed Black woman in the South and gradually becomes the head of a household of women whose talent for music runs through the generations. Their path is marked by severe hardship, and the novel follows them as they live through pivotal years of the nation's past.

The book is a multigenerational saga that places a family's private struggles against the public history of the United States. Its focus is on the women's resilience, their creative lives, and the bonds that hold them together through loss and survival.

Ntozake Shange, best known as a poet and playwright, wrote the novel, bringing to it the rhythmic language and attention to Black women's lives that define her wider work.