In her memoir, Carol Tonge Mack takes us on a journey from a small town in Antigua, to the streets of the South Bronx, to private college life in New England, to a career in academia in her wonderful memoir, ‘Being Bernadette: From Polite Silence to Finding the Black Girl Magic Within’. From the opening of Carol’s memoir to the final pages, you see a life that has endured the challenges of not only being an immigrant to the shores of the U.S., but specifically as an immigrant who is also black and female. 

The title of the memoir is telling in that we see a girl taught to be respectful of tradition and of others, and how this upbringing morphs into a way of enduring the sudden confrontation of being ‘American’. Once in the U.S., this upbringing becomes a mode of survival until Mrs. Tonge Mack learns the realities of what it takes to actually make it as a black female immigrant in a world that sometimes views her with skepticism and sometimes, even downright hatred. In all, Carol’s memoir is told with love, humor, wisdom and most of all a sense of endurance—the kind of endurance endowed by the magic of being a black woman.