Daughter A Novel [Paperback]

At nineteen, Aya is a promising Black college student from Brooklyn who is struggling through a difficult relationship with her emotionally distant mother, Miriam. One winter night, Aya is shot by a white police officer in a case of mistaken identity. Keeping vigil by her daughter's hospital bed, Miriam remembers her own youth: her battle for independence from her parents, her affair with Aya's father, and the challenges of raising her daughter. But as Miriam confronts her past -- her losses and regrets -- she begins to heal and discovers a tentative hopefulness.Chapter One

Eight Manchester Place: Wednesday, 7:15 A.M.

It was a morning thick with winter and a surprising sun. And the light was early. It was gliding down the two-block road, down the stripped-down street, down past where the old frame houses wore their paint like rags and did not concern themselves with frivolities like manicured front lawns or usable porches. The light coasted until it came to the corner where the small brick two-family house stood, stiff and alone.

Eight Manchester Place. That was the home. Well kept and clean, it was a reminder of what this neighborhood, this street, had once looked like. Here had been a community born during the migrations of the 1930s and 1940s, organized by the push and power of the 1960s, rocked by the horse and recession of the 1970s, asphyxiated, cut, cast out, and cracked in the 1980s. Still, there was light somehow. Even in this final decade of the century, with all its bruises and deep-set abrasions, there was light somehow, and this morning it was coming in early.

It was coming in and Aya Rivers, who lived on the second floor of 8 Manchester Place with her mother, Miriam, was trying to sit up under it. Cross-legged in a chair at the dining table, beneath the window and furious spider plant, Aya was reading from an anthology of poems for her Black women's literature class. She was particularly fixated on a Sonia Sanchez verlSq