8 Books on the Highs, the Lows, and Everything in between of Black Motherhood
Motherhood is one of the most beautiful things a person can experience in this world. But like all deeply human experiences, it’s difficult. Some of of us were blessed with the best mothers in the world (me, it’s me, I was), and some of us had not so great mothers.
Many of us had mothers who did the best with what they had (also me).
Our mothers are not perfect. They are human. Sometimes it takes looking at an experience outside yourself to truly appreciate what you have and that is one of the reasons why I love reading so much.
Reading is the only time we get to step into a new world, a new life, and experience living as someone else.
So this Mother’s Day, I’ve compiled a list of 8 books by Black women exploring the complexities of motherhood to read before you call your mama. Better yet, I’ve paired each with a card from our new mother’s day collection so you can read the books and then compose a heartfelt message to your mother.
Sometimes the message can be as simple as Tupac Shakur’s iconic words to his mother - who wasn’t perfect but did her best.
“Dear Mama, you are appreciated.”
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PARABLE OF THE TALENTS by Octavia E Butler
As Lauren Olamina fights to plant the seeds of Earthseed, her daughter Larkin is stolen away and raised in a world that teaches her to hate her mother’s legacy. Their relationship becomes a haunting exploration of how a mother’s devotion to a cause can inadvertently sow the seeds of a daughter’s lifelong resentment.
"A child is a child. But a mother is a world."
Grieving the sudden loss of her mother, Bree Matthews discovers a secret society that holds the key to her family’s buried, magical past. Her journey is defined by the realization that her mother’s greatest act of love was a wall of protection that Bree must now dismantle to claim her own power.
"A mother’s love is a force of nature, but a mother’s secrets are a different kind of power altogether."
Bound by their shared status as motherless "cradle friends" in the Jim Crow South, Annie and Niecy navigate lives shaped by the women who were forced to raise them in their mothers' stead. While one seeks social elevation through education, the other embarks on a desperate journey to find the mother who abandoned her, proving that the ghosts of maternal absence can be as powerful as presence.
"When you don’t have your mother, you don’t really know who you are. Even if you have a bad mother... you can use her to know what you are not."
(Don't ask me why I started with three books about absent mothers. Maybe it's because sometimes seeing what other's don't have helps us appreciate what we do).
Haunted by the ghost of the child she killed to save from a life of bondage, Sethe must confront the devastating, "too thick" love that defines her motherhood. The relationship is a visceral exploration of how the trauma of slavery twists the maternal instinct into a force that can both protect and destroy.
"Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all."
THE JOYS OF MOTHERHOOD by Buchi Emecheta
Nnu Ego’s entire identity is anchored in her fertility and the success of her children, yet she finds that the "joys" promised by tradition are a hollow reward in a rapidly changing colonial Nigeria. Her life is a poignant testament to the tragedy of a mother who sacrifices everything for a future that ultimately leaves her isolated and alone.
"God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a whole human being, not anybody's appendage? ... After all, I am a woman, a human being, with a mind and a soul of my own."
Beginning in eighteenth-century Ghana and moving forward through eight generations, this novel traces two half-sisters and their descendants — what they pass down, what gets taken, and what survives anyway. Every chapter is its own world. Every mother in it is trying her best in circumstances that were never designed for her to win.
"Strength was a thing that was passed down from mother to daughter, like a secret language that only they could speak. But when the line was broken, the language was lost, and the daughter had to learn to speak all over again, using only the sounds of her own breath."
THE SECRET LIVES OF BABA SEGI'S WIVES by Lola Shoneyin
Within the walls of a polygamous household, four wives navigate a silent war where motherhood is the ultimate currency for security and power. As secrets unravel, the novel exposes the desperate lengths a woman will go to protect her children and the hidden burdens mothers carry to survive a patriarchal system.
"A mother’s heart is a vast abyss, a place where secrets are buried and sacrifices are made in the name of a love that can be as cruel as it is kind."
A GIRL IS A BODY OF WATER by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Set in 1970s Uganda, this is the story of Kirabo, twelve years old and obsessed with one question: who is my mother? A desperate search for the mother she never knew leads her to the ancient, powerful secrets of the women who came before her. The novel reimagines the mother-daughter bond not just as a personal connection, but as a deep, ancestral lineage that links a girl's identity to the very soul of Uganda.
"A mother is the first home a child ever knows. Even when you leave that home, you carry the soil of it under your fingernails for the rest of your life."