In the Garden of Our Dreams: Memoirs of a Marriage - Hardcover

She was an African American princess, raised in a racially mixed Connecticut neighborhood and taught by her father "to go after whatever I thought I could do." He came from a poor section of Washington, D.C., and supported his brilliant academic career with scholarships and part-time jobs. But when they met in 1957, their shared aspirations to "uplift the race" and force white America to accept them on their own terms drew them together. Married in 1959, the Haizlips held various socially conscious jobs while experiencing the tumult of the 1960s from an unusual vantage point; when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Shirlee Haizlip notes, "I stopped wearing white gloves." They lived in a privileged, integrated world but never wavered in their commitment to help less fortunate black people. And their joint memoir sketches the evolution of both a marriage between very different personalities and the racial landscape in America. Pungent political awareness leavens the sentimentality of the couple's family portrait, and alternating first-person narratives give the story a "he said, she said" completeness, doing justice to two powerful individuals who quarreled but maintained an unshakeable bond. --Wendy Smith

Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, bestselling author of The Sweeter the Juice, and her husband, Harold C. Haizlip describe, with unwavering commitment to each other, their families, and their race, what hard work, good luck, and most important, unshakable love can accomplish.
Told in their alternating voices, In the Garden of Our Dreams is a portrait of their nearly forty-year love affair. Born into a generation reared in segregation, Harold, the Southerner, and Shirlee, the Northerner, strove not only to marry their individual differences in reaching for common happiness, but also joined the larger struggle of their generation to achieve integration and racial equality. In this intimate and moving memoir, the couple reflects on how they defined themselves as African Americans during some of the most important years in America's struggle with issues of race, class, and equality. Uplifting and romantic, In the Garden of Our Dreams gives all couples hope in this time of increasing cynicism about the value of marriage and the effect each individual can have in the larger struggle against society's ills.