Minerva Wyche Blackwell

Behind the Kitchen Door: a Shotgun Wedding Minerva Wyche Blackwell

BEHIND THE KITCHEN DOOR . . . A Shotgun Wedding begins in the rural countryside of North Carolina. It is the story of Alene, a pretty, smart, teenager who has to endure a lot of tragedies in her young life and of her family's struggles in America's rural south from the mid 1920's through the Great Depression, dealing with racial segregation and Jim Crow laws. She has to grow up much too fast due to her mother's death after giving birth to her baby sister. Alene who was thirteen and the oldest of eight children helped her father to raise her younger siblings until her father remarried. She gets pregnant by her boyfriend Julius at seventeen and tells her father, who beats her mercilessly. She and Julius are forced to go to court and tell the judge where they had sex. They are made to marry. She leaves Julius because of beatings and abuse and move up north to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On her way to Philadelphia she experiences fi rst-hand Jim Crow laws, starting with segregated interstate trains cars. Once in Philadelphia she meets four young women and they form a lasting friendship. Alene meets and falls in love with Mitch at a jazz club. She becomes seriously ill with tuberculosis, and her father comes and takes her and her little boy back home. Her doctor admits her to a sanitarium for treatment but later tells her and her family that the disease is