Race on the QT: Blackness and the films of Quentin Tarantino
rates, black women's labour force participation, and year to year change in median weekly earnings; they show some gains, a lot of zigzagging from the 1970s to the present, but nothing to suggest that pre civil rights southern cities or towns were a better place to live in than is contemporary Baltimore. In short, the reach of The Hero's Fight has slightly exceeded its grasp. That can be understood as a virtue of the book as well as, or even instead of, a defect; putting Big and Little Floyd's stories into a structural context encourages us to pay careful attention both to real people and to more abstracted societal forces. I wish Fernandez Kelly had relied less on her anger and ideology, and more on a range of scholarship, in depicting the political context and trajectory of West Baltimore, but she has nonetheless given us a rare gift in revealing the sad lives of Big and Little Floyd, Towanda and Lydia.