Perfect Peace A Novel [Paperback]

Daniel Black'sPerfect Peaceis the heartbreaking portrait of a large, rural southern family's attempt to grapple with their mother's desperate decision to make her newborn son into the daughter she will never have

When the seventh child of the Peace family, named Perfect, turns eight, her mother Emma Jean tells her bewildered daughter, You was born a boy. Imadeyou a girl. But that ain't what you was supposed to be. So, from now on, you gon' be a boy. It'll be a little strange at first, but you'll get used to it, and this'll be over after while. From this point forward, his life becomes a bizarre kaleidoscope of events. Meanwhile, the Peace family is forced to question everything they thought they knew about gender, sexuality, unconditional love, and fulfillment.

Daniel Black on writing Perfect Peace

I conceived this book one day, in 2005, when I saw a child and couldn't determine if it was a boy or girl. Then I wondered why it mattered at all. I knew the child washuman; that wasn't up for question. But by desire to know lingered. I began to imagine the price the child was paying as the world sorted out its gender, or created one. My imagination ran free. I situated the story in the rural, segregated south in order to explore the specific ways in which southern black folk grapple with issues of gender, and I wanted to examine just how far a community is willing to go to right what they feel is wrong in one of its members. I also wanted to examine the ways in which patriarchy and homophobia have shaped the black community's constructs of God and salvation, leading its members to denounce and demean all in the name of something holy.

Perfect Peacewas extremely difficult to write for three reasons: (1) appropriating the language and perception of black people at the time with regards to social dimensions of gender and sexuality, (2) trying to imagine how a child would cope witl6