She is functionally illiterate, obese and destitute. In addition to being impregnated by her father twice, she is also sexually abused and beaten by her mother. Without a doubt, Precious has trouble aplenty. Push is told in the extraordinary voice of Claireece “Precious” Jones, who introduces her story with an agonising declaration: “I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver.” From there unspools a novel that is a merciless indictment of a society that abandons its most vulnerable citizens. The slick packaging was a far cry from the tattered pages we’d passed back and forth, and the woman in the author photo wore a close crop instead of long, thick dreadlocks, but the fingerprint of an author is her words. “Is that our Sapphire?” This was pre-internet, so I ran to the bookstore. I called Angela, as we were now living on opposite sides of the country, trying to figure out adult life. Imagine our shock and delight in 1996 when the entire literary world was on fire with the publication of Push – the author had been given a major advance, the first chapter would appear in the New Yorker, and there would be a serious book tour. Some critics were appalled by the very idea of this story being held up as an important work of literature “She is a hero,” Angela declared, and I nodded in solemn agreement. Angela speculated that Sapphire would likely never receive her due in the world of letters, because she had chosen as her subject the people whose bodies are stigmatised, whose families are pathologised, and whose very lives are held up as everything America rejects. The poem was defiant as the speaker focused less on the joys of motherhood and more on ownership of her sexuality. What I remember most clearly was a poem from the point of view of Celestine Tate Harrington, the quadriplegic boardwalk singer who fought the city for custody of her child. My good friend Angela passed me a sheaf of xeroxed pages by an author who called herself Sapphire.

As a college student, I hung out with a cluster of intense, arty types, sharing battered copies of chapbooks, zines and small-press volumes. I n the Reagan years, I was a teenager, more reader than writer, when I discovered the work of Sapphire.

Sapphire author