Porgies Are Best

About the Book

B.J. Ray is on a hilarious journey with one goal in mind, an interracial marriage. For sixteen years, she has been planning her escape from the South Bronx projects. If she ignores the experiences and opportunities, she may be stuck with project dwelling forever. She encounters the challenge of having to ingest salt tablets and collect rocks in one-hundred-degree weather, a prerequisite for interracial dating. She also attends Hampton share parties where white folks drink out of paper cups, not Welch’s grape jelly jars, and a share consists of a cot in the laundry room every fourth weekend. She finds invited guests to your home demand bottled water, request organic wines, organic foods, and really can’t tell the difference about most things in life, not to mention water, foods, and wine. One March night, B.J. Ray attends her middle sister’s birthday party with her younger sister and they are summoned to pick up the Carvel cake. They don’t return until the wee hours of the morning. B.J. Ray meets a man and discovers that he is the key to her becoming a highly successful individual. Porgies Are Best: A Fishmonger’s Daughter is a book of vignettes of a young African American, Jewish girl from the projects of the South Bronx, who experiences love, humor, misfortune, compassion, and accomplishment.

About the Author

B.J. Ray was born in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and was raised in the Andrew Jackson Projects located in the South Bronx with four siblings and two parents. She is a licensed group psychotherapist, school administrator, and certified licensed mental health counselor (LMHC). She lives on the east side of Manhattan.