I COLLECT MY EYES…A MEMOIR

I COLLECT MY EYES…A MEMOIR, A Mother and Daughter’s spiritual journey and conversations about love, motherhood, death and healing, by mother and daughter Shirley Bradley Price LeFlore and Lyah Beth LeFlore, are stories spawned from the intimate and candid conversations about love, motherhood, death and healing, the two had during the final year of Shirley’s life before she passed away in 2019. Deeply personal and poignant, their unique intergenerational journey explores the richness and complexity of women. Shirley and Lyah shed tears and laughter, exposing their failures, fears, tragedies and triumphs as mother and daughter.

Shirley was a professor, poet, and performing artist, a key architect of the Black Arts movement in the 1960s, and St. Louis Poet Laureate Emeritus. Lyah, a noted television and film producer, and critically-acclaimed National Bestseller, provides a richly detailed and riveting history of her mother and her career; tracing her ancestors’ extraordinary experiences as a midwestern African American family, with a deep belief in both God and the spirit world; entrenched in southern roots, from slavery to civil rights. For Shirley, the horrific murder of her father, and her own near death, on January 6, 1946, at the hands of her uncle, would forever plague her life and artistry. It would also shape her to become the prolific poet she became. Lyah reveals what it was like to grow up with a mother of such tremendous renown, while creatively following in her mother’s footsteps; and the mental and emotional toll of care giving, and starting over after devastating loss. The tight knit relationship Shirley had with all three of her daughters is beautifully interwoven into the story, delving into the unbreakable bond Lyah shares with her sisters, as each comes to terms with the eminent death of their matriarch. It is a testament of their strong faith, and the spiritual teachings Shirley passed on to them.

A bittersweet tribute, I COLLECT MY EYES…A MEMOIR also includes Shirley’s private writings from profound journal entries and unreleased poetry, discovered by her daughter post-death; revealing secrets, confessions, childhood reflections, lost love notes exchanged with her two former husbands, and her short-lived love affair after her second marriage ended. I COLLECT MY EYES is a moving collection filled with memoristic text, poems, ephemera, photographs and stories that are both sweet and harrowing, with palpable boldness and vivid prose. In Shirley’s own words: “I COLLECT MY EYES is like letting all your days look over your shoulders. Revealing all your own questions about yourself, your life; wiping the lens of the eye of the significant others that are pieced together, patchworked into your quilt. To become naked, unraveled, one unwraps the hidden gifts, before the mirror, before eyes, all different eyes inside my eyes. Seeing where those eyes have been. To whom those eyes belong. Well, it has been a long time to accept standing, dancing, crying, being freely human in the eye of so many beholders, now, to be baptized, cleansed, to be set free.”