The Invitation: A Memoir of Hope Amidst Lessons of Race and Place

In The Invitation, Clifton Taulbert returns to the themes of Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored, his award-winning book and the source of a major motion picture. This new memoir chronicles Taulbert's transformative experience of a supper invitation to a former plantation house in Allendale, South Carolina, where the successful adult confronts his childhood memories and wrestles with the legacies of slavery and segregation that demand to be acknowledged in his present circumstances.

Transported back to a setting that looks and feels like the cotton fields and shotgun shacks of his childhood, Taulbert finds himself expected to cross racial barriers that no "colored" man could have broached without dire consequences. The Invitation is the story of the man and the little boy inside him wrestling with a past they both know so well, and of stepping into a future that is still being determined.