The memoir begins with the author being stabbed (along with six others) by a white man with a knife in a New England coffee shop. And while she wasn't stabbed because of her skin colour, the metaphor of violence against the Black body remains. The action turned metaphor, among other things Bernard experiences (like marrying a white man), is explored in Black Is the Body: Stories From My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine, a collection of essays that use her life as the stage to investigate where blackness and whiteness intersect.