For thousands of years, history has been kept alive through the written word; I and women of virtue, in particular, have recorded social struggles so that future generations can know about the events that happened during their lives. With Freedom in the Family, Patricia Stephens Due and Tananarive Due set out to ensure that the injustices they and countless other African Americans suffered during the civil rights movement would never be forgotten. In their memoir, the mother-daughter duo listed all the obstacles they had to overcome in their fight for freedom for themselves and their family. Their story is one of a search for purpose, identity and a desire to be free in the midst of an ocean of discrimination and injustice, but above all it is a piece of history that has been discovered in the hope that it will never be repeated. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Both Patricia and Tananarive lay out the goals of writing this memoir in the early chapters in an effective way to set the tone for the memoir. and emphasize the importance of what writers undertake. Patricia shares a short anecdote from a time when she was on a textbook committee and didn't realize that none of the textbooks mentioned Tallahassee as it related to the civil rights movement. She writes: “Without written documentation, I was told, the forty-nine days my sister and I spent in prison, the tear gas that burned my eyes and the people I know could not not be included” (2). It is at this moment that Patricia realizes that she and her fellow freedom fighters are not yet part of history, and so she writes this memoir with the intention of turning their story into history. Storytelling is important to the Due family, and this sentiment is echoed by Tananarive in her first chapter when she describes the Holocaust survivor telling her story in Miami Beach. Tananarive laments: “Soon she [the Holocaust survivor] will be gone and all her stories will accompany her” (5). Tananarive wants to make its own history more concrete so that it does not disappear with it. She wants to ensure that “the children of strangers…will never forget” the suffering of an entire race, and this becomes her primary goal in writing Freedom in the Family (6). It is worth noting the effectiveness of both women's tone in their opening chapters. Both Patricia and Tananarive speak with a tone of urgency and an underlying sense of fear of what might happen if they don't complete this task. This tone lends credibility to the actions they later describe, because it makes it easier to see them as the fierce activists that they are, fearing not what would happen to them because of their actions but what would happen to the world. if they don't act immediately. There is no doubt that, thanks to Patricia and Tananarive, freedom in the family has become part of history. However, it differs from most history books that students will read in class because the way events and characters are described makes readers feel like the story is coming to life. It is one of the most effective tools used by writers because it keeps readers stuck in the minds of the events they describe long after they close the book. For example, take Tananarive's description of Patricia when she goes to meet the police who accuse her husband of stealing machine guns from his black van. According to Tananarive, his mother “was underthe [police] spotlight that evening, dressed in short, transparent underpants, because she was wearing a bulletproof vest…. My mother never flinched and she certainly wasn't about to start” (215). The images evoked by these few sentences are electrifying, unlike most representations of history. This brief example of the story is described in a way that feels like it's the climax of a gripping thriller. Most memoirs are written in the same way; the endings of most chapters contain either elements of foreshadowing or other strong declarative statements about various characters that add to the dramatic feel of that part of the story. These descriptions further demonstrate the importance of storytelling to the Due family. They want their story to be more than just dull and boring like the textbooks Patricia was reading in her first chapter; they want their history to be ones that future generations can remember and share with others. An additional element of the memoir that makes it so captivating is its contemporary relevance. The way the struggles that the authors and others describe in their memoirs are described, with such vivid detail and expressive language, makes them very easy to understand. An underlying theme of the memoir is that many of the problems Patricia and Tananarive faced are problems people face today, regardless of race. Take the question of identity and belonging that Tananarive wrestled with during his years at Northwestern University. When Tananarive writes, “I felt like a white woman in black face when I set foot in FMO [For Members Only, a black student organization] meetings,” she expresses a feeling of displacement on her university campus (108 ). These issues of discomfort in one's own skin and lack of connection with one's peers are issues that plague many college and even high school students today, and it is almost comforting to read that even a woman who has done so many extraordinary things continues to do it. struggles with the most ordinary human emotions. Additionally, Freedom in the Family addresses the question of what one's purpose in life is. This problem is made clear when John says, “[Civil rights] was my life. Patricia always talks about that, my whole life” (151). The question of what one is supposed to do with one's life, how one can make a difference in the world is a question that many people, young and old, struggle with today and which is beautifully described in Freedom in the family. The structure of the memoir is another element of the work that makes it relevant to readers today. The fact that the book is designed so that two stories are told, each a generation apart and yet completely linked to each other, implies the continuing nature of the story. There is no fixed beginning or end to any period of history. The story of the civil rights movement told by Patricia and Tananarive spans two generations, and the structure of the memoir implies that there is no reason why it couldn't be about the next generation - the generation of students today. This problem is not yet resolved. Patricia even alludes to the actions of modern-day activists that echo the actions of the activists she worked with while in college when she describes observing a "sit-in [in 2000] outside the office of the Florida Governor Jeb Bush in Tallahassee. [She] felt like she had gone back in time” (364). She also writes that the same.