Some kind of kin: complex bonds and confused racial identities emerge in histories of African American families.

Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family by Ronne Hartfield University of Chicago Press October 2004 $22.50, ISBN 0-226-31821-4

Everyone has a story. The author's mother, Thelma "Day" Shepherd Drayton, chose to tell hers through the eyes of a black woman trapped inside a white body (according to her death certificate). Ronne Hartfield captures the intimacy of the past in her memoir.

Day, her brother and 10 of 11 cousins lived and married black, but passing for white, Day and a cousin gained better employment. Race wasn't a secret for Day. She felt it was nobody's business. Period.

Day's brother, John, who enjoyed the benefits of the white race, never gave up his black roots, a contradiction for anyone who wanted to "pass." After Day's death, her family fought to have the official race on her death certificate changed from white back to black.

Hartfield says the key to verifying her mother's story was a genealogist and a black Recorder of Deeds in Mississippi, who was able to unearth obituaries and an unpublished book written for white family members.

Another Way Home is an historian's textbook, a genealogist's dream assignment and a family's legacy, examining seven generations.

Pat L. Simmons is a news writer and assignment editor for a CBS station in St. Louis, Missouri, as well as the Community Events Coordinator for Books-a-Million.