We Are Taking Only What We Need

Working-class African Americans strive for meaning and search for direction in lives shaped by uncontrollable forces in this prizewinning story collection.

“Cheeky, urbane, and playful. Lorrie Moore meets Eudora Welty.” —The New Yorker

The ten stories in this resonant collection deal with both the ties that bind and the gulf that separates generations, from children confronting the fallibility of their own parents for the first time to adults finding themselves forced to start over again and again.

In “Highway eighteen”a young Jehovah’s Witness going door to door with an expert field-service partner from up north is at a crossroads: will she go to college or continue to serve the church? “If You Hit Randall County, You’ve Gone Too Far”tells ofa family trying to make it through a tense celebratory dinner for a son just out on bail. And in the collection’s title story, a young girl experiences loss for the first time in the fallout from her father’s relationship with her babysitter.

Startling, intimate, and prescient on their own, these stories build to a kaleidoscopic understanding of both the individual and the collective black experience over the last fifty years in the American South. With We Are Taking Only What We Need, Stephanie Powell Watts has crafted an incredibly assured and emotionally affecting meditation on everything from the large institutional forces to the small interpersonal moments that impress upon us and direct our lives.

“Watts shows us people, real souls like the people we sit next to on the bus, people who live down the hall, people who could be relatives.” —Edward P. Jones

“These stories celebrate real people and their tenacious ability to break down life’s locked doors.” —O,the Oprah Magazine

“Impressive . . . What is lovely about these stories is that Watts can take a few words and paint a landscape that reveals so much richness about the people and culture.” —Library Journal