Raised by her grandparents in the Jim Crow South, the young Arlinda Willis “had a front-row seat” to the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama, while growing up in nearby Toxey. In defiance of the systemic racism that shaped her upbringing—she grew up in “squalid conditions” in a “ramshackle house” without indoor plumbing or electricity—Willis was determined to forge her own destiny. In this biography, based largely on conversations she had over the course of her multidecade relationship with the author (her co-worker and, later, caretaker), Willis describes how she joined her mother and millions of other Black Americans who participated in the Great Migration by moving north to Cleveland as an adolescent. By the 1960s, she’d landed a job as a dancer for a local TV show called Upbeat, which would later be syndicated nationally; there, she’d share the stage with stars like James Brown. As a young adult during the civil rights and Black power eras, she would also win runner-up in the first Miss Black Cleveland beauty pageant and tour with the band Rare Earth as a dancer. After landing a white-collar job at a law firm in California’s famously liberal Bay Area, Willis notes that she still had to spend “years of proving herself, of being twice as good as the [white] staff…just to be equal to them.” It was here that she met Cole, a white man years her junior with an academic background in creative writing, with whom she would form a lifelong friendship. Just as racism and misogyny shaped Willis’ early life, Cole documents how medical racism—Willis suffered from undertreated pain and received delayed diagnoses—affected her final years as she battled cancer. What makes this work special is not just its poignant retelling of Willis’ life, often in her own words; it’s also the author’s ability to place her experiences within a larger context of American history and structural racial inequality.