Bessie Head was born Bessie Amelia Emery in a South African mental hospital in 1937. She was the daughter of a black father and white mother whose wealthy family had sent her to the institution upon learning of her pregnancy. The baby was briefly taken in by foster parents who gave her up due to the color of her skin, and then was raised by white missionaries. While Head was still a child, her mother committed suicide.

After teaching elementary school for several years in South Africa, Head spent two years as a journalist for Drum Publications in Johannesburg. She married fellow journalist Harold Head in 1961, but they soon divorced. In 1964, she moved from South Africa to Botswana with her son, saying that she would no longer live under apartheid, South Africa's institutionalized system of racial discrimination. In Botswana she lived in poverty as a refugee on...