A secular sermon and offering

Three Houses has a tripartite structure: The House of Pride, twenty-six stories cataloguing Price’s childhood and youth with her parents and seventeen siblings on their small farm in West Helena, Arkansas; her young adulthood at a(n) historically black college. The House of Woe (Marriage) examines Price’s marriages to two charming and seemingly compatible partners and the failure of those tumultuous relationships; and My House—seventeen stories that chart Price’s forty-eight-year career as a public speaker and English instructor as well as the cumulative effect on the author of the interesting people who have enriched her odyssey.

Potentially the forty-six discrete narratives engage readers in the way that we patronize films and plays, read short stories and novels, hear concerts, and frequent houses of worship. The final two chapters, together with a generous Album of photos of the principal participants in Price’s life, analyze the role of performance art, including music, in Price’s journey and recount the Price Family’s appearance on stage at Lone Star College-North Harris; Houston, Texas. Collectively, the accounts invite readers to explore afresh their connectedness to others in the human family through communal experiences and traditions.

Velma Price Smith is a retired educator. A native of West Helena, Arkansas and the provisional resident of the states of Mississippi, Indiana, Illinois, South Carolina, and Texas, Smith performs a program of music, poetry, and stories for congregations, schools and colleges; government agencies, and correctional institutions.