She illuminates realities of middle-class Black American life, particularly around the time after the Civil Rights Movement via fictionalized stories.

She then contextualizes the novel, which actually began as a set of short stories debuted in The New Yorker, published during a period in which the black middle class rose in numbers.

Sarah Phillips, Smith says, is in a lot of ways everything that her predecessors, both in terms of fictional characters like her and real world individuals who identified with her story, could dream of: being black and middle class, achieving success in the eyes of white America.

Sarah reveals that since she and her brother, Matthew, were children, they were "dispelling" the traditions of the church, taking a secular pride in knowing how Communion was prepared.

She describes her mother's background as having "been brought up with all the fussy little airs and graces of middle-class colored girls born around the time of World War I"[1] and having a bit of a classical education.

Sarah and her mom go to Judge Barber's house to pay respects to the family, bringing food, and encounter his daughter Phyllis.

In "Gypsies", Sarah describes her black suburban, middle-class neighborhood near Philadelphia, Franklin Place, in the summer.

She plays a lot with her best friend at the time, Lynn Yancy, a girl often confused as Sarah's sister because of their similar light-skin and frizzy braided hair.

The couple then leaves, and later that night, Sarah relays the story to her parents, who explain that the man and woman were "gypsies" who sold furniture.

"Marching" begins with a story about Sarah, her brother Matthew, her father, and her Uncle Freddy on a trip to Harlem in 1959.

While Reverend Phillips tells Sarah and Matthew to "say 'Negro' with near-military briskness when we spoke of ourselves in the classrooms of our Quaker school"[1] and also talks a lot about civil rights, he also speaks about Negroes, or "we" as people who ruin neighborhoods and communities when they move in.

Matthew argues that his mother is being unbelievable considering she sent her kids to predominantly white schools their entire lives, and then get upset when "the inevitable happens".

Chen-Cheu makes a loud comment about some of her clothes being stolen from her bag, and the girls in the cabin fight, for example.

This is significant because ultimately, when the students are made to leave before their week is up due to all the conflicts that had occurred, Sarah and Ellen perform their song.

When Sarah and Grace go to Ms. Jeller's house, with pound cake to give her, she is watching television with Ms. Bryant, her residential staff worker.

Ms. Jeller was raped at the age of 12 by a man in the community, and so her guardians organized a wedding between the two of them, and once the baby arrived, they got the marriage annulled.

In "Fine Points", Sarah and her roommate Margaret plot to engage romantically with their professor crushes at the university.

She begins to get bored at the conversation and lose interest in the professor, although he attempts to compliment her in relation to her work in his class.

Education—Sarah's education primes her to attend Harvard, live in Paris, meet European lovers, and escape the confines of her religious middle-class home life.

Coming of age—Although she deals with the added complications of being black in a predominantly white space, and being minimally religious in a devout household, Sarah struggles to find her identity throughout her adolescence and young adulthood like any other character.

"It astonished me considerably", Sarah says, "to discover a world in which the lines were so clearly drawn, and in which I was the object of a relentless, discreet curiosity mingled with wariness on the part of some teachers, as if I were a small, unexploded bomb.

[1] Family approval—Sarah reminisces on her friendship with Curry, the son, also studying at Harvard, of her mom's distant cousin and childhood best friend.

Some examples are included below: In a November 1984 review in The New York Times, novelist Susan Richards Shreve described Sarah Phillips as an "unsentimental autobiography".

She continued, it "is clear that Miss Lee intended her to be a child of the civil rights movement, representative of a new black woman, educated, sassy, worldly, harshly critical, somewhat self- deprecating and bound for a kind of glory".

DuBois and William Faulkner, Don N. Enomoto argued, in a 1999 Journal article published by MELUS, Sarah Phillips is ideal material for exploring the tensions between "theory and tradition".

He wrote that Sarah Phillips, the character, fights "to liberate herself from restrictive conditions while constructing a new identity that better reflects her own subjective experience of reality".

[3] In March, 1985, a student writer for The Harvard Crimson said Sarah Phillips is "really a collection of finely shaped autobiographical short stories".

[4] Adrienne McCormick, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Winthrop University, said in a 2004 essay published by the Johns Hopkins University Press that Sarah Phillips "raises questions about the middle class black woman's ability to recognize, let alone resist, racism and sexism as they intersect with class privilege".

[5] In a January 1985 Los Angeles Times review, Lola D. Gillebaard said "Sarah is not consciously clashing with issues of history in these chapters, but author Lee has clearly made her a child of the educated, cheeky, cosmopolitan, critical and bound for achievement".

[6] This variety in response to, and interpretation of, Sarah Phillips, is part of what Valerie Smith discusses in her introduction to the novel, as mentioned earlier.