The Senses of Silence - Paperback

by Lamar Vinson (Author), Jonathan Lee (Foreword by)

Port Chicago. 1944. A blast that shook the nation - and a silence that shaped a family.

Lloyd Anthony McKinney survived the explosion but carried its aftermath in his body, his posture, his quiet. For decades, his story lived in gestures and shadows, passed down without words. In The Senses of Silence, his grandson follows those traces - the tension in a photograph, the absence in a conversation, the ache that outlives the event. What emerges is a portrait of inherited trauma and the work of turning pain into understanding.

It is both memoir and restoration: a return to a story the Navy buried for eighty years, and a reckoning with the silence that shaped generations. As the nation finally reexamines Port Chicago, this book steps into the gap - honoring a young Black sailor whose courage was never recorded and whose truth was never spoken aloud.

For readers who carry lineage, loss, or unanswered history, The Senses of Silence offers a way through: a testament to what survives, and what can finally be named.