One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South
Starred review from June 12, 2023
McCaulley (Reading While Black), an associate professor of the New Testament at Wheaton College, explores racism, poverty, and faith in his searing memoir. McCaulley grew up in Huntsville, Ala., with a mother who was fundamentally rendered a single parent after his father became addicted to drugs. He saw football as his most promising route to a college scholarship, but when an injury seemed to nix those plans, he turned to his studies, eager to prove himself as “more than a Black body, useful only when I collided with other desperate boys wrestling for control of the football.” He negotiated pressures in college to conform to the often-narrow expectations of a progressive Black intellectual, struggled with faith and purpose, and later found his calling: “to put into words and on paper the varied experiences of God in the souls of Black folks.” With uncompromising honesty and deep introspection, McCaulley complicates the narrative of “overcoming racism and poverty as a hero,” and instead sets his story amid larger communal narratives of Blackness, because “the focus on a singular person obscures the truth that the gifted are not the only ones who succeed, the weak are not the only ones who perish, and the America we laud for producing victors still creates too many victims.” This is powerful and necessary.
August 1, 2023
Theologian McCaulley recounts a hardscrabble life in the South and the rise of faith in the face of childhood trauma. As the author, a native of Alabama who grew up in "a neighborhood for people who were broke but not yet on government assistance," writes, it's difficult to believe in a God who allows suffering, especially the suffering of children: "Where was God on the slave ship, in the cotton fields, in courtrooms where innocent men and women were condemned to death for crimes they did not commit?" Such questions, in the end, center on the problem of evil, by McCaulley's account, a constant preoccupation of the Black church. His faith is genuine, not motivated by the fact that, he writes, there are three paths out of poverty for someone who grew up in his circumstances: sports, the church, or dealing drugs. The author had no interest in the third option, recognizing that no drug dealers in the neighborhood lived beyond a certain young age. He chose football instead, which won him a scholarship to a university whose "spectrum ran from white conservatives to white liberals," the latter of which thought themselves able to speak about how to repair the Black world without interacting with any Black people. Still, college allowed McCaulley to leave a home marked by addiction, imprisonment, and danger--one reason kids played sports in that neighborhood, he says, was to have a place of safety from street life until the adults got home from work--to a place that, once an injury sidelined him, allowed him to "search for a positive vision of my life that included more than being different from my father." He clearly found it, along with marital happiness and professional fulfillment, even while fully recognizing from experience that "the path to the promised land is not always clear." A thoughtfully written book that offers heartfelt, empathetic lessons without preaching to the choir.
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August 1, 2023
McCaulley follows Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope (2020) with a frank, probing, lucid, and giving memoir sparked by the death of his largely absent father. He looks back to his Alabama childhood and how his mother helped him navigate racism's cruel realities and rigid narratives. Initially, high-school football mapped a path to college, but after an injury knocked him out of the running, McCaulley managed to transfer all the discipline, effort, and ambition he brought to sports to academics. Accepted at Sewanee University, where one of the first things he saw was a Confederate flag, he eventually realized that he was inadvertently conforming to what the nearly all-white school expected of him. Instead, he realized, he "needed to find a distinctly Black and Christian way of being." Part of that quest involved diving into his fascinating and affecting family history as "a people born of trauma and miracle." McCaulley observes, "Recounting Black pain is uncomplicated and simple. . . . The harder thing to explain is the joy and beauty of Black life in this country."
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.