My Year With Books
The authors who helped me attend affectionately in 2022.
Unlike the recent flights of thousands of other holiday travelers, the commuter jet that took me from Chicago to Memphis on Christmas afternoon was on time. In fact, we arrived early enough that I could slowly stroll through the relatively quiet terminal. Maggie and the boys had driven down a few days earlier - a day sooner than we'd planned so as to beat the incoming snow storm - and she was making the hour drive from her parent's house to pick me up.
As I waited for my patient wife who, after all these years, knows to anticipate a pastor's holiday responsibilities, a display of large black and white photos on the departure level near the ticket counters caught my eye. Stenciled to the wall was the display's title, "Martin's Last Flight." Beneath it, attached to the wall, was one of the metal historical signs so common throughout the South. This one commemorated the chartered American Airlines flight which flew Dr. King's body back to Memphis after he was murdered on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
I've visited the National Civil Rights Museum which now occupies the Lorraine Motel more times than I can remember. I've looked up at the balcony and imagined the terrible scene. I knew that Dr. King was eulogized at Ebenezer Baptist Church and Morehouse College in Atlanta before being buried nearby. But I hadn't thought much about the in-between from Memphis to Atlanta.
The photos surrounding the sign began filling in that gap: the jet idling on the tarmac, King's closest associates lifting their friend aboard his final flight. And this detail about the previous day's flight to Memphis: "Prior to leaving Atlanta, airline officials halted King's flight because of a bomb threat." My eyes lingered over the sentence and I've thought about it repeatedly since.
King surely experienced many such moments, both threatened and real, but something about a bomb threat against the flight he and the other passengers were counting on to bring them to their destinations, something about imagining them all buckled in their seats on that April day wondering about the reason for the delay - Did a member of the flight crew whisper the news to their famous passenger? Did he sigh and nod, having anticipated this predictable hazard? - something about this small detail injected new uncertainty into a story with which I'd become overly familiar.
Stumbling across an unexpected display in an unfamiliar airport isn't the only way be reacquainted with the strangeness of history; most of the time a good book will do the job as effectively and far more efficiently. I ended the year with Imani Perry's South to America, a memoir, travelogue, and history of the American South. Perry's thesis is simple: to understand this country, you have to understand life and memory south of the Mason-Dixon line. Each chapter investigates the meaning of a different city, state, or region (Appalachia, North Carolina, and Mobile to mention a few) by exploring the author's relationship with the place and what her experiences might suggest to be true about the nation as a whole.
Imani Perry
I spent my childhood in South America but most of my life in this country has been lived west and north of the places Perry writes about. I was, however, born in a small town in the Appalachian foothills of Tennessee and college and our first year of marriage were lived happily in western North Carolina, so I'm predisposed to agree with the narrative argument in South to America. The memories of those years continue to shape my interpretation of the rest of the country: the bumpers plastered with variations of the Confederate flag; the bottled sweetness of Cheerwine and the chewy satisfaction of a Moon Pie; the man who, as Maggie and I picked up our U-haul trailer for the move north for graduate school, asked incredulously, "What's the matter? Aren't our schools good enough for you?"; the way the small town of Old Fort, not far from our college, cleared out the fire station each Friday night to make room for the bluegrass musicians who would play the strangest and most beautiful music as the audience members listened carefully and who, at some cue my foreign ears never learned to discern, would jump up and clog along to the banjo, fiddle, mandolin, and upright bass; the friendliness that masked suspicion and loyalty; the way I felt a constant somewhere-ness that had been mostly absent during my high school years in Southern California.
Perry lifts these regional notes and invites all of us to reckon with what it means for the South to have lost the Civil War while, in many lasting ways, having won the right to tell the nation's story. Clint Smith picks up a similar theme in How the Word is Passed. The author, whose other life as a poet makes his prose shimmer even when illuminating the shadows of supremacy and enslavement, is interested in how the story of slavery is told - or not - by those who steward its historical sites of enforcement and spread. Reflecting on the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, Smith asks, "How do you tell a story that has been told the wrong way for so long."
This is the question anyone wanting to see racial justice advanced in this country is regularly forced to ask. False narratives like American Exceptionalism, the Lost Cause, Meritocracy, or the Epidemic of African American Fatherlessness are so deeply entrenched in the nation's imagination that any effort to reach the starting point of fact and reality ends up being too much effort for many of our comfortable neighbors. Smith's book illustrates powerfully the generational impact of these half-truths as well as the possibility of redemption when people commit themselves to learning and telling the truth. Other books I read this year which explored these truth-telling themes included On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed, Following Jesus in Invaded Space by Chris Budden, Utopian Legacies by John C. Mohawk, and Missionary Conquest by George E. Tinker. I picked up the Tinker book while browsing a used bookstore in Berkley last December with a couple of dear friends. One of them, a missiologist, raised his eyebrows when he saw the this book and gave me a look that said, buckle up! In fact, I found Tinker's critique of well-known Western missionaries to be even-handed if heartbreaking.
Strangely, I find it easier to read authors willing to speak accurately about our country's racism as well as those who reveal much of Christianity's complicity with that history than I do those who are telling the truth about the environmental crisis through which we are all living. Maybe this is because I'm surrounded by friends and accomplices who are willingly giving themselves to justice, inside and out of our churches. Truthful critique opens the possibility for renewal, however hard-won. The same hasn't been as true when it comes to environmental degradation, species loss, and climate change. Oftentimes these griefs are subsumed beneath other urgencies.
I'm sure I'm prone to this same logic of scarcity, but earlier this year I read an article James Cone wrote twenty years ago. In it, he contends that the struggles for racial and environmental justice cannot be separated.
The logic that led to slavery and segregation in the Americas, colonization and Apartheid in Africa, and the rule of white supremacy throughout the world is the same one that leads to the exploitation of animals and the ravaging of nature. It is a mechanistic and instrumental logic that defines everything and everybody in terms of their contribution to the development and defense of white world supremacy. People who fight against white racism but fail to connect it to the degradation of the earth are anti-ecological -- whether they know it or not. People who struggle against environmental degradation but do not incorporate in it a disciplined and sustained fight against white supremacy are racists -- whether they acknowledge it or not. The fight for justice cannot be segregated but must be integrated with the fight for life in all its forms.
I've decided to take Cone at his word and have found authors who've helped me imagine the connections between loving my neighbor and loving my place. Barry Lopez, who died recently, is one of those voices. Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World is a beautiful collection of essays, many which deal with our fraught relationship with the planet which sustains us. I'm not sure how I'd remained unaware of Lopez for so long, but I'm glad I bumped into the neighbor who'd recently finished one of his earlier books and who, with tears filling her eyes, urged me to pick up his latest.
Barry Lopez
Place is a theme running throughout Embrace, the uniqueness and power of the places which shape who we are and how we see. "Each place is itself only, and nowhere repeated. Miss it and it's gone." Of course, this sentiment isn't always obvious in a land of suburban subdivisions, urban franchises, and rural monocrops. "Once," writes Lopez, "I can easily imagine, we each had a fundamental sense of well-being that grew directly out of our intimacy, our back-and-forth, with the profundity embedded in the places we occupied." How many of us can still claim this kind of intimate health which flows from the love we give and receive from our places? Is such earthy friendship still possible in the Anthropocene?
Randy Woodley believes it is and he's given much of his life to helping the rest of us imagine something we've rarely experienced. Becoming Rooted is a collection of one-hundred short reflections about Creation and our place within it. In these meditations, Woodley invites us to consider the possibility of becoming indigenous (lowercase i) to our places and what good might result from that limiting choice. In Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview he unpacks these ideas and stories in the form of a series of lectures and questions and answers which follow each chapter. I've returned to both of these books repeatedly as I've begun work on my own. My writing about racial and environmental justice was also helped by Suzanne Simard's Finding the Mother Tree, Theological Foundations for Environmental Ethics by Jame Schaefer, An Immense World by Ed Yong (a thoughtful gift from a friend, this book lived beside my bed for the last third of the year), and the paradigm-shifting Theologies of Land, edited by K.K. Yeo and Geen L. Green.
Dr. Jonathan Tran, a professor at Baylor, spent the fall quarter teaching at the University of Chicago, a few blocks away from our apartment. I'd recently finished Tran's book, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism, and was glad when he accepted my invitation to lunch. I picked him up on campus and we drove north into Bronzeville to a favorite Senegalese restaurant where I got to ask Dr. Tran about the argument he creatively and persuasively advances in his book.
Using the language of racial capitalism, Tran contends that race (and racism, white supremacy, and the like) is always a justification for material plunder. It is the rationale for the exploitation and extraction which has fueled imperialism and colonialism. Using the history of Chinese immigrants in the Mississippi Delta and ethnographic research of an Asian American church in Northern California, Tran shows how Asian Americans have had to choose whether to profit from or stand in resistance to these racialized forms of material theft.
In Tran's work I've found more important connections between racial and environmental justice. If race is the guise of exploitation and extraction, then the connections Cone pointed out between racism and environmental abuse start to reveal themselves with undeniable clarity.
And, so, we return to the question of what our history includes and what gets forgotten. Will we remember why our world groans the way it does? Why moments of beauty and grace are worth honoring? Why the places and communities to which we belong deserve our attention and affection? My thanks to all the authors who helped me attend more closely this year.