Lee
[00:00:00] I'm Lee C. Camp and this is No Small Endeavor - exploring what it means to live a good life.
Esau
This need that you have as a child to categorize good and bad in a simplistic way may be helpful in helping you navigate the early stages of life, but it's not sufficient for adulthood.
Lee
That's Esau McCaulley - professor, theologian, New York Times op-ed columnist - discussing his new book, How Far to the Promised Land? One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South.
Esau
When I was a child, I closed off stories, and as an adult, I was able to say that nobody's story is over as long as they still draw breath.
Lee
Today Esau shares many of his own life stories which illustrate the complexity of the history we have inherited, as well as the poignancy and promise of looking deeply into one's own story for hope and healing.
All coming right up.[00:01:00]
I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor - exploring what it means to live a good life.
I've not yet written one, but the trick with a memoir, it seems to me, is a compelling frame, or a provocative, controlling metaphor. And it's the villains and the heroes, and whether the author is honest enough to make it clear that villains are often complicated and have their own backstories too, and that heroes are also complicated and almost never pull themselves up by their own bootstraps but arise out of a community which makes life and beauty and hard work possible.
So imagine a memoir with that sort of compelling nuance, add a dose of engagement with some of the most pressing questions facing American culture today, and you begin to get an idea of what you'll hear in our conversation with [00:02:00] Esau McCaulley on his beautiful new memoir. Enjoy.
Dr. Esau McCaulley is Associate Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College. He's also a theologian-in-residence at Progressive Baptist Church, a historically black congregation in Chicago. He's the author of the award-winning book, Reading While Black. He's also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and his writings have also appeared in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and Christianity Today.
Today we're discussing his latest book, a memoir, How Far to the Promised Land? One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South.
Welcome, Esau.
Esau
Lee
It's great to have you. And having grown up in Alabama, as did you...
Esau
Oh, I didn't know, what part of Alabama are you from?
Lee
Yeah, so I grew up not far south from you, in Talladega, Alabama.
Esau
Lee
Yeah. But, you know, the-- your new book is just beautiful and it's moving and I'm really grateful for it and thankful, [00:03:00] excited to get to talk to you about it today.
Esau
Oh, thank you for those kind words. That means a lot to me.
Lee
You have, throughout the book, the juxtaposition of a lot of terms that often are seen as sort of mutually exclusive, but you're trying to hold them together in, in so many ways.
Things like joy and sadness, uh, use the phrase trauma and miracle to refer to your family, to one of your matriarchs, heroic and tragic. You point out that villains are also often victims. And you talk about absence and presence. All of these sort of competing notions that you keep holding together in these beautiful threads throughout the book.
And there's another word that I think that you also use multiple times throughout the book that point to you trying to hold all those potential dichotomies together, and that is 'complicated.' And so we'll get to explore a lot of those, but I think I would like to start, if it's okay with you, in kind of the fundamental story of both absence and presence [00:04:00] that kind of holds the whole together, with your, your father.
And would you share with us this story about-- that was very important for you as a boy, in a road trip that did not happen?
Esau
Yeah, it's, it's funny, the book opens with a road trip that I take with my son, when we go from where we were living at the time in Rochester, New York, down to North Carolina. And it's amazing how, as parents, our stories stack on top of each other.
Lee
Esau
In other words, we go through the process of parenting our children, if you have children, but that process of parenting itself kind of evokes old memories. It kind of-- it resurfaces things, right? And so when I was taking my son on a trip, it was the first trip it was just me and him, it reminded me of a trip with my father.
My father was a truck driver and he would go on these road trips. And I would beg him to take me, beg him to take me, beg him to take me. And [00:05:00] one time he finally relented and said, I was going to take you. And so I pack up all of my stuff and I get ready to go. And my father says, I just need to go to the corner store to get a couple of things, and I'll come back and then I'll take you on the trip.
And my mom's there. And so my father leaves, and I go and I sit out in front of our house with my little bag, waiting for him to return, and he just doesn't come back. And I'm there for, as a child, it felt like hours. Who knows, it could have been one, it could have been five hours. I just sat there until my mom comes and gets me and tells me I need to come, come back inside.
And we don't see him for a few months after that. My father was kind of in and out. But one of the things that I talk about in that story is, like, that absence, the absence of my father influences me just as much as his presence. So in other words, if someone abandons you, that [00:06:00] empty spot, it marks you in a certain way. Like, you feel the absence.
And so I talked about, in the book, the trauma of having my father away, but also the difficulties of what it was like when he was around. And the both of those things, his presence and his absence, had the definitive impact on me.
Lee
You said a moment ago that we see in our own adult experience of raising kids the way in which our experience stacks one on top of the other in our families. And you show this in numerous ways in the narrative you tell about your own story, but I was especially taken with your, your father's grandmother and your father's mother, uh, and the way they, they factor and, and the ways in which they are such strong women, and, uh, and have to deal with broken and difficult relationships with their own husbands.
Can you share with us some of the way in which you see the, the beauty and the tragedy in their lives playing into your own [00:07:00] experience?
Esau
When it came time for me to write my story, it didn't feel honest to portray myself as some kind of exceptional Horatio Alger figure dipped in chocolate. That what I really wanted to do was to say, you know what? The field of vision of my story is too small. That my story is not simply a story of me, it's a story of my community and the people around me.
And not only that, whose stories do we believe are valuable? Do we believe that the stories are valuable only if they make it into middle class success and they become New York Times opinion writers, or is there something beautiful and instructive about my grandmother's life as it is, even if the rest of the society wouldn't view it as anything exceptional? And so when I talk about my grandmother, then, it was a way of saying, her Black life mattered. And my great-grandmother's Black life mattered, even if everybody else pushes it aside.
And it's a way of asking, [00:08:00] what kind of society requires these kinds of things of my relatives? So for example, my great-grandmother, Sophia, who has basically a chapter in the book, it deals with my great-grandmother growing up as a tenant farmer. And she, she worked in the fields, but she had this vision of, like, a better life for herself. So in addition to working in the fields, she also cleaned houses in the evenings. And she also was a midwife for Black women in the area who couldn't go to hospitals.
And through that process of working in the fields, uh, midwifing, and by cleaning, she saves up enough money to buy her own plot of land.
But through a series of events that people will read about in the narrative, that plot of land is stolen [00:09:00] from her by white landowners. And the question is, is that story simply a tragedy? A woman who had something and then had it taken from her, and then she eventually, you know, passes away. But I want to say no, that there was something about her struggle for dignity, despite the odds, that reveals something beautiful about the human experience.
So if you put these stories together and you put Sophia's story beside my story, people will say, well, Esau's story is valuable, but Sophia's story is not. But Sophia was the woman who in our family instilled a sense of dignity and hard work and belief in the providence of God. And then those hard-won insights about what it means to be human aren't simply valuable in so much as they inspire me; they're valuable because there's something beautiful about her life. [00:10:00]
Lee
You speak then of this sort of all-encompassing vision, or at least a broad vision, of these various stories. It also points very quickly to the way in which, even though you're very forthright and vulnerable about your father's own brokenness and difficulties, that throughout the story, you're trying to tell the story in such a way that you move beyond the simplicity of a simple goodness and badness, right?
Esau
Lee
Uh, and even later in the book, you say, uh, you knew what it was like, the simplicity of, at moments even hatred toward your father, uh, that you moved beyond that sort of simplicity to see that there's a complexity, um, that there's a sort of nuance. So would you unpack that a bit for us as well?
Esau
Yeah. I guess the best way to unpack that is to talk about when I first had to face my father's story in its fullness.
My father passed away in 2017. [00:11:00] And my family asked me to do the eulogy, which is a tricky thing to do, to do the eulogy of your father. But more than that, it was tricky because he had spent a significant period of our lives away, that he wasn't there. And so I didn't know him as well as I could have, or I wish I had.
And... I was also a clergy person, I am a clergy person. And I've done eulogies before. And one of the things you have to do in the eulogy is to make sense of someone's life, and to tie that sense you make of that life in the context of the wider purposes of God. That's one of the things eulogies do. And so I, I felt like I was tasked with trying to come to grips with my father's story.
And so it forced me to return to his life and see him not only in the role that he played in my life, in which, like, I was the star and he was the character who was acting upon me, but he became the star in his own story. And when he became the star of his [00:12:00] own story, I could begin to see the tragedy in it.
When you're a child, you can't see those things. You kind of think, my father took the VCR. I'm going to date myself by saying the VCR. My father took the VCR and the DVD player because he hated us. That's the way I thought about it. He would take those things and pawn them because he had an actual malice against us.
But when you're older, you begin to understand what addiction does.
Addiction actually distorts personalities. And so what I saw as a mystery as a child, I understood better as an adult. And that doesn't actually make the things that he did less bad in the past, but it widens the scope. In other words, the problem wasn't simply, my father mistreated me. The problem was, his life was hurtling towards a tragedy.
And if you can [00:13:00] see, if I could see his life as a tragedy, then I could find space for compassion. And so I began to find compassion for my father. And because it was a eulogy, I had to say, is there anything redemptive or instructive about the narrative of his life for the people who've gathered? And so it was a way for me, in the process of writing the eulogy, to write kind of an ending for his life that he himself didn't get to write.
And all of those things are the ways in which I found my way towards compassion.
Lee
You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our conversation with theologian and New York Timesopinion writer Esau McCaulley on his new memoir, How Far to the Promised Land? One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South.[00:14:00]
I love hearing from you. Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at lee@nosmallendeavor.com.
You can get show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you listen. These include links to resources mentioned in the episode, as well as a PDF of my complete interview notes, as well as a full transcript.
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Coming up, Esau shares more stories from his childhood and how his experiences have informed his life and work.[00:15:00]
Another binary that you have is Blackness, but you say at some point, you began to understand that there are at least two sorts of notions of Blackness that you want to grapple with.
One is your lived experience and the beauty and the struggles of being Black in the South. And another is, whatever it is that white people, whether they're conservatives or liberals or whatever they are, the way they imagine Blackness. And that kind of struggle with what does Blackness mean and entail then becomes another sort of set of themes that you're working with.
But you want to unpack some of that for us?
Esau
One of the things-- it took me most of my life to understand this, and I think I'm still struggling with it, is to accept the fact that if something doesn't describe you, it doesn't describe you. In other words, like, people will try to put definitions on you as to who they think you are.
And you [00:16:00] can spend all of your energy trying to prove that you're not their definition. You can, you can have your life directed by proving someone wrong. And so when I was a kid growing up, Black was just normal. You know, Black was, like I said, it was like my, my, my mother's, my grandmother's red velvet cake, and barbecue on Saturdays, and Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston.
It was just like, Black is ordinary. Black is beautiful. Black is exceptional. And then, I had this introduction to Black as it was perceived outside of our community. Black is dangerous. Black is ignorant. Black is uneducated. And so you began to realize that certain people, especially in the South, have a different definition of what it means to be Black.
And that duality... between, like, Black as I understand it, as I move through the world, and Black as society tries to place upon me, is something that you're introduced to as a child.
One of the [00:17:00] things that I try to articulate is that we treat racism almost like... maybe evolution or puberty, that you kind of slowly evolve into an awareness of racial reality. But it's more like the Big Bang - like you just, you have this encounter at a certain point in your life, in the South, where it becomes completely clear that America, especially the southern part of America, sees you differently because of the color of your skin. And it takes a while to realize. You're like, kind of, what's going on?
One of the things that's really hard is-- I have four children, I have two boys. And... you wonder, as a parent, what's the best way to do it? Do you let society tell-- show your children that they, that they perceive Black as dangerous, they perceive Black as other than what it actually is? Or do you tell them yourself?
And one of the things that I talked about in the book [00:18:00] is, because my, my father wasn't around, I didn't have a Black man to come and explain to me what it meant to carry this Black male body around in the South. So I just kind of bumped up into Southern racism. And one of the harder things that I wonder is, do I protect my children for as long as I possibly can?
I keep that definition - that, that hateful definition - of Black out of their lives for as long as I possibly can until they have a better sense of self. Or do I kind of inoculate them against it? Do I, do I say, people might treat you this way, but you have to be aware.
And that's hard, right? Because you don't want to be the one who disappoints your children, or teaches your children that life isn't fair or that life is going to be hard. But I think it's better for your children-- I hope that it's better for your children to know the lie before they hear it, than to come home surprised and traumatized.
Lee
Yeah. Yeah. As [00:19:00] you unfold a lot of these stories, it seems, as a reader, that you are then simultaneously working with that set of realities. You say at one point, for example, the narrative arc of anti-Blackness is clear in America.
You know, it's a rather simple story to see the pain and the anguish and the trauma that it's caused. And then, and at the same time, you're honest about the way in which you feel frustrated with friends in the neighborhood, for example, who are making poor choices, who then are reinforcing the negative stereotypes of what it means to be Black.
Esau
Lee
And so what was it like for you in writing this book, to try to, to try to be honest to yourself and the way you think about that, in a way so that you didn't feel like you were playing into anybody's given trope?
Esau
Yeah. One of the hard things to do is to find the courage to be honest as a writer and a thinker, because there's accepted, kind of, [00:20:00] ways of thinking and articulating things.
And so, on one level, it would be very easy for me to say, you know what, it's all personal responsibility. That, that we're poor in my neighborhood, and we were the way we were because of poor decisions that we made. And that was-- that would, that would be an easy story to tell.
Another easy story to tell would be, we are the way that we are in our neighborhood because of societal factors. The, the anti-Black racism that marks the South forces us into certain decisions.
And I want to say, well, there is a dynamic interplay between those two realities. It would be simply dishonest to say-- and one of the reasons that I told this story of my ancestors is to articulate the long, the long tail of white supremacy in the South. That it's not just one generation, that it's, that just, there's generational trauma that is compounded. And people need to have that story in their mind. [00:21:00]
But it's also the case that we are actors, we are persons in our own narrative, and that it's not just society that was mean to me, it was other Black people who were mean to me.
Now, it is also true-- and this is the, this is not to be, add complexity upon complexity-- if you put people in untenable circumstances, then sometimes people are going to break under that pressure. They were the ones who broke, but they broke under that pressure.
And so to articulate the ways in which society pushes down upon Black dreams and aspirations, but at the same time giving us agency to understand that some of our decisions are our own. And to talk about my experiences as a young Black man in Alabama to say, listen, I understand what you're going through. I'm broke too. I understand. Like I got pulled over by the police too. And so I understand that frustration. I [00:22:00] understand that sense of, of nihilism that arises in your chest, when you feel like no matter what you do, you can't win because the game is the game.
There was this, there was this, um, phrase we used to say growing up. And I don't know, I'm an old person now, so I'm washed. So no young person uses this, uses this anymore. But we used to say, we used to say, 'the game is dirty.' Or, 'if you do dirt, you get dirt.' In other words, we said because the game is rigged - we can't win - the game is dirty.
Well, the only thing for you to do is to do dirt yourself, because if the game is rigged there's no reason to play fair. And I can understand that analysis of society. The game is rigged against us; therefore, let us check out. But if you check out of the game, other people suffer.
And to articulate that suffering with the intersection of societal pressure, creating Black trauma, and creating Black nihilism, but giving enough respect to individuals to say [00:23:00] that nihilism did not have to manifest itself in the damage that was done to our communities, and keeping those things together.
I think that one of the things that happens when you make a little bit of progress in society, you can tend to look back on your childhood and say, everybody should just be just like me, and they don't deserve compassion.
And I want to say that everybody are both responsible, and it's okay to have compassion on the ways in which society may have hurried them down a road that they might otherwise not have traveled.
Lee
You have one chapter dedicated to sharing some of your own [00:24:00] experiences just with police, with state authorities. And I think as a white man... I mean, I've read a lot about white supremacy, the history of race in America, lots of treatises on both history, philosophy, politics. And I know the most grotesque, you know, cases that have happened that are overwhelming.
But I think one of the things that I've seen that just really drove home for me finally... I don't know, 10 or 15 years ago I was, I was sitting at dinner with a Black pastor of one of the largest churches in Texas, Black churches in Texas. And he started sharing how he still to this day, even though his sons are 20, 20, in their 20s, he would remind them of the rules of the road and what to do if they get pulled over.
And I was just shocked by that. And I think that that just pointed to me again how even as, you know, as a well meaning [00:25:00] white man, how, how there are just these realities that I am simply unaware of in my experience.
Esau
Lee
And, and so you share some of those and, and then at the end of that chapter you say, but, but you get to the point of where, even though you're, you're dealing with them okay, uh, in, in the terms of not getting violently harmed... you wonder, okay, how much longer can I put up with this before I break myself?
Um, commentary on that or want to unpack any of that for us?
Esau
The thing about racism, it's not on your schedule, right? You don't get an email that says, okay, at two o'clock on a, on Thursday, you're going to deal with some racism. And so one of the things that happens is you're just kind of moving through your life and all of a sudden you find yourself in a racial incident.
And so you can say, I drove around every day in the South for-- from the ages of 16 to 22. I was probably driving somewhere every day. If you could-- who knows how many days that-- that's over a thousand days, right? [00:26:00] Whatever that number is. Multitude of days. And so how many times have I pulled over by the police?
Maybe ten...right? And so you can say, well then that means that, you know, of the thousand days that you were driving around in the South, 990 of them, you were, like, just-- you had a normal experience. But those ten literally came at random, and they were bec-- they wasn't because of anything that I've done.
And you find yourself with almost no preparation, and all of a sudden your adrenaline is up, you're nervous, and you're trying to navigate. You're thinking, like, there's a way in which one of these circumstances could spiral out of control, and I could lose my life. And that means that you always have to, in your mind-- I'm not talking about the legal part, I'm not talking about the legal part, whether or not you speed. I'm talking about once the encounter begins.
You have to, you have to, like, get all the answers correct, in the sense of, like, [00:27:00] your tone, your voice, the way that you speak, the things that you do. And even if you do things perfectly, you can encounter someone having a bad day who's, who's intent upon escalating the situation.
Now, if you take that to the side and you say, okay, those are the driving incidents. What about when you're just, like, in the mall and you're shopping and someone's harassing you there? What about when you're applying for a job? In other words, you have to, as a Black person, almost have a perfect record of how to respond to racial trauma.
But the tricky part is, these events stack upon one another. So it's not that you have to be, like, perfect in incident number five. It's that you gotta push back incidents one, two, three, and four, and respond with patience and the right tone of voice. And I was 21 or 22 at the time, and I got pulled over and I hadn't done anything. And the officer said to me-- and this is, [00:28:00] and it had been said to me numerous times in the South... the officer says to me and my friend, "You boys," - we're 22 years old. "You boys go straight to, back to campus."
And the way he said "boys," and the way he looked at us, led me to believe that it was like, he was almost egging me on to say something. And everything inside of me in that moment wanted to say, who are you calling a boy? And had I said that, I may have felt really good. I may have felt really good. But who knows where the incident goes from there.
And this, this, this desire or this need to make African Americans swaddle their dignity in order to live is soul crushing. And I didn't know how many more times I could do that.
And so, I felt like for me personally, I needed to leave [00:29:00] the South because I didn't want the South to, in a sense, break me. And the weird part about all of that is I went running from the South, but I was so marked by it, it's all that I write about.
Lee
Esau
And it may be most of this book and most of my writing since then. It's funny, I, I-- the first chapter in my book, Reading While Black is called "The South Got Something to Say." In other words, I found out that I couldn't run from it. That I had to return to it and make sense of it and give all of those things some kind of wider meaning and purpose.
Lee
Esau
We're Southerners, man. No matter what we do. We're Southerners.
Lee
Esau
It's in my, it's in my drawl and my love for sweet tea. What am I supposed to do?
Lee
Yeah.
[Both laugh]
We're [00:30:00] going to take a short break, but coming right up, Esau does a critique of both the right and the left, and the ways they've reduced racism and other issues to unhelpful binaries, and why looking at one's past provides a helpful resource and framework for moving forward in the world.
Another, um, place that you complicate things for us is your description of one of the major things that you learned in college. You talk about how one of the things you begin to grapple with is that the white options don't suffice for you. That is, if you think about it in terms of white conservatism to white [00:31:00] liberalism--
Esau
Lee
--that that sort of spectrum was leaving something out that was very significant to you.
Esau
Lee
Namely, that it seems as if, while you clearly are uninterested in the sort of anti-Blackness racism of some Southern conservatisms, and you don't want that, obviously, uh, you also found the progressive answers insufficient.
You could share, you could share the critiques, but the answers, perhaps, that they gave wasn't sufficient.
Esau
So I think that one of the weird things that people don't realize-- and I, I, I talk about this a lot, but I don't think people believe me. So I'm going to say it again, even though I wrote it in the book and maybe people will believe me because I put it on, on your podcast and your radio show.
When you grow up in a Black context - an, an actual all Black context - the kinds of questions and options that you have are different. So, from-- in my community growing up, we ran from something like Black [00:32:00] nihilism or Black hopeful-- hopelessness, elements of Black secularism, Black nationalism, Black Christianity, right?
And so, in other words, you're trying to figure out, given the reality of racism, what are we gonna do about it?
Lee
Esau
And there are different ways in which African Americans historically have responded. There's intellectual traditions arguing for all of them. Um, separatism, integrationalism - all of these things.
And so, when you walk onto a college campus and you have that Black set of options, and you come to a college campus, at least in a majority white college, you're plopped onto, like, the white spectrum. And so then I kind of go, well, they say, well, do you want to be a fiscally conservative Republican or some kind of, like, white progressive Democrat? Take a side. Take a side.
And I could say pretty clearly, you know what, I'm not interested in a kind of political or theological or social world that denies the [00:33:00] trauma that's inflicted upon Black people. So that's not, that, that was kind of like, I pushed that to the side. But one of the things that I began to see was kind of a paternalism in elements of white progressivism.
Like the faith and, and, and spiritual formation that you had as a child was good to get you here. Congratulations, you escaped poverty. Good job. I'm glad that God was helpful for you in that. But now, we're going to show you the history of the European Enlightenment and how no reasonable person can believe in God, right?
So now that you're here-- and especially if you want to critique racism, because we know that the people of faith, they're the racist, right? So you want to run from kind of racist, Southern, Christian conservativism. And the way to do that is by, kind of, Bertrand Russell. This is how you do it. What the university wanted to form me into was an African American person who critiqued racism [00:34:00] and sided with progressives in their battle against Southern white racism.
And I'm anti Southern white racism. Like, I was amen on that. But I knew racism was bad before I went to college. And I wanted to be more than simply the Black mouthpiece or weapon in a war against white conservatives. And even though we share some basic political sensibilities with some of my liberal, progressive friends, I traveled down a different intellectual road to get there.
And this is, this is really important, right? It is very easy, when you read a lot of books and you kind of get a college degree, to look at the piety of my ancestors who worked in the cotton fields as simplistic and unreflective, and that sophistication means abandoning that [00:35:00] tradition. And I said, well, maybe they were more wise than we gave them credit for.
Maybe it wasn't simply a crutch that they used to survive. Maybe it was actually some kind of real encounter that I have to take seriously, right?
Like Frederick Douglass, one of my heroes, was someone who could be unapologetic in his critique of white supremacy and the ways in which America was stepping on the backs of Black people, but he was able to see that in the context of the Black church tradition. And so what I wanted was intellectual space to define the terms and the means by which I would achieve liberation.
And that sometimes meant rebelling. It wasn't simply like, oh, I want to go and be this kind of like-- the problem is we need more Black [00:36:00] Republicans, blah, blah, blah.
And like, it wasn't even moderation. It wasn't saying, I want to be the middle between Democrat and Republican. It was actual freedom. And how do you find space to be a Black person in America who isn't easily co-opted by the warring factions that make up most life in America?
I'll say this, and forgive me because I just finished Frederick Douglass' book, so I'm going to talk about it for a minute. Frederick Douglass talks about, after the Civil War... he speaks about how, in some ways, the African American was caught up in a battle between the North and the South that they couldn't themselves affect. In other words, African Americans had opposed slavery for centuries, but they couldn't cause the Civil War, right?
The South had to act in a certain way that drug the North into this battle. And he's saying that sometimes Black liberation happens through a conflict of which they're not controlling the terms and the [00:37:00] outcome. And so he's saying that we have to find a way, when the circumstances, kind of, outside of our power coincide, to make that our moment, to grab that, that intellectual or that spiritual or that political moment for ourselves and make meaning out of it.
What I was trying to do is to say that, yes, as an African American Christian or intellectual or writer, I don't control the news cycle. I don't control any levers of power in America. But I want to be able to be free to make my own meaning, to be able to articulate the truths as best as I can discern them, for the good of my community, that isn't dependent upon anybody's patronage.
And if that meant that I didn't get certain benefits from being acceptable, then I just won't receive those benefits. And so sometimes I feel like the most beautiful thing about the Black [00:38:00] Christian tradition is that it is precisely because we had no economic and political power that all we had left to do was to tell the truth. And trying to find, in the midst of the competing ideas in the university, the space to tell the truth.
But at the same time, and this is the complex part, honoring the fact that the things that I read and learned in college were valuable to me. They gave me more tools to articulate this feeling that I had in my chest that I couldn't give voice to. So it's not like the liberal tradition did nothing for me, it's that it wasn't definitive to who I was.
Lee
Yeah.
Yeah, that is, that's, uh, very, very helpful. And provocative. And, um, worth a great deal of consideration.
You tie this together with, perhaps an unexpected way, early in the book, where you're, you're talking about how do you justify a good God when there's such suffering in the world. And, and you talk about [00:39:00] how, you know, you, you've known a lot of people who struggle with the notion of a belief in God because this God seems to allow suffering.
And then you go on to say that this kind of criticism becomes even more urgent in Black contexts, where the question then can be raised, why didn't God intervene, for example, to end slavery sooner? Or, where was God on the slave ship, in the cotton fields, in courtrooms where innocent men and women were condemned to death, you say.
And then you say this: "My reply to these questions is, we who have suffered must have some say in how that suffering is interpreted. We won the right through our scars to discern the significance of what we endured."
And then you situate that theologically, that you have a desire to understand that, through God being present to you in various ways, or God being present to your family in various ways, that brought you through that suffering, or was with you in that suffering.
Uh, but more commentary or unpacking any of that for us?
Esau
Yes, I'll tell you a story that doesn't appear in the book, [00:40:00] that gets to it.
I was sitting at a debate one time, and it was a debate around the existence of God. And there was two white dudes who were like on the pro side and the con side. So one white guy said there was a God, one white guy said there wasn't a God.
And there was this audience. It happened to be a largely, um, white audience. And one white guy stands up and goes, "Hey, there can't be a God because of AIDS and malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa. Look how miserable these Africans are. Therefore, there is no God."
He had other parts than this - this is, like, one part of the conversation.
And then the other guy gets up and goes, "Well, no, many of those people are Christians. So there is a God."
And I'm sitting there, as the only Black guy in the room, and I almost stood up and said, do I get a vote?
[Lee laughs]
Because, because you often have people use the problem of suffering [00:41:00] to, to disprove the existence of God, when the suffering peoples of the world are the ones who exhibit faith.
And in the South, it is simply a matter of fact that a significant number of people who were enslaved found hope through belief. Now-- you're now, you're now stuck in a catch-22.
This is the thing I was getting at earlier. Are we going to be paternalistic and say it was simply a coping mechanism and that these Black people didn't know any better? Or do they get to articulate the meaning of their suffering?
But here's the other thing, and here's the other thing. If the enslaved people could rise up and give voice and give testimony, they wouldn't simply say, "God still exists, despite your, your statements of doubt." They would say, "God doesn't want me to suffer in this way. What are you doing, brother and sister, to bring about my [00:42:00] liberation?"
In other words, if the enslaved and the oppressed people stood up, it wouldn't simply be, God is real. It would be, God is real and therefore set us free.
And it's the inability of people who use Black religion as an apologetic to wrestle with the essential claim of Black religion. And one of the essential claims of the Black church is simply that God wills both our spiritual and our physical and material transformation, that it's not simply about the by and by, but that when I experience this suffering, I experience as a grave [00:43:00] injustice and an offense to God.
And so in the book, I don't simply say, God exists. I say, in so much as you allow a society to perpetrate injustice against oppressed peoples, then you're fighting on the wrong side of a battle against God, and that's not a very good place to be.
Lee
What surprises-- as we kind of move toward the end here, what, what surprised you about the process of writing a memoir?
Esau
How hard it is to tell the truth. One of the things that I've realized is that some of the stories that I told as a child weren't untrue... they were just insufficient. [00:44:00] And having the courage to revisit those stories and discover the truth of things, certain doors you have to close in order to, to survive, that you had to open again and reenter in order to find healing. And so for me, that was one thing that surprised me.
One of the other things, and it's a central theme of the book, is like this fundamental rejection of exceptionalism. I, somewhere along the way, forgot how talented and gifted the other Black people were who were around me.
Because people will tell you that you're special. And it was important for me to remember all of the people who I knew as a child who were intellectually stimulating-- and not just intellectually - spiritually and culturally. [00:45:00] Like the richness and the beauty of the people who were around me, and the ways in which they pressed me spiritually and intellectually in a way that I haven't experienced since.
I mean, it takes a lot, it takes a lot to be in the South, be at an all Black high school that is underfunded, and everybody in society and culture, on televisions, on talk radio, telling you that you're nothing, that you're just a statistic, and for you to say, in that context, I don't care what anybody says. I know who God made me to be, and I know what I am, and I'm worthy, and we're going to be something.
And that defiance that was in that community is much different than when you go to a university and half of the people at the university have been told they're amazing their entire lives. [00:46:00] And they're there because their parents are legacy admissions, and they have money. Every Black person that I knew, coming from my neighborhood, we got it out the mud.
And so to understand the beauty of that struggle in a context in which everybody told me that I'm so glad that you got out of there. That's how they talk about my childhood - I'm so glad you made it out. And I want to say, yes, there was a lot of trauma there, but there was a lot of beauty and talent there as well.
So shout out, shout out to Northwest Huntsville and J. L. Johnson High School. There we go.
Lee
Beautiful place for us to end. We've been talking to Dr. Esau McCaulley, professor at Wheaton College, also an opinion writer for the New York Times, discussing his latest book, his memoir, How Far to the Promised Land? One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South.
Esau, thanks so much. We're [00:47:00] very grateful.
Esau
Thank you so much for having me. I'll come back any time.
Lee
You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our interview with Professor Esau McCaulley, theologian and award-winning author of Reading While Black. Today, we've been discussing his new memoir, How Far to the Promised Land? One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion, and the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.
Our [00:48:00] thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hays, Mary Eveleen Brown, Cariad Harmon, Jason Sheesley, Ellis Osburn, and Tim Lauer. Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life, together.
No Small Endeavor is a production of PRX, Tokens Media, LLC, and Great Feeling Studio.