How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South

by Esau McCaulley

The truth stings, making hostility toward the bearer of such bad news inevitable.

Racism persists for a reason, and experience had taught me that change is not the work of one speech or book.

Nobody escapes poverty; we are marked by it. The friends, relationships, and traumas we experienced linger. We carry them wherever we go.

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 to be at ease with the way things are.

I had delivered eulogies before. I understood that the pastor’s job is to find meaning in unfinished lives. Because few people have the opportunity to set their affairs in order and make amends for all the things gone wrong, it becomes the job of the clergy to provide closure for grieving friends and relatives.

Anyone close to the deceased can tell a fond story about them, but clergy are tasked with something deeper: connecting the life of the deceased to the wider purposes of God.

It had taken me most of my life to begin the process of forgiving him. I had set off down that path, but I had not yet learned to regard him with much tenderness. To eulogize him, I would need to see him clearly, as someone whose story deserved to be treated with care.

We come from a long line of wanderers, looking this way and that, trying to find the promised land in a country that has never loved Black people well. Nonetheless, when tragedy—fire, disease, sickness, and physical violence—has threatened to undo us entirely, God has intervened and performed miracles. By miracle, I do not mean a simple rescue, an escape from danger. Instead, like the ancient Israelites finding their way in the desert, we have received just enough manna in the wilderness to make it to another day.

whenever I’m restless, stressed, or sad, I like to scroll through listings on real estate websites. Houses offer a chance to dream about the lives we might live inside them and the people we might become.

There is no Black faith that doesn’t wrestle with the problem of evil.

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. My grasp of that significance begins with my experiences of God as a child, on my knees in front of my twin bed, hands clasped and eyes shut tight in prayer, repeating the simplest of prayers: “Help.”

God came to me not with logical explanations of the problem of evil b...

When I prayed, a sensation of warmth that began in my chest moved throughout my body. The room seemed less empty. The lack of a speedy deliverance frustrated and perplexed me, but I never doubted my experiences of God. It was how I survived. God and I have been thr...

If there is a testimony that deserves our attention, it is the large number of folks who believe there is no other way to tell the Black story in the United States w...

Those nights spent in fear set the trajectory for the rest of my life. They simplify my dreams: All I want is to love and be loved. I want to have children who go to school without shame and secrets weighing them down like book bags much too heavy for them to carry. I never want the woman I love to have hands reaching for her with affection in one moment and malice the next. My father’s failures turn me into a family man at a young age.

Our family, like Daniel and his companions, lived in a land surrounded by danger on all sides. Given what was coming, my best chance of survival was prayer to the God who rescued an exile from the mouths of lions.

Together as a congregation, we confess “the things done, and the things left undone,” believing that the good we fail to do can mar our lives as much as the harm we inflict on ourselves and others.

My dad caused havoc in our family. That part of the story is easy enough to tell. But his absence during my childhood and teenage years created as many problems as his presence. It wasn’t so much him that I missed. The loss of what my father could have done right was as impactful as the things he did wrong.

I missed him when he was away. During his absences, I could imagine a life with the father I knew as kind. When he came home, I remembered why I loathed him.

Questions of life and death, hope and despair were tossed around like footballs in the backyard on a Saturday afternoon. I have never experienced that much multifaceted intelligence, swagger, and potential in one place since. I found myself constantly pressed, emotionally and intellectually, to give an account of who I was, what I wanted to be, and how I might get there.

I remember those fights not as a reason for Black shame but as manifestations of the cruelty that can cluster in spaces when hope has been taken away.

Money can buy lots of things, but it cannot purchase time. It cannot give my mother back her youth. It cannot return the many years she spent without someone to tell her that her hair looked pretty on a Sunday afternoon. She gave up dinner dates, surprise gifts, and Valentine’s cards—except those sketched on construction paper in the shaky script of a middle school boy. She made that sacrifice so that I could have a stabler life. She succeeded, but at what cost?

Oddly enough, the same culture that taught me to prey on other people’s daughters encouraged me to protect the women closest to me.

That afternoon, I was not just one teenager trying to fight a much older drug dealer. I was all the helpless little boys who couldn’t protect the women they loved. I couldn’t protect my mother when my father came home high and violent. I couldn’t protect my sister from a man who didn’t treat her well.

I used to pray that I would grow big and strong enough to win a fight like that. I realize now that the problem wasn’t merely the limitation posed by my size. The problem was the limited tools and imagination that made violence the only solution. The problem was the widespread lack of respect for Black women that allowed my sister’s boyfriend to call her something so vile. The problem was my inability to see that, at bottom, he and I weren’t combatants. We were fellow prisoners to a toxic definition of manhood, struggling for the remnants of respect left after a society had stripped us of dignity. We should have questioned the system.

We who lived did not do so because we made the right decisions. Sometimes we were just as foolish as those who faltered. I did not feel like I represented the best of us when I walked across the stage to receive my diploma. I felt responsible, and I wondered what those other two hundred might have become had we lived in a world that didn’t demand so much of us when all we were trying to do was be kids.

In that moment, the most piercing of questions imposed itself upon me. It was not a voice but an idea—a question that wrote itself into my soul, a place from which it has never escaped: What do you do when you have everything you ever wanted, but it is not sufficient to bring you joy?

What do you do when you have everything you ever wanted, but it is not sufficient to bring you joy? An answer etched itself right next to the question, the completion of a thought that arose from elsewhere, more a request than a demand: Consider Jesus.

An answer etched itself right next to the question, the completion of a thought that arose from elsewhere, more a request than a demand: Consider Jesus. I saw then that all the things that had marked my first three years of college weren’t evil; they simply were not a life. A life needs a telos: a picture of the good, the true, and th...

I didn’t need to be told that society had failed Black people, nor did I need to know that my father had mistreated me. I needed the spiritual resources to forgive or at least to become more than the jumble of grievances I had collected during my twenty-one years on the planet.

But evil cannot be wholly explained by the brokenness of the world. Sometimes we participate in the breaking.

Rather than considering what she lost by staying in the relationship, she thought about what her husband contributed.

But even in the realm of childhood fantasy, monsters and heroes are not just born. They are made. The same trauma that sets the context for heroic bravery also creates the possibility for failure.

The same trauma that sets the context for heroic bravery also creates the possibility for failure.

It was not enough for me merely to survive, nor could I accept partial truths about the people whose lives shaped mine. I had to find beauty. I had to see something in the struggle itself that was worthy of remembering and carrying forward.

That was Sophia’s gift to me. She showed me that a Black life could be lived with honor through faith, even when the world was set against you. I would need to do something with this gift.

Nothing good happens after midnight.”

Outsized acts of evil attract news cameras, but it is commonplace racism that makes us weary.

Racism always demands our full attention and never follows a schedule.

Clarice taught me something about humanity: it doesn’t matter if your chances of victory are slim to nonexistent; you have to demand respect, even from a largely indifferent system.

When death comes for us, we have decisions to make. We can run from the fear that proximity to death produces in us, or we can love.

If breath and sound could be chased down, I would have run after my words and dragged them back inside my mouth. But it was too late. I had spoken.

We do not know who we are until we are forced to decide under the pressure of life-and-death situations. These moments, as much as any statement of belief, reveal the role that God plays in our lives.

In the Black tradition, the “call” describes a desire to preach the Gospel, which is different from an experience of God’s love. All Christians have that. The call is a sense of being commissioned to a task that requires more than one feels capable of giving. Who, after all, would take it upon themselves to speak about the things of God? Most clergy talk about trying to run from it, but the hound of heaven won’t leave them be until they relent.

Things aren’t so simple. He understood that love sometimes means acknowledging and bearing with the broken parts of people, even to the point of suffering scorn.

If we were both trapped in the same tired play, then the only way to change things was to rewrite the script. But who could tell a better story than the one we already knew? God was the answer that came to me that afternoon.

The words came tumbling out. I told him that I knew about the blood and forgiveness central to Christianity, but I also felt called to talk about what came after, the different path open for us with God as our pillar of fire, leading us through the desert. My ministry would be for people searching for hope among the rubble. My neighborhood had offered me a host of ways of ordering a human life—the potential methods for finding meaning, value, and purpose. In the end, only Christianity struck me as truly beautiful and transcendent. I aimed to appeal to young Black boys and girls considering the same options given to me, carrying traumas similar to the ones I had experienced. They had heard and rejected the church’s offer. I wanted to ask them to reconsider their rejection.

He explained that in three months, I would have to give a trial sermon. “Make sure that you mention the birth, death, Resurrection, and return of Jesus. Whatever else you get wrong, get Jesus right.”

With God, I’d learned, it was okay to be vulnerable. God had given me permission to soften my hard exterior and let the world know about my pain and my trials, in hopes that those who’d suffered might know that God waited for us on the other side. I had encountered God as a whisper or a mystery, and I longed to explore that. I needed to talk to him about the things I had seen and experienced. I needed to ask God in front of the world to help me make sense of Black suffering.

Life is wide and strange and wonderful, and stories are made by individual persons, not tropes. We move through the world, and if God is merciful, we fall in love.