Read "The Christian Imagination" by Willie James Jennings online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Mary, my mother, taught me to respect the dirt. Like many black women from the South, she knew the earth like she knew her own soul. I came along late. I was the last of her eleven children, born not of the South but of the North, the fruit of the great migration when black folks wearied of the Jim Crow South and, in search of work, pointed their hopes toward northern cities and replanted their lives in colder air [1] So I was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and found myself each spring with my mother, Mary, in her garden in the backyard.
[1]: Milton C. Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migration of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). An incredibly important text in this regard is William H. Chafe et al., eds., Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell about Life in the Segregated South (New York: New Press, 2001).