IN THE WORKS! My book, Walking to the Edge: Break with Whiteness

• A small White country church struggles to stay afloat in an area famous for moonshine and segregationists. 
• A White seminary student, after a lifetime of grappling with his racist upbringing, is called to be the church's pastor. 
• At the same time, the partial desegregation of the county's schools is underway, one year before full integration.

At the intersection of these threads, a Christmas party is shattered by a shotgun blast. Why? Because both Black and White teenagers have been invited.

In Walking to the Edge: Break with Whiteness, the 16-year-old daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher includes her new Black friends on the guest list of her annual party in 1969. Her family and friends become the target of White supremacist violence. What follows shatters her idealism and innocence.

I was that 16-year-old. At the age of almost-70, I return to gather the threads of this defining moment in my life. I re-examine my family's story in the light of new learnings about Whiteness and White supremacy. And blind-sided by love, I fall for a man from half a century ago--one of the Black students at the party--who deepens my understanding of both the past and the present.

The book is a memoir of a family's faithfulness to principles of inclusion and racial equity in 1960s North Carolina. It is an interrogation of Whiteness, especially my own, as I tell the story. And it is an unexpected love story crossing barriers of time and race.

I share my personal experience of White rage and violence from the perspectives of both an idealistic White teenager and an older, hopefully wiser, White woman. The book also follows the transformation of a White segregationist farmer (my father) and a White homemaker (my mother) into people who come to believe that racism and segregation are morally wrong. And the book is interwoven with a love story that crosses the boundaries of race and time.

At the heart of my book is a passion for truth-telling and a hope for transformation.

Sign up for my mailing list to be kept informed about any future developments and the progress of my book! And thanks for your support.