It is 1969 in a small southern town. The 16-year-old daughter of a White Southern Baptist preacher invites her new Black friends to her annual party. Church members threaten her father, but he refuses to cancel the event. A shotgun blast rips through the family’s home during the party. The response of both church and community afterward shatters the girl’s faith. She returns in her 70s to tell the story and re-examine it in a country still firmly grounded in White supremacy. While interviewing people she knew back then, she is blind-sided by love with the boy, now a man, whose hand she clung to after the shot hit the house. I was that girl, and I married that man.
Read Morewriter
truth-seeker
lifelong learner
About Me
Since 2020, I have been exploring how Whiteness warps and twists White folks. My blog, "holy discomfort: Love letters from a reluctant Christian" (holydiscomfort.com), focuses on topics at the intersection of personal faith, social justice, and anti-racism.
"What Changes, What Remains the Same," an essay of mine that placed 2nd in the Winston-Salem Writers Flying South 2024 contest, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Another, "Coyote at the Crossroads," was published in 2018 by Paloma Press in a collection entitled Humanity.
Currently I am working on a memoir about an act of White vigilante violence that targeted my family and friends in North Carolina in the late 1960s.
A newlywed in my 70s, I live in North Carolina with my husband William, who keeps me honest and does all the cooking.
"What Changes, What Remains the Same," an essay of mine that placed 2nd in the Winston-Salem Writers Flying South 2024 contest, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Another, "Coyote at the Crossroads," was published in 2018 by Paloma Press in a collection entitled Humanity.
Currently I am working on a memoir about an act of White vigilante violence that targeted my family and friends in North Carolina in the late 1960s.
A newlywed in my 70s, I live in North Carolina with my husband William, who keeps me honest and does all the cooking.