Prologue
“...walking to the edge….”
The poster hung on the wall of my father’s study in every church that he pastored in later years. The left half was goldenrod yellow; the right half was pitch black. A jagged line separated the two, and across the poster, these words were written:
Faith means
walking to the edge of
all the light you have
and taking
one
more
step.
Every word but the last was printed black against yellow. The final word, in yellow, stepped over the line into the black.
It was the closest thing to a creed that my Southern Baptist preacher father ever had.
2021
On a clear day in July, I am driving into Wake Forest, North Carolina, on NC Highway 98. The day is hot, but the humidity is uncharacteristically low, so I roll the windows down and turn off the AC. Listening to a CD of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, I go over a story in my mind—the story that brings me back to a town I thought never to revisit.
Ridgecrest Baptist Church still sits beside NC Hwy 98, Durham Road, its tiny steeple pointing sharply into the sky as if to pin it in place. Next to the two-lane 55-mph road that connects Wake Forest and Durham, it looks exactly as it did in 1969 when my father was pastor there for nine short months before he was dismissed for putting into practice what he preached.
The highway, on the other hand, has changed. Since the 1980s, the twists and turns of the road I knew lie buried deep beneath the waters of Falls Lake, a reservoir formed when the Neuse River was dammed. A remnant of old NC Hwy 98 dead-ends into a white metal gate, beyond which the road has been turned into a gravel-covered walking trail. Here and there, gray pavement emerges from beneath the gravel, but yellow and white center lines, almost transparent, now lead to where the old highway disappears beneath muddy water.
The country road that coiled around old homesteads has been superseded by a streamlined two-lane highway straight into town, level as far as the eye can see. Where there were once gently rolling fields of tall golden grasses, dotted here and there with sometimes abandoned farmhouses, there are now clusters of oversized residences with tiny lawns, sitting smugly behind manicured hedges and black iron railings. The new communities are reminders that what was a cozy seminary town of 4,000 when my family lived here, is now home to about 55,000 people. Wake Forest has become a bedroom community for Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, which form between them what is known as the Research Triangle.
A lot has changed—but Ridgecrest Baptist Church looks the same as it did more than fifty years ago.
Headed toward town, I drive past the church, turning left onto Stony Hill Road, looking for a modest red brick ranch-style house that no longer exists. All that remains is a narrow lot to the side of the road, covered with patchy grass and dirt studded with rocks and debris. A black iron fence, surrounding one of those new housing clusters, cuts through the middle of where the living room used to be.
That house was the parsonage of Ridgecrest Baptist Church. For two months in 1969, it was my family’s home. It still stands at an intersection in my memory between innocence and experience: the carefully curated innocence of Whiteness; the bitter experience of racist violence.
Its absence haunts the shoulder of Stony Hill Road.
1969
I was 15 going on 16 when my father, a student at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, was installed as pastor of Ridgecrest. About six miles west of town, Ridgecrest had split from another well-established church about seven years before, and they were struggling. Under my dad’s leadership, attendance went up. Offerings increased. The congregation was so pleased that they pulled the blueprint for a new parsonage off the shelf and began building it that summer.
By late August, the house was finished, and in September we moved in.
A month later, my mother pulled me into the kitchen. It was late afternoon, and I was just home from school. The October days were getting noticeably shorter. The sun was already sinking behind the trees on the other side of the road. She sat me down at the table to talk to me about the party my brother and I were planning for December.
“Some people are going to be upset,” she said, “that you are inviting Bettie and Jean, William, Mike and Silas, and Marjorie.” —the names of some of my Black friends— “Are you sure you want to invite them?”
Every year since I’d entered high school, I had thrown a party for my friends. Anywhere from 10 to 15 would show up. The duplex where we lived when my father first entered seminary was small, so the party was usually planned for the fall when we could still gather outdoors. We set up volleyball nets in the wide yard over to the side. Dad grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, and Mom spread a long table with condiments and buns, paper plates and plastic utensils.
Of course, since the Wake County school system was still largely segregated as late as 1968, all my friends were White.
That changed in the beginning of my junior year. In the fall of 1969, about nine Black students, also juniors, elected to transfer from all-Black W.E.B. DuBois High School to predominantly White Wake Forest High. Both of my parents were born in southeastern Virginia and raised in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s and 40s, but the civil rights movement got past the barriers that Whiteness carefully placed around them. Slowly, and not easily, they came to believe that segregation was morally wrong. They were raising me and my brothers to believe that, as the children of one God, all people are siblings— “brothers and sisters,” as they said— regardless of race or color. That we are equal in the eyes of God. Equally beloved of God.
I made friends among the Black students. Since we were all juniors, we were in many of the same classes. As we were getting to know each other, I planned another party—this one in the much larger parsonage. Naturally my new friends were on the guest list.
Now, my mother was sitting across the table from me asking if I was sure that I wanted to invite them.
“Mom!” I said. “If I can’t have a party with all my friends, I don’t want to have a party at all!”
She quickly reassured me, “Yes, that’s what your father and I thought you would say, and we agree with you. We just want it to be your decision.”
2021
I am staying with old friends, White friends in Wake Forest. They were among the few White people who stood by us in 1969-70, providing a place for us to live when we were turned out of the parsonage. Even so, when I tell them I’m writing a book about what happened, their response is less than encouraging. “This place has changed so much since you lived here,” they tell me. “So many new people have moved in.... It isn’t the same town anymore.
“No one remembers what happened back then.”
One of my former classmates from Wake Forest High invites me to a cookout at her house. Everyone there is Black, including our host, except for me and one other White friend.
After eating ourselves silly, we gather in the family room and plop down into comfy chairs. The mother of one of my classmates points at me and says, “Oh! Is this the girl that had that party?” Everyone nods.
“Do people still remember the party?” I ask.
“Oh, yes,” another friend answers. “They remember. They act like they don’t. But they remember.”
+ + +
When our first Black president was elected in 2008, I called my father.
“Dad! Dad!” I shouted, crying, into the telephone.
“I know, I know,” he said through his tears. “I never thought I would live to see this day.”
It was easy in that moment to imagine that the story I have to tell is a relic of the past, no longer relevant.
I wish. I wish it were that simple to uproot racism and White supremacy.
“Faith means walking to the edge of all the light you have and taking one more step.” Again and again, I watched my parents walk up to the limit of their understanding and take one more step in faith. They were living examples to me and my brothers of what it means to “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). It will take courage on the part of all of us to walk to the edge of all the light we have—and then to step over that jagged line into what we cannot see and do not know. But, because of their example, I know it is possible.
So, here I am, driving to Wake Forest along NC Highway 98. Following a road I no longer recognize, partly because the road has changed, and partly because I am no longer the same. Moving toward a town that is hurtling toward the future without reckoning with its past. Mourning a house whose absence haunts me, and passing a church frozen in time.
The road stretches before me and behind. To go forward, I must go back to the events of the past, and beyond that, into the roots of my family’s history.