The Wounds Are the Witness: Black Faith Weaving Memory into Justice and Healing

In this stimulating meditation, Pierce (Hell Without Fires), dean of the Vanderbilt Divinity School, draws on “the subversive nature of the gospel” to examine the “historical wounds” of Black people in America. Exploring how shame is wielded by the powerful against the vulnerable, she links the story of how the prophetess Miriam was shunned for having leprosy to a viral 2015 video of an encounter in which a Black girl in a bathing suit was forcibly restrained by the police. In Pierce’s telling, the Bible story and the video both evoke how humiliation is internalized by Black women and girls who have historically been denied agency over their bodies. Elsewhere, she looks at how Black women in the rural South used knowledge passed down through generations to heal others with plants and roots for salves and painkillers, caring for the sick despite being wounded and endangered themselves. According to Pierce, the contemporary scientific validation of those ancestral healing methods disproves another “dominant story: that the traditions of rural southern folk were ignorant, unscientific, and based on superstition.” Such insights are thought-provoking, though the author’s tendency to rove rapidly between biblical, personal, and historical anecdotes can prevent them from cohering into a unified argument. Still, this is a resonant, richly detailed study of the complex relationship between race and faith in America. (Feb.)