Religion scholar Yolanda Pierce doesn’t mind if you don’t know what a womanist theologian is, or whether you're a science nerd. Examining Christianity through the experiences of Black women is one of Pierce’s greatest passions, and she is combining it with ideas about how biology, archeology, and scripture can reveal what she calls “the healing capacities of memories” in her new book, The Wounds Are the Witness: Black Faith Weaving Memory into Justice and Healing (Broadleaf, Feb.).
Pierce is a professor of African American and diaspora studies and dean at the Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tenn., and the author of 2016’s In My Grandmother’s House, which explored the importance of generational maternal legacies.
In her new book, Pierce traces history from the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade of the early 16th century to the Jim Crow era in order to explore the realities of Black life in America today. By looking at facts of the past, or as Pierce writes, “when the wounds bear witness,” truths can be revealed about both root causes of trauma and harm, as well as strides made toward healing and justice.
For example, Pierce writes in the book about the depletion of soil nutrients and deforestation that took place while enslaved labor was enforced. Cash crops including cotton, sugarcane, and tobacco were often grown continuously on the same plots of land without proper rotation or soil replenishment, which led to erosion and the loss of topsoil. “If the very dirt is still telling a story, and if there is land on which we still cannot plant crops and topsoil because it is in recovery, why can’t we imagine that the very bodies of the descendants of the enslaved are also still telling a 400-year-old story,” Pierce asks in the book.
The book also sheds light on stories of resilience, survival, and what Pierce calls “ingenious subversiveness” of enslaved people, such as women who braided rice into their hair in order to plant and grow their own food. “I want to engage the reader about ancestral memory as a site for healing,” she tells PW. “And by calling attention to wounds, the invisible and visible, is to not allow us to use amnesia or say ‘I didn’t know the history.’”
“We are a broken and fractured world in so many ways,” Pierce adds. “I am interested in a broader conversation about the personal as well as national wounds—racialized wounds—that we carry with us, what to do with them, and saying healing takes time.”
Museums are excellent sources for learning about our nation’s past, Pierce notes, including the U.S. Holocaust Museum, the National Museum of African American History & Culture (where she served as founding director of the Center for the Study of African American Religious Life, and now serves as an advisor), and the Whitney Plantation in Edgard, Louisiana. “It’s one of few places that has been reconstructed so that the point of view is focused on the enslaved,” she says of the latter. “It’s a tremendous experience to see the roles they played.”
Pierce also encourages readers to do oral histories with their older family and community members for more stories about African people and their descendants. “You would be amazed at what you learn about resiliency,” she says. “These are the stories of generations ago, of people who made a way out of no way. When you take time to interview elders, you find how resiliency, joy, and healing are possible.”
Valerie Weaver-Zercher, senior acquisitions editor at Broadleaf, says that The Wounds are the Witness “manages to look at heartbreaking history head-on” while maintaining the author’s faith in God—the same faith that sustained her ancestors.
“I don’t know of another writer who knits together disparate strands—scripture, family stories, womanist theology, the Black literary tradition, a nation’s history—quite as deftly as Dr. Pierce does,” Weaver-Zercher adds. “Dr. Pierce finished writing this book long before the 2024 election occurred, but she knew that America would keep on wounding Black people. In this book, she is prophetic enough to anticipate future woundings and courageous enough to write about past wounds, avoiding what she calls the ‘willful amnesia’ of so many.”
