Loving in a loveless, anti-Black country

Reading Shoutin' in the Fire: An American Epistle by Danté Stewart felt to me a little like eavesdropping on a conversation meant for someone else. I'm so grateful to Mr. Stewart for sharing with anyone willing to read this book his experience of grappling with what it means to him to be Black, Christian, and a citizen of the United States.

One Stewart maxim stands out: "This country is exhausting."

Stewart rode his football potential away from his family and Pentecostal home church in rural South Carolina to attend Clemson, the state's public university and football power. He wasn't a great football success, but he did graduate. His recollections from that time are slightly shame-faced.

Trayvon got murdered when I was a sophomore at Clemson University. I remember other Black teammates on the football team around me were so shaken by the death of someone who looked like us. Some of my teammates lamented the reality of being Black and young and terrified, fearing they would never be protected in the world the ways we knew we were protected on the field. 

I had learned the same lessons as a kid. My mother and father would make sure that we knew how fragile the balance our lives hung in. ... 

I used this as an excuse to stay quiet. So I was a part of the group that didn’t really want to rock the boat, lest I get on the bad side of the coaches, and become what they liked to call a distraction. 

So I kept quiet. ... 

I had worked hard to become the best athlete and the best man I could be, as our coaches would always say. I had succeeded. During spring ball, my coach raved about how good I was doing, how much I was progressing as a leader, and how proud he was that I was accomplish­ing so much in a short amount of time. “Ma,” I said as I called my momma one day on the way home from practice. “Coach mentioned me in the news conference.”

But Stewart's football success didn't last. Another Black player was able to do more for the team.

Playing college sports, you learn how to see the person next to you as a friend but never too close. Each of your futures hangs in the balance. It is a ter­rible way to live. It is a terrible way to grow up. It is a terrible way to learn how to love yourself. It is a terrible way to learn how to love others. But it is the way that I learned. ... 

This is how we learned to survive college: by dis­trusting one another. Distrust can be a powerful thing, especially when you learn to distrust those who look like you. ... We both came from the bottom and were just trying to make good on the lessons that we’d learned early from our people. We were both trying to prove white people wrong about us. Every. Single. Day. We were trying to prove that we were the “good Black boys.” So many friends and family back home would drop out of school. Some would get pushed out. Some would be ignored. Some would just leave. So we had to be good and much better than those “nig­gas” back home. ...

Stewart's degree in sociology and his devotion to his evangelical faith got him a job as a youth minister in a White megachurch after college. He "succeeded" there, but gradually came to feel there was something very wrong with the White people's Christianity and his own soul. With his wife (who I suspect of being very kind and long-suffering of her emotional husband), he moved back to the South, to his family, to his roots in Black faith. He became a school teacher among young Black kids.

I wanted them to know that any progress that has been made in our country is not because our country has been so good or is always progressing. It is because we have refused to shut up and play, shut up and pray, shut up and work. We have refused to be silent about our pain, out struggle, and our dreams. It is because we have refused to give up faith in ourselves, in God, and in the possibility of justice, liberation, and healing. 

Black Lives Matter was not just a rallying cry of protest for Black bodies. It was a love letter, a monument, a testimony, a hallelujah, a yes Lord, a sermon, a dream. It was a cry to remember and love hard, and to love publicly and to love honestly, and to tell the truth, to be better, for all of us. ...

He found himself wrestling with the meaning of it all:

How do we live in a country that believes itself to be exceptional? 

How do we live in a country that does not believe you to be worthy of loving and surviving and being free? 

How do we live in a country where millions believe you should have stayed enslaved? 

How do we live is a country that clings to myths that are killing us, that says it loves you while betraying you? What does it mean to be caught between truth and myth? What does it mean to love and live in it and believe in it and pray for it and preach in it and not be killed by it? 

And how the hell to do we love? 

... I don't know if I have the answer to any of these questions. I believe they are worth asking and I believe that one day we will all have answers. As the old folks would say, we will understand it better by and by. But more than any answers I could conjure up, I must give myself and others something that will make us shout in the fire. ...

Today Mr. Stewart is a student at Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia -- still trying to figure it all out and still preaching up a storm.

I strongly recommend reading this book in the audio edition. Stewart preaches his story himself.