A Fire in the Bones Albert J Raboteau

...They attended carefully to the daily tasks of community...

...In the narrow, academic sense, it does have nothing to do with religion...

...I didn't say it, but I felt different, alone, far from my people, far from home...

...Graciousness with others, gentleness, generosity, care, kindness, politeness-these were the virtues of my people, patterns that healed...

...Albert J. Raboteau was one of them...

...There were...

...Don Wycliff is editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune...

...The second book comprises the prologue and the epilogue...

...The larger consists of nine essays, most of which have previously been published elsewhere...

...This book actually is at least two books...

...It is largely an implicit defense, flowing out of a discussion of the tension between the demands of the historian's discipline and religious faith...

...These were my people...

...These two short pieces appear to have been composed explicitly for this publication, to try to give some coherence to the essays and justify their appearance in a single volume...

...The epilogue is less easily described...

...Raboteau, a professor of religion and former dean of graduate studies at Princeton, is a first-rate academic and probably the pre-eminent scholar of African-American religious history in the nation...

...Not to avenge, nor to make up for, not undoing what can't be done, but perhaps to heal...

...Perhaps it is just the projection of one who sees exceptional similarities between aspects of Raboteau's life and his own, but I have the sense that this book is an effort by the author to find his way home, to go back in some fashion to grandma's house in the Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi, of his childhood: In Bay Saint Louis, unlike the North, there always seemed to be time and space enough for the long-time love...

...And without reading too much into him, it seems safe to say that Raboteau feels that these-especially the healing and the building and maintaining of community-have been special concerns in African-American religion, if only because they were so badly needed...

...But Raboteau is, at certain points, quite explicit, as, for example, when he asserts: In the absence of black history, a myth of the American past developed, a myth that denied black people any past of significance....The recovery of African-American history served as a paradigm for the recovery of the pasts of other people whose stories had also been left out of American history...

...Simply in terms of filling a personal informational gap, I found invaluable the essay "Richard Allen and the African Church Movement," about the founder and first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal church...

...But in the broadest, fullest sense-the only meaningful one-it has everything to do with religion...

...It might best be called a sermon-about the importance and possibilities of history, both personal and national, for healing our fractured national community...

...In the evening twilight, we gathered'for supper...

...In terms of timeliness, the three reflections on "African-American religion and American destiny" were especially helpful in illuminating the recent decision of the Southern Baptist Convention to formally apologize for its acquiescence in the original American sin of slavery...

...Don Wycliff When I was growing up, I was acutely aware that I was, for most of my school years, the only black child in my class and, except for my brothers and sisters, the only black child in my Catholic school...

...The table was heavy with food, laughter, and stories, stories about the old people that went on long into the night, until the last warm sweet sip of anisette placed a benediction on the evening....There was no rush about them, as with the people up North...

...They had an ease about them that put others at ease, like a warm embrace...

...So what he writes in these essays is solid, bankable...

...And I sometimes wondered whether there were others elsewhere in the same situation...

...Up North [in Ann Arbor, Michigan]," he writes, "black Catholics were few...

...To be perfectly frank, they don't do that...

...Supper, stories, healing, "the long-time love" and "the daily tasks of community"-those are central to religion, or at least to Christian religion...

...If this seems to have nothing to do with African-American religion, that is absolutely right-and completely wrong...

...The prologue is as fine a defense of multiculturalism in education as I have ever read...

...But to say that the prologue and epilogue don't work for their intended purpose is not to say that they don't work...

...I was one of a handful of black students in Saint Thomas School...

...Now, as much as ever, we stand in need of their presence....Memory, story, ritual-these are all ways of remembering a community broken by hate, rage, injustice, fear...

...Having recalled and reflected on episodes from his own personal history, like the one above about Bay Saint Louis, Raboteau observes: "Our nation too has ancestors...

...If for nothing more than this sermon, Raboteau deserves to be read...

...In the end the book feels like what it is-a collection of disparate writings, all having generally to do with African-American religion but not really constituting a single argument or expressing some grand, overarching idea...

...They vary widely in character, from a brief, almost journalistic explanation of new trends in African-American religion over the last half-century, to a scholarly explication of what might be called African-American Christian theology, to an intriguing discussion of the points of convergence between the thought of Thomas Merton and that of Martin Luther King, Jr...