How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South by Esau McCaulley

From Christian Forum Convergent Books  From the New York Times contributing opinion writer and award-winning author of Reading While Black, a riveting intergenerational account of his family’s search for meaning and a place to call home in the American South For much of his life, Esau McCaulley was taught to see himself as an exception: someone who, through hard work, faith, and determination, overcame childhood poverty, anti-Black racism, and an absent father to earn a job as a university professor and a life in the middle class. This account was the one he was conditioned to give, the story America demands from Black survivors. When preparing the eulogy at his estranged father’s funeral, McCaulley was forced to reexamine and face the shortcomings of that narrative about his own path to prosperity. No one “escapes” poverty; it marks us. He came to see that people, even those who harm us, are more complicated than the roles we create for them in our imagination. The way to the promised