Alas, my other lives (teacher, wife, mother, producer [for the moment] and writer) are calling me, so I will contribute less frequently to T&S and other blogs–though this has been really fun. I promised to publish a post about writing the trilogy with Darius. I’ve written elsewhere about some of that experience–the miraculous parts–and thought I’d write here about the more difficult parts. The most obvious difficulty I dealt with in writing about Black Mormons and the history of the Church in regards to race was the research. Not the research per se–I loved doing that–but the things I read, the sad and lingering legacy of prejudice.
\nMany people have told me how pleased they are that the new movie in the JS Building shows a little of Jane Manning James. Yes, I am glad she was included, and thought Fiona Smith did a good job representing her, but because I know “the rest of the story,” I had a few problems seeing the selected vignette. Jane is in a scene in which Joseph Smith binds her wounds–not quite historically accurate, since Jane reports that God healed her bloody feet (and those of her family) after they prayed during their journey. So it was Jane’s faith, not Joseph’s hands, which bound the sores. But more important are the events which followed Jane’s time in Nauvoo. She came west with the pioneers and pled for temple blessings. Eventually, she was permitted to do baptisms for the dead, but she was never allowed to receive her endowment. She had been invited to be sealed as a child to Joseph and Emma Smith and turned that offer down in 1843. When in 1884 she requested the sealing, racialist ideas in the Church had evolved so much that she was sealed not as a child, but as a servant to the Smith family, with Bathsheba Smith acting as her proxy. And regardless of how deep Jane’s faith was, it could not be transferred to her children. Eventually all of her progeny left the Church. She has seven generations of descendants; most don’t even know her pioneer story and have never heard of Joseph Smith. This is not to say she wasn’t loved. She was, and Church presidents blessed her. Nonetheless, they felt that they could offer no better than what she had already received because she was “of Cain.” That lineage summed up her limitations.
\nI use this as a precursor to my experience with Darius. We became quick friends, and I knew him as a bold advocate of the faith. But in the moments where we dealt with his most difficult experiences (such as his learning about the priesthood restriction the night before his baptism), unless I was willing to let him tell his story in his way, we fought. We could fight over adjectives, phrases, or characterizations, but it came down to the problem of my using my talents to tell HIS story, and presuming that I understood what it was like to have two white missionaries say, “You won’t be able to hold the priesthood.” (I wonder, if Jane would’ve fought with the screenwriter for the new film…)
\nI have found many in the Church who have Black friends and assume that by virtue of the friendship, they understand the Black experience (or the many Black experiences). Not so. We all understand something about the human experience, but the truth is, each of us is ultimately a mystery. We may love Cakchiquel Indians, for example (as I do), but will never really understand their lives, because we visit their culture with our own options–namely, we can get on a plane and leave at any time. And I doubt that security guards will suddenly take notice of my entering a store. They do take notice of my Black friends–one of whom is a respected lawyer and has simply grown accustomed to the suspicious stares. I grew to love Darius dearly, but I recognize that though I know him very well, he remains a mystery. As for the trilogy, I know so much more about the characters now than I did when we wrote the books, because I have met their descendants. The characters we present in the trilogy are the result of imagination, research, and experience. But if I were to meet any of them in real life, I am sure they would let me know where I got it wrong.
\nIn the early years of the Church, when racism was an international plague and the white man considered that he had a “burden” to civilize the “hottentot” and any dark-skinned creature, writers and anthropologists tried to sum people up as categories or as fulfillments of their own theses. That’s always a temptation, isn’t it. We want Jane Manning James to stare, awestruck, into Joseph Smith’s eyes while he wraps her bloodyd feet. In some ways, we want the story to end there, while it’s still comfortable. We want to wrap her up and use her as a testimony builder. I love John Updike’s poem called “Seven Stanzas for Easter” which says “Let us not mock him [Jesus] with metaphor.” I hope my life will continue to be an opening and an unfolding, inviting experiences gleaned from literature and from friends of many cultures and skintones. I hope to know my friends better at my death, and I hope to know the Savior better. But surely I will not fully understand them or Him. Still, I hope to stare, awestruck, into Jesus’ eyes and prepare for greater light and knowledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alas, my other lives (teacher, wife, mother, producer [for the moment] and writer) are calling me, so I will contribute less frequently to T&S and other blogs–though this has been really fun. I promised to publish a post about writing the trilogy with Darius. I’ve written elsewhere about some of that experience–the miraculous parts–and thought I’d write here about the more difficult parts. The most obvious difficulty I dealt with in writing about Black Mormons and the history of the Church in regards to race was the research. Not the research per se–I loved doing that–but the things I read, the sad and lingering legacy of prejudice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}