Description
Book SynopsisRemnants is the spiritual memoir of Civil Rights Movement activist Rosemarie Freeney Harding. She was a religious woman whose spirituality blended several religious practices. Following her death in 2004, her daughter Rachel finished her memoir, recorded interviews, her mother's journal entries, poems, previously published essays, and a lifetime of conversations.
Trade Review“[A] spirited compilation of ecumenical history, folk wisdom, fiction, memoir, and poetry. . . . The central message of Harding’s life is abiding love, passed down through generations, strengthened in the aftermath of grief, racial terrorism, and trauma. The book also tells the unusual story of Mennonite House, a pioneering center of interracial activism in Atlanta co-founded by Harding and her husband, and offers other insights that shape its powerful narrative.” * Publishers Weekly *
"Co-authored by Rachel and her late mother, [
Remnants] is in its very composition both intimate and collaborative. ...It is a book of returning to the source as a resource for the future and present. There are lessons about human connection and resilience, and our capacities to be better to one another. Out of the particulars of these two lives, a window opens into Black life more broadly, in all of its complexity and interconnectedness with the vast networks of humanity." -- Imani Perry * Public Books *
"
Remnants will appeal to those who are interested in religion and social transformation. Social change advocates, justice seekers, grassroots organizers, nonviolent revolutionaries, race critical theorists, theologians, clergy, historians, womanists, ethicists, ancl educators will all find gems within
Remnants....
Remnants provides hope for a better humanity." -- Dean J. Johnson * Mennonite Quarterly Review *
Table of ContentsForeword: Daughter's Précis / Rachel E. Harding ix
1. (the light) 1
I. Ground 5
2. Rye's Rites (poem) 7
3. Grandma Rye 9
4. There Was a Tree in Starkville . . . 15
5. Daddy's Mark 21
6. Joe Daniels: Getting Unruly 24
7. The Side of the Road 29
8. Papa's Girl 32
II. North 41
9. Snow and Spring in Woodlawn 43
10. Shirley Darden 52
11. Brother Bud's Death 54
12. Death, Dreams, and Secrecy: Things We Carried 57
13. Season 63
14. Elegant Cousins and Original Beauty 66
15. Warmth 71
16. Altgeld Gardens 75
17. Hot Rolls (short fiction) 82
18. Looking for Work 92
19. The Nursing Test 96
20. In Loco Parentis (short fiction) 97
21. Mama Freeney and the Haints 107
22. Height 113
III. South 115
23. Hospitality, Haints, and Healing: African American Indigenous Religion and Activism 117
24. Mennonite House in Atlanta 127
25. The Next-Door Neighbor 137
26. Traveling for the Movement 140
27. Koinonia Farm: Cultivating Conviction 144
28. A Radical Compassion: His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Clarence Jordan, and Marion King-Jackson 155
29. A Song in the Time of Dying: A Memory of Bernice Johnson Reagon 163
30. The Blood House (a story outline) 165
31. Spirit and Struggle: The Mysticism of the Movement 168
IV. The Dharamsala Notebook 179
32. Sunrise after Delhi (poem) 181
33. The Dharamsala Notebook I 182
34. The Dharamsala Notebook II 194
V. Bunting 199
35. The Bunting 201
36. The Workshops and Retreats: Ritual, Remembering, and Medicine 217
VI. The Pachamama Circle 227
37. Pachamama Circle I: Rachel's Dream 229
38. Pachamama Circle II: Sue Bailey Thurman and the Harriets 231
39. Pachamama Circle III: A Choreography of Mothering 237
40. Mama and the Gods 241
AfterWords 243
41. Fugida: Poem for Oyá 245
42. Class Visits: Love, White Southerners, and Black Exceptionalism 247
43. A Little Wind 265
44. (the Call) 268
Appendix: Rosemarie's Genealogies 271
Acknowledgments 283
Index 287
