Josina Guess

I WAS VISITING my sister and niece in Maine with my middle daughter when we learned that Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon died. Our aunt in Oakland sent the obituary to our mom in Ohio, then Mom texted us: “Thought immediately of you both and all that she and her music meant to us. Long, lovely memories.”

Even in the news of her passing, Reagon, the founder of the celebrated music ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, was connecting women across generations, geography, religious, and racial categories. The music of Sweet Honey helped my mom, a white Quaker woman and Methodist pastor from rural Ohio, find her voice. It also shaped my sister and me as biracial Black women growing up in Washington, D.C. in the ’80s and ’90s. I took a course from Dr. Reagon during my senior year in high school. I never saw her again. Waves of grief and gratitude washed over me.

The day we got the news, we woke in a tent after camping near where the sun rises first over North America. As we drove past towering pine trees, taking in the news of one more passing — each death stirs up the sadness of all the other losses and more to come — my sister and I played our favorite Sweet Honey songs. We sang along to Reagon’s “I Remember, I Believe” from the 1995 Sacred Ground album: “My God calls to me in the morning dew / The power of the universe knows my name / Gave me a song to sing and sent me on my way / I raise my voice for justice, I believe.”

AUNJANUE ELLIS-TAYLOR, known for such roles as Hippolyta Freeman in the HBO series Lovecraft Country and Mama in The Color Purple (2023), approaches her acting as an artisan, searching for the right tools with which to craft her characters, she told Sojourners’ assistant editor Josina Guess this spring. Two recent films — Origin (2023) and Exhibiting Forgiveness (2024) — feature powerful performances by Ellis-Taylor and tap into her own yearning for a world in which justice and truth prevail.

Origin (written, produced, and directed by Ava DuVernay) is a biographical drama inspired by Pulitzer-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s process of writing Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). The film depicts a quest for the origins of why we separate ourselves from one another, even though it destroys us physically, spiritually, and politically. For her moving performance as Wilkerson, Ellis-Taylor traveled to Germany and India, tracing Wilkerson’s observations about the connected histories between Nazism, the caste system, and racism in the United States — deepening our understanding of these bitter human wounds.

Exhibiting Forgiveness is an autobiographical film written and directed by artist Titus Kaphar, whose process-oriented works on canvas, sculpture, and film reveal the layered reality between history and the present. In Exhibiting Forgiveness, an artist named Tarrell experiences rising success while haunted by flashbacks of a childhood riddled with addiction and family violence. Ellis-Taylor plays Joyce, the artist’s mother, who begs her son to forgive because “it’s what the Bible says.”

Both films invite viewers to wrestle with themes of reckoning and healing on a personal and societal level. Ellis-Taylor spoke with Guess about the lessons of Origin in this election year, what she sees as the “burdensome” work of Black forgiveness in the face of ongoing harm, and her commitment to speaking and living into truth, including embracing her queer identity while remaining in the Black church. —The Editors

WEEDS GROW THROUGH a rusted wash pail in a thicket beside the University of Georgia’s West Parking Deck in Athens, Ga. Littered with the detritus of college life — beer cans, a condom wrapper, Styrofoam containers — this area, unlike the otherwise pristine campus, is neglected and uninviting. Walk in anyway. Look under brambles to find a bent scrap of aluminum roofing, a green Coca-Cola bottle, a cooking pot, and a plastic toy rifle. These objects, buried under vines and rotting logs, form the understory of what used to be a working-class African American neighborhood called Linnentown. Children would swing from grapevines to get across the creek. Now college students, high-rise dorms, and cars swirl above the 22 acres of the erased community. This patch of land, mostly buried under concrete and steel, was stolen from the Cherokee and Creek people first, but the people who remember the second forced removal are still alive. They can’t get their land back, but there is a growing movement for redress for communities like Linnentown.

From 1962 to 1966, the city of Athens used eminent domain under the Urban Renewal Act to force Linnentown residents out of their homes so that the University of Georgia could build three dormitories and a parking lot for their growing, mostly white, student body.

The children of Linnentown are in their 70s and 80s now. As a child, Hattie Thomas Whitehead ran from yard to yard with her playmates and sometimes snatched pears from Ms. Susie Ray’s tree. Christine Davis Johnson enjoyed pears, apples, and pomegranates from the trees in her own yard. They both remember the bulldozers running in the middle of the night, the intentional fires, and the sense of outrage when their parents and neighbors were forced to accept a pittance for their homes and land.

“It was a warm place to live,” remembered Johnson, who was 20 in 1963 when she and her newly widowed mother had to move. Johnson bore double grief that year from her father’s death and the loss of her childhood home. “No hate. My mother didn’t teach me hate,” Johnson said, as she thought about how her tight-knit community was torn asunder. “It’s gone, it’s over, don’t go back,” her mother would say to her. Against her mother’s advice, Johnson would sometimes drive through what used to be her neighborhood, just to remember.

AS AN INFANT, my son Malachi inserted an “el” sound into his cries. “Ah-La,” he wailed with outstretched arms. My husband Michael scooped up our boy and crooned Sinéad O’Connor’s lyrics, “All babies are born saying God’s name” (from “All Babies,” on the album Universal Mother, 1994).

As church-going Christians, we didn’t call God “Allah,” but we recognized it as the Islamic name for the Most Divine. We heard that name in our baby’s voice. But what strange lullaby was my husband singing to our child? “All babies are born out of great pain / Over and over, all born into great pain / All babies are crying / For no one remembers God’s name.”

I came of age to O’Connor’s 1990 album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, belting out every word to the hit “Nothing Compares 2 U.” I stayed up late one night during 9th grade to watch O’Connor on S aturday Night Live. I was confused when she sang a cover of Bob Marley’s “War,” itself a rendition of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s 1963 speech to the U.N., then tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II. I did not know then that she was protesting years of rampant child sexual abuse largely ignored by the church. She wanted us to listen to the cries of children.

BEFORE HE STEPS onstage as Ike Turner in TINA: The Tina Turner Musical, Garrett Turner (no relation) does a simple ritual: He swirls a wooden mallet along the rim of a Tibetan singing bowl. As the sound washes over him, he focuses on himself as Garrett, not Ike the musician and abusive ex-husband of the “Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll.” And he prays.

“Tina found Buddhism on her way to liberation from Ike, and it was something that Ike decried,” Garrett told me a few days after I saw him perform in Atlanta. Embracing something that Ike pushed away helps Garrett become Ike onstage while remaining Garrett within. With eight shows a week for the touring Broadway production, this spiritual practice helps Garrett draw a clear line between himself and the broken man he portrays.

I was wrapping up some research in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University when I requested a box of Lucille Clifton’s personal writings. I had not come to study Clifton. I was researching anti-lynching activism in Georgia, specifically a 1936 lynching photograph. But by the end of the week, I began turning to Clifton’s personal writing as an oasis. “Resolve to try to fear less and trust more and be healthy,” she wrote in her red Writer’s Digest Daily Diary on December 31, 1979. Clifton was a published children’s book author, memoirist, activist, and the poet laureate of Maryland when she wrote those words. She was also 43, the same age I was that September day. Her body of work, which includes Two-Headed Woman and Blessing the Boats, crossed oceans, told family stories, and revealed both the sting of injustice and the heart of what’s holy.

The day after Clifton resolved to “fear less and trust more and be healthy,” she wrote in her journal that she returned to a house with “no central heat; bad plumbing; and foreclosure.” A few weeks later, the house was auctioned off to the highest bidder. She sat down and wrote something anyway.

When I met bell hooks three years ago, I had all four of my children in tow and I wasn’t sure what to say. A mutual friend arranged a short visit to her home. My heart was bursting with gratitude for all the ways hooks wove race, gender, class, faith, place, and love into her work. My mind was racing with ways to express some fraction of my appreciation and awe.

"AND THERE SAT a dark leather-bound Bible soaked in blood. A bullet had pierced its pages.”

The Bible belonged to Felicia Sanders, one of the five people to walk out of Mother Emanuel AME Church alive after a stranger who had been welcomed to a Bible study shot and killed Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Rev. Daniel L. Simmons, Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson.

The quote is from Jennifer Berry Hawes’ new book, Grace Will Lead Us Home: The Charleston Church Massacre and the Hard, Inspiring Journey to Forgiveness. With measured prose and journalistic excellence, this book rounds out the forgiveness and grace that have become synonymous with the Charleston massacre by exposing the outrage, isolation, and bumpy road of grief that followed the deaths.