When people ask me about the decisive influences on my theological and political perspectives, my response always includes something about my mother and father, and what it meant for a black person to grow up in Bearden, Arkansas, during the 1940s and '50s. The more I reflect on who I am and what is important to me, the more the Bearden experience looms large in my consciousness.
Is it nostalgia? It may be that, but I do not think so. I am not homesick for Bearden or even for the Macedonia A.M.E. Church there. The importance of Bearden is the way it enters my thinking, controlling my theoretical analysis, almost forcing me to answer the questions about faith and life found in the experience of my early years. The people of Bearden are present around my desk as I think and write. Their voices are clear and insistent: "All right, James Hal, speak for your people."
Two things happened to me in Bearden: I encountered the harsh realities of white injustice that were inflicted daily upon the black community; and I was given a faith that sustained my personhood and dignity in spite of white people's brutality. The dual reality of white injustice and black faith, as a part of the structure of life, created a tension in my being that has not been resolved.
If God is good and also all powerful as black church folks say, why do blacks get treated so badly? That was the question that my brother Cecil and I asked at an early age, and it is still the question that creates the intellectual energy and passion for my writing today.
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