Natasha Sistrunk Robinson - A Sojourners Truth: Choosing Freedom and Courage in a Divided World

N atasha Sistrunk Robinson and I first met in the most prosaic of placeson Facebook. Everyone knows how tentative those initial interactions can sometimes be, but Natasha stood out. She was strong, clear-eyed, confident, a US Naval Academy graduate, a seminary graduate, and a former US Marine Corps officer. Watching her in even that pedestrian setting, I was left with one deep appeal: to truly know her. Or, as I asked when we finally were blessed to meet by video conference: Tell me your story. The real one. The brave one.

People of faith ask that of each other because we know theres always more than what is seen. Our surface is precisely thatour veneer. Under our Bible-studying, prayer-lifting, exegetical facades, we know our real truth awaits. People of color know this even more; our stories go untold. Looking to explain, we struggle to express our vexationleaning on beloved warriors like Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote, Theres no agony like bearing an untold story inside you. Her words can feel mocked, however, when we learn theyre often wrongly attributedfrequently to Dr. Maya Angelou, who is often misattributed herself. The mix-up affirms how, as people of color, our stories get wrongly shared, our personal details get lost, our worth gets minimized, and our courage gets undervalued (if its ever even weighed).

Yet we soldier on, as African American theologian James H. Cone did, in a society and in an intellectual discourse that did not even acknowledge that I existed. Letting our hair down all the way, however, exposes us to the bone, leaving us to declare with Audre Lorde, If I didnt define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other peoples fantasies for me and eaten alive.

In this book, youll find a Cone-style, Lorde-blessed version of the warrior Natasha Sistrunk Robinson. Telling her own truth, she opens a vein. Telling all, she dares to help save herself, but also to galvanize the rest of usmaybe even to redeem us. From what? That there is no place of safety for black people in America. Indeed, that the American church is oftentimes too slow and too passive about almost everything that matters. Churched folks act, therefore, as if this rotten trouble were not a stench in Gods nostrils or God couldnt strengthen us to help fight systemic injustice and fix it.

Well, God can.

In saying that, A Sojourners Truth is an important book indeed. It is Natashas story, but told on Natashas terms. As she writes in her opening pages, I am an expert on being me: a black, Christian woman from the South. So thats the story Im telling.

I thought I knew Tasha well, but I needed to hear her hardest storiesthat she struggled in vain to protect her light-skinned baby sister in a color-struck world. Or that her successful matriculation through military gauntlets brought her, literally, to her knees. With candor, she shares the pain and peculiarity of her familys Negro povertya wealth gap she deplores. As Natasha confesses, My nasty, dirty little family secret is that we were poor.

With rich humility, Natasha unburies these raw family pearlsalso granting equal time to the story of biblical Moses and the exodus plot of his own beleaguered people. As companion narratives, this material provides urgent, theological, Sunday go to meeting teaching. Natasha holds our reluctant feet to the fire.

This warrior is on a mission, indeed. For every ugly racial inequality still staining American soil and souls, she issues a battle cry to action, holding the body of Christ accountable to Christs standards, and to work together to become a loving, united, and righteous people of God.

In this brave volume, she invites us to kneel a while with her narrative and, as the saints of old used to say, to tarry there. Near her feet, humbled to look up and see God, well be inspired to do the right thing: to climb up from the mud and finally march.