This sort of denial is endemic to the way we talk about race, violence, and the inequities of our nation. Perhaps we could call it the cultural hermeneutic of white denial, that whiteness does not in fact exist. …Only life can conquer death.”4 As powerful as Blount’s challenge is, a profound obstacle stands in the way of the kind of witness he imagines. …What the purveyors of death notice is defiant life. Blount, New Testament scholar and president of Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia, believes that the story of resurrection isn’t only for Easter, but for a world typified by death: “In a world typified by death, killings, even high-profile killings, do not raise a transforming alarm. But there is another possibility: if we think of these tender expressions as a longing, a call, and a plea for resurrection, or even more sharply expressed, as a call for an uprising of resurrection, for incarnation, for mending of the creational hoop, then I suppose we have begun to hear the true import of their testimony.īrian K. Instead, the bodies of their children were being prepared for burial, for incineration.3Īt one level, maybe this talk makes us uncomfortable because it is too true. Another told how her family took care of her son’s body: trimming his fingernails, shaving him, washing him, dressing him, almost like a mother would do before sending her child to school … only, he wasn’t going to school. I think he was seeing something beautiful, that’s why his eyes wouldn’t stay shut.” “He was messed up,” Phyllis said over and over, just shaking her head, like she was trying to shake away an image that haunted her at that moment, shaking her head as if stung, shuddering as if she had suffered the gunshot herself.
They taped them shut, and then they’d just pop open again. Yet what I heard before the concert continues to haunt me: “His eyes wouldn’t stay shut. If the concert that followed was powerful (and it was), the testimonies of these three women were inexpressibly beautiful and to the same degree painful. They were united by a story of loss: each had lost a child to the violence in Baltimore, Treshawna just a few months before.2 So it was that Treshawna, Phyllis, and LaChelle were there, in Reid Chapel, preparing to speak in a traditionally white church. Our church was preparing to host a community-wide concert to raise awareness about the violence in our city.
That, at least, is what I imagined when I sat down at a round table with Treshawna Williams, LaChelle Rice, and Phyllis Scott in Reid Chapel, just outside the main sanctuary of the First & Franklin Presbyterian Church, in the Mt. Initially, it seemed like small talk on a typical Sunday afternoon.
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