"MORE THAN I IMAGINED"

 “MORE THAN I IMAGINED”

Today’s title phrase is the title of my friend John Blake’s newest book, whose full title is “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.” It was released in May by Random House, and it is a memoir about his growing up as an interracial child in the rough streets of Baltimore.  His previous book “Children of the Movement” was also a fine book.

I first met John when he came to Oakhurst in 1996 to do a story on us for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, for whom he was a reporter.  The AJC gave us a full page story by John, and he became interested in us and in the church’s story.  He started worshipping with us and became a member.  Later her became an elder on the Session.  I officiated at he and Rev. Terrylyn Pons’ wedding at her church on the other side of Atlanta.  In his new book, John credits Oakhurst with helping him to recover his faith.

John describes his journey in “More Than I Imagined,” and he begins it in his upbringing on the tough streets of Baltimore, streets that were depicted in “The Wire.”  John and his brother Patrick lived with his father in Baltimore – he did not know who his mother was.  Learning her identity and her story is part of the “more than I imagined” of this book, as well as John’s reconciliation with his mother (and his father) and parts of his mother’s white family who had previously rejected him.  John’s father was a merchant marine, and so he traveled a lot.  When he traveled, John and Patrick would be farmed out to various relatives and the underground foster care system.  One of those foster care givers, Aunt Fannie, was a person who terrorized John and Patrick and caused them to be filled with resentment and anger. But another Aunt (this aunt, a biological aunt), Aunt Sylvia, treated them with love and respect – she was tough but fair, demanding but compassionate.  She knew that she was raising Black boys in a white world, and she wanted them to be tough but to also have love at the center of their hearts.

John grew up amidst violence, despair, and struggle, but people like his brother Patrick,  Aunt Sylvia and even his father helped him to find his center as a child of God – a child who was illegal when he was born, a child whom the institution of white supremacy told was worthless, a child abandoned by his mother.  Yet he heard that he was a child of God.  Reading and books were also a prime way that he escaped the pain and his seeming destiny of street life.  Many people threw seeds of love and vision along his path, and he was fortunate enough to find some of those seeds and nourish them in his heart.

He eventually found his mother, but I will leave it to you to read the book to see how her love prevailed in his heart, even under the worst of circumstances.  He also had encounters with his racist maternal grandfather in ghostly, eerie encounters, which forms one of the big mysteries of his book.  He also met his mother’s racist sister, and their developing relationship is one of the powerful stories in the book, giving us hope in a hopeless world.  John discovered in his journey a truth that becomes one of the mantras of his book:  “Facts don’t change people; relationships do.”

John’s story speaks to our system of race which targets those classified as Black - especially black males – to be put on the road to the prison/industrial complex.  His story is an inspiring one, but those of us classified as “white” must take care not to judge the system by John’s (and Patrick’s) remarkable escape from it.  We are so invested in denying that the system of race exists, and John’s story can be used as an antidote to that.  John puts it like this towards the end of his book:  “A choice is unavoidable.  I once wrote that America is in the middle of another “irrepressible conflict” where white Americans will eventually be forced to choose between becoming a vibrant, multireligious, multiracial democracy, or a “hollowed out” democracy where one racial group rules the rest.  The status quo will no longer be sustainable.”

I highly recommend John’s book, and I hope that you’ll get it and get taken into its narrative – as Caroline put it, it is a page turner!  It will anger you, make you wonder, and inspire you.  Most of all, it will call you to give thanks for the vision and possibility of America that John calls us to see in this fine memoir.