
Where Moses Is Leading Me — and It Isn’t the Promised Land
Hello, my name is Kimberly Burge, and I am a white woman.
I say that to neither boast nor apologize, only to let you know what’s occupying my mind these days. Actually I should expand that description. Along with being a white woman, I am a proud yet conflicted daughter of the South. “American By Birth, Southern By the Grace of God,” as Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and my Mama would put it. I have opinions on cornbread dressing and the perpetual bias against Southern accents. (Thank you for that reminder, Mr. President.) But I haven’t lived in the South for more than three decades, so I’m not entirely sure where my opinions come from.
I’m also a lifelong Christian who could recite the 23rd Psalm at the age of two, and who now, more often than not, feels embarrassed and sometimes enraged when I hear the things other Christians say. I want to scream out that these people do not get to speak for me. (And sometimes I do.) Some of these sentiments I find hateful and so far from the character of the Jesus Christ I know that I wonder how we can possibly be reading the same book. Except I know we are, because for centuries, the Bible has been used to justify all manner of things I find appalling, from slavery to anti-Semitism to the silencing of women to mistreatment of refugees and immigrants. If I lay claim to an identity as a Christian, then all that stuff belongs to me, too.
Recently, I discovered Moses.

Moses Henegar, I mean. Private in the 6th Alabama Infantry Regiment. Captured in DeKalb County and held as a prisoner of war at Camp Chase near Columbus, Ohio. After the Civil War, he returned home to Alabama and became a Baptist preacher.
He’s my great-great-grandfather, on my mother’s side. I found him on ancestry.com, and in the best photo I could locate, he looks exactly as I’d expect a Civil War veteran Baptist preacher to look. With his bushy beard and square face, I can also see a resemblance to my younger brother. Moses holds what I’m guessing is a Bible in one hand. I want to know what chapter and verse it’s opened up to. I want to know how he wielded the Scriptures during Reconstruction.
Because this man belongs to me now, too.
When I wrote a book about girls growing up after apartheid in South Africa, I was an outsider and therefore cushioned from that country’s racism. This wasn’t my history, I told myself, even though South Africa had intrigued me since the 1980s, at the height of the struggle to end apartheid. In high school and college, as a burgeoning activist, I set out to learn about this faraway place and the atrocities committed against blacks there. It was safe for me to do that. I could feel curious without feeling complicit.
I’ve always wanted to believe that I would have marched for Civil Rights in Mississippi or in Birmingham — birthplaces of my grandparents and my mother — had I been old enough in the Sixties. It’s easy to place a hypothetical version of yourself on the right side of history. It’s harder to do that when you don’t know where you came from, which part of this history links directly to your people.
Moses died in 1909 before his grandson — my grandfather, James Harold Henegar — was born in 1920. I never asked my Grandpa what he knew about his Grandpa. When you’re a child, how can you even conceive that your grandparents had grandparents?
There’s a lot I didn’t have a chance to ask Grandpa, because he died when I was fourteen. What did he hear from his family about the Civil War? What did he think of the Civil Rights marchers he saw on the news after he moved his young family away from Birmingham in the early 1960s to small-town Arkansas? And was there a reason they moved away just as this most segregated city in America began taking steps to integrate?
Sometimes I’ve been glad that I didn’t have a chance to ask, because I didn’t have to hear him confirm my worst suspicions.
But now I feel deeply curious.
I’ve come to realize how few words I’ve written about race and racism in my own country — in my own family — and I’m working to change that. Not out of any sense of complicity or guilt; I know these are poor drivers for change. Instead, I just want to know my history, what’s mine to own and thus to reject.
Is racism a family and cultural through line, passed along intentionally? Or maybe carelessly? Which is more insidious? And what stops it?
“In these turbulent days of uncertainty, the evils of war and of economic and racial injustice threaten the very survival of the human race. Indeed, we live in a day of grave crisis.”
Many days, these words ring true for me in 2018. But they come from the preface of Dr. King’s 1963 collection of sermons, Strength to Love. I’ve heard plenty of African Americans scoff at the idea that things are suddenly so much worse on the racial front. Incidents are just more blatant and visible in our viral age. People like me are finally paying closer attention.
My attention may be long overdue, but now that I’ve noticed, I can’t un-notice. And I don’t wish to stay quiet. If I don’t want anyone else speaking for me, then I best have something to say for myself about the racism I have inherited as a white Christian Southern American woman.
“Strength to Love.” That’s the strength I want to learn to wield. I know I have a ways to go. I hope you’ll keep reading and learning alongside me.
So what do you want to know about your family or your history that you’ve been afraid to ask up until now? Tell me here or on Twitter: twitter.com/Kimberly_Burge
