I recently had another birthday on Thursday, September 4th. I turned fifty-seven and spent most of the day editing the manuscript of my new book. For some, the fact that I am a Virgo explains a lot about me and, perhaps, why I was in my office on the anniversary of my birth. I am not so confident in such things. But I do have a looming deadline.
I must admit, though, that I miss one particular ritual. Every year for close to two decades, because we were born on the same day twenty-five years apart and just down the road from each other on the Mississippi gulf coast, Albert J. Raboteau, my teacher and one of the major architects of the field of African American religious history, and I would talk and wish each other “Happy Birthday.” In 2021, he died of Lewy body dementia. I miss him and his quiet voice, especially on our birthday.
When Al retired, he gave me most of his books, at least the ones in his office at Princeton. He knew I coveted his library. As a graduate student, I would walk in and, before sitting down, I’d look to see what new books were added to the shelves or what books I had missed the last time we met. His interests were wide-ranging: from literature, philosophy, and experimental film to Catholic and Orthodox theology to, of course, American and African American religious history. A capacious mind.
I still remember a conversation in 1879 Hall, just outside of his office, about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. His attention to McCarthy’s sentences and language stood out. His comments about the pacing of the novel. He was inside the mechanics of what The Road achieved. I talked about how the novel made me reach for a scotch (I prefer Irish whiskey now). And I listened…closely. He was teaching me, yet again.
My first book, Exodus!, found its beginnings in a classic essay Al wrote entitled, “African-Americans, Exodus, and the American Israel.” As a graduate student I was obsessed with Black nationalism. In seminar, Cornel West had argued that black nationalism had no institutional presence in Black life. I countered, with the recklessness of the young, that “his church was a black nationalist institution.” I can still hear Cornel’s words and see his broad smile, “Well, brother Eddie, that’s a promiscuous understanding of Black nationalism, brother.” Al’s essay gave me resources to make good on the claim.
He also taught me how to move about the archive and gave me the latitude to ask my questions of the source material. In his own way, he trained me in the arts of historical research but did not try to make me a historian. And when an editor from the University of Chicago Press visited him at Princeton in search of a new book, he told him about my dissertation. He set up the meeting between the editor and me in his office. Introduced us and then left. I will never forget that.
When I returned to Princeton as a faculty member, we taught together. I had been writing about his classic book, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. On my reading, the book contained a theological argument. In Al’s hands, these enslaved Black Christians offered the world something powerful. No need to reach back to the early Christians for an example of the faith. That example could be found in the slaveholding south. In class, he talked about writing the book while a graduate student at Yale, working with Sydney Alhstrom and John Blassingame. He drew on slave narratives and spoke of his communion with the ancestors as he wrote. He could feel and hear them around him.
I mentioned that Toni Morrison once said that the slave narratives didn’t really give you a sense of the interior life of the slave. And with a quiet reserve and self-assurance, Al turned to me and said, “She’s wrong.”
That calm confidence, with no malice or arrogance, and his deep faith journey left an indelible mark on me.
But there was always something in Al’s eyes. Something beneath the calm – perhaps sadness, maybe a storm. He lost his father three months before he was born. His dad was shot and killed by a white man in Bay St. Louis for defending his wife. Al writes about it in his lovely memoir, A Sorrowful Joy. The white man was never prosecuted. Al writes about meeting the man’s son years later. Forgiveness followed. But sadness remained, I think.
Even so, I am reminded of his insistence about the power of what he called the holy ordinary: that the sacred can emerge out of the mundane—that the presence of the numinous can be experienced within our daily lives. Quoting the French Poet, Paul Eulard, Al believed that “there is another world, but it is within this one.”
I think we all need to remember this in these troubling days. So much nastiness demands our attention. Our eyes train on it. Algorithms keep the ugliness in our faces. So much so that the holy ordinary can go unnoticed. Beautiful acts of kindness and generosity, moments when political labels fall to the side and love breaks through are often drowned out and suffocated in the noise of our days and in the evil of times.
As many of you know, my mom has been undergoing radiation treatment. A couple of older white men have been on the journey with her. They didn’t know that treating the site of radiation with Aquaphor and cocoa butter could help make the treatment bearable (thanks, Jamila). My mom brought some Aquaphor to the treatment center and gave it to them. Days later, they told her it helped tremendously.
These old men are Trump supporters. To my eyes, they look like stereotypical working-class white men from Mississippi, and my mom has no misconception about who they are or what they may think of her. She told me that her kindness is not based on what they think. One of them recently finished his treatment. He smiled and suddenly hugged my mom. Told her, he loved her and urged her to get better. The holy ordinary.
Al insisted that we keep our hearts open to these moments. They are transformative. And, I guess, they can help us beat back the sadness. Thinking of him, I reached for A Sorrow Joy and randomly opened its pages to this underlined passage. “It is through us, if we permit it, that God reaches out to heal our wounds. And it is through our love for another that he transforms our sadness into joy.”
He is still teaching.
Happy Belated!
I love your stories. And I love your mother; her strength and wisdom are remarkable.
Also, the apple didn't fall far from the tree.
Thank you, Professor Glaude, for this post. The student has become the mentor for all the rest of us. Somewhere your friend, Al, is smiling.