TWO TREES

Colleton-Akins (My Experience, 2017, etc.) recollects the religiously infused lessons received from her father and writes about them with co-author and husband, Akins.

In 1978, while Colleton-Akins was attending college in Florida, her father (who is unnamed in the book) fell ill and invited her to visit. He requested that she bring a tape recorder to immortalize a series of wide-ranging lessons that began with and focused on the history of the Israelites, beginning with the Book of Genesis. Her father taught her that gentiles had suppressed those sections highlighting the special election of the Israelites by God, whose true name is Yahawah. Much of the biblical history he related corresponds to the conventional version, but there were notable deviations. For example, he said the existence of the white race dates back to the birth of albinos in Noah’s family line. Unhappy with their pigmentation, angels transformed them into Caucasians. He told his daughter that Lucifer not only tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden with forbidden fruit, but also tricked her into having sex with him. He recounted personal memories as well—overcoming alcohol addiction and protecting her from two strange men who repeatedly tried to steal her. Some of the tales are morbidly dark and presented almost parenthetically; for example, when the author was a young child, her godmother poisoned her milk with kerosene. With the exception of the biblical history, the remembrance is meandering and disjointed—the author’s father jumped without transition from biblical exegesis to tales of the Atlantic slave trade to a short biography of Harriet Tubman. He made macabre predictions about the imminent appearance of the Antichrist as well as the ensuing end of the world. The work is a loving homage to Colleton-Akins’s father, whom she obviously both adored and respected deeply. However, the prose is awkward and leaden, and many of the lessons seem out of place here: “The male, testosterone hormones, is the male trait to produce healthy sperm and to have an erection for pleasure.” Further, the author’s recollections are so idiosyncratically religious they’re unlikely to appeal to readers who don’t share her eschatological convictions.

A disorderly mélange of remembrances that won’t pique the attention of a broad audience.