WHERE THE LIGHT FELL

Yancey, who was raised as a fundamentalist, has written about his faith in more than two dozen books. Although he drew on personal experiences for those books, this is his first true memoir, a reflection on family, spirituality, education, and racism. After his father died of polio when he was 1, Yancey and his older brother grew up in Georgia within what he now calls a culture of “white-racist-paranoid-fundamentalism.” His mother taught Bible classes, and his home looked like “a Christian gift shop,” with plaques and wall calendars featuring Bible verses and Voice of Prophecy in the magazine rack. For most of his childhood, his family lived in a trailer, “a perfect symbol of my world at home and church: narrow, rectangular, cloistered, metallic.” Church services on Sunday mornings and evenings, Wednesday prayer meetings, vacation Bible school: The church dominated his life, instructing him “what to believe, who to trust and distrust, and how to behave.” Also ubiquitous was prejudice. “As a true son of the South,” he admits, he was “born and bred a racist.” As the civil rights movement erupted, Yancey, like his neighbors, feared integration. In Atlanta, he ate at a restaurant where Black waitresses, dressed as plantation slaves, sang gospel songs to the diners; boys in slave costumes displayed the menu “on sign boards hung around their necks.” Throughout his adolescence, the author believed in the “myth of the Lost Cause” and the heroism of the Confederacy. Yancey chronicles his mother’s wrath and rages; his brilliant brother’s descent into mental illness; his own refuge in school and books; and his struggle to define and embrace his faith. “In the end,” he writes, “my resurrection of belief had little to do with logic or effort and everything to do with the unfathomable mystery of God."

A forthright recounting of a rocky journey to self-knowledge.