I saw God in everything. My childhood spirituality matured into mysticism. As a born-and-raised East Tennessean and the granddaughter of a Seventh-day Aventist minister, my nature and upbringing led me to the faith. Surrounded by majestic purple mountains, the natural world seemed alive and thinly veiled. As a child, it struck me as unpleasantly. I saw something sacred. Inside the white tail is a sugar maple tree. Mid-autumn harvest moon. I heard the still little voice of the perfect red of Grainger country heirlooms filling the valleys all around me in the winding emerald scum. I was able to touch God. As Plath said, I too “felt my lungs expand at the inundation of the landscape: the air, the mountains, the trees, the people.” I have always wanted to worship in my heart.
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Faith is a central theme in my collection. good woman. All of the women in this book struggle with their own personal ethics. Some women are pious, confident, and act without thinking, while others are doubtful, suspicious, and sensitive. All humans are imperfect and seeking. Their morals vary widely. Their beliefs tell their own story.
I chose to write carefully about black religious experiences in this book. I wanted to give voice to the way I observed and felt them as a child, young woman, and adult. Naturally, there are nuances to the “Black religious experience.” I saw this firsthand. My faith has given strength and burden to the women around me.
I come from a family deeply rooted in Seventh-day Adventism (SDA), a religious tradition that has shaped my family’s identity for generations. Fate welcomed me into the SDA family. Tradition has protected us. My great-grandfather was an orphan in Chattanooga who was adopted by Adventist educator and philanthropist Almira S. Steele into the Steele Home for Needy Children, the South’s first orphanage for black children. I was adopted. His son, my grandfather, became a prominent Adventist minister in the South and even built his own congregation in Knoxville. My parents met and started a family at an Adventist HBCU.
It is difficult to know one’s origins when one’s history is erased. Faith bridged the gap in my extended family. provided an explanation. The promise of eternity provided rest from suffering. He made a way! The elders always said, As the United States becomes increasingly secular, it has become common to discount religion as obsolete. But this reductive and elitist mindset misses the nuances of these very personal experiences.
Each religious experience leads to a deeper and more universal origin story.
good woman There was a need to restore power to the validity of experience, honoring the wisdom and reduction within belief itself. Each religious experience leads to a deeper and more universal origin story. Everyone throughout eternity has asked the same thing. Why are we here? what is our story?
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Before I became a writer, I planned to become a pastor. I studied religion in college, sang in a gospel choir, and interned at various churches to prepare for my calling. Once, one summer while working with pastors at a Presbyterian church in the Deep South, I stopped by this sanctuary after work and paused to admire the neo-Gothic architecture. The jewel-encrusted stained glass sparkled in the afternoon sun. In each vibrant pane, millions of white faces were frozen in a bright cobalt glow. A strange feeling came over me. Doubt.
The skin was peeling off. I kept feeling like I wasn’t ready for a missionary life. What wisdom could I have offered someone at the age of 23? I had a lot of questions, many of which were harmful to dismantling, deep-seated beliefs that I couldn’t get rid of so easily. I needed distance. The best thing about that summer was the community. The stories people have shared with me, the frustrations and joys that come from living everyday life with others. I often thought about my family. And I continued to write every day, taking inventory of the times that I knew had changed me.
Once, while having lunch after church with my host father, he asked me where I was planning to apply to seminary. I joked that I wanted to get an MFA. “Poetry or novels. Maybe.” We laughed and continued eating, while I made a list of schools I would apply to if I had the courage. I knew I was telling the truth. The following fall, I enrolled in the Savannah program and vowed to find a way to write about local people.
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I learned the story on the Sabbath. As all good Adventist families do, we kept the fourth commandment. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy, quite literally. After church on the Sabbath, we didn’t do much. I could not do it. No TV, no music, no radio. So we were either silent or talking to each other. Folk tales filled the space to kill time. My ancestors, coincidentally, sounded like they came straight out of Biblical antiquity.
Members of the family were moonlit as Cain and Abres, Solomon, David, Bathsheba, and Mary Magdalene. We joked about the woman in us. Are you Mary (lazy, selfish, impulsive, creative) or Martha (hard-working, self-righteous, dense and tidy)? These stories depicted major changes that transcended reality. We had all kinds of people: orphans, chemists, fortune-tellers, poets, and they were always accompanied by miracles. Although emotions and logic clashed as I grew up, I cherished my family’s unwavering faith in the God of my childhood. Despite my growing disbelief, I vowed to cultivate, study, and protect it.
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The older I get, the more I see the full picture and shadow of these stories. Like all myths, they speak to our deeper human conditions, including complex trauma, PTSD, horrific racism, abandonment, war, brutality, and poverty. I wondered about the literal truth behind them, but most of all I wished I could have seen and felt my ancestors in this life. I missed people I had never met. Listening to the book of Exodus depicting the plight of the Israelites in Sabbath school made me think about the resilience of my own lineage. I imagined a family wandering through the wilderness, chasing a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, heading for their promised land. where were they now? Have they ever made it? Their journey was worth knowing.
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good woman Written by Halle Hill, available from Hub City Press.
