Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism, and Mothering

by Rosemarie Freeney Harding, Rachel Elizabeth Harding

Overview

An activist influential in the civil rights movement, Rosemarie Freeney Harding’s spirituality blended many traditions, including southern African American mysticism, Anabaptist Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, and Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Remnants, a multigenre memoir, demonstrates how Freeney Harding's spiritual life and social justice activism were integral to the instincts of mothering, healing, and community-building. Following Freeney Harding’s death in 2004, her daughter Rachel finished this decade-long collaboration, using recorded interviews, memories of her mother, and her mother's journal entries, fiction, and previously published essays.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822358794
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	05/15/2015
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Rosemarie Freeney Harding (1930–2004) was an organizer, teacher, social worker, and cofounder of Mennonite House, an early integrated community center in Atlanta. She also cofounded the Veterans of Hope Project at the Iliff School of Theology.

Rachel Elizabeth Harding, daughter of Rosemarie Freeney Harding and Vincent Harding, is Associate Professor of Indigenous Spiritual Traditions in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Denver, and author of A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Daughter's Précis / Rachel E. Harding  ix

1. (the light)  1

I. Ground  5

2. Rye's Rites (poem)  7

3. Grandma Rye  9

4. There Was a Tree in Starkville . . .  15

5. Daddy's Mark  21

6. Joe Daniels: Getting Unruly  24

7. The Side of the Road  29

8. Papa's Girl  32

II. North  41

9. Snow and Spring in Woodlawn  43

10. Shirley Darden  52

11. Brother Bud's Death  54

12. Death, Dreams, and Secrecy: Things We Carried  57

13. Season  63

14. Elegant Cousins and Original Beauty  66

15. Warmth  71

16. Altgeld Gardens  75

17. Hot Rolls (short fiction)  82

18. Looking for Work  92

19. The Nursing Test  96

20.  In Loco Parentis (short fiction)  97

21. Mama Freeney and the Haints  107

22. Height  113

III. South  115

23. Hospitality, Haints, and Healing: African American Indigenous Religion and Activism  117

24. Mennonite House in Atlanta  127

25. The Next-Door Neighbor  137

26. Traveling for the Movement  140

27. Koinonia Farm: Cultivating Conviction  144

28. A Radical Compassion: His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Clarence Jordan, and Marion King-Jackson  155

29. A Song in the Time of Dying: A Memory of Bernice Johnson Reagon  163

30. The Blood House (a story outline)  165

31. Spirit and Struggle: The Mysticism of the Movement  168

IV. The Dharamsala Notebook  179

32. Sunrise after Delhi (poem)  181

33. The Dharamsala Notebook I  182

34. The Dharamsala Notebook II  194

V. Bunting 199

35. The Bunting  201

36. The Workshops and Retreats: Ritual, Remembering, and Medicine  217

VI. The Pachamama Circle  227

37. Pachamama Circle I: Rachel's Dream  229

38. Pachamama Circle II: Sue Bailey Thurman and the Harriets  231

39. Pachamama Circle III: A Choreography of Mothering  237

40. Mama and the Gods  241

AfterWords  243

41. Fugida: Poem for Oyá  245

42. Class Visits: Love, White Southerners, and Black Exceptionalism  247

43. A Little Wind  265

44. (the Call)  268

Appendix: Rosemarie's Genealogies  271

Acknowledgments  283

Index  287

What People are Saying About This

Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil - Emilie M. Townes

"I could not put this book down.  It is a work of love and a testament to the power of love between a mother and her daughter and an abiding belief in the possibilities we have to help create a more loving, humane world.  This is a book of astounding beauty and wisdom.  This is a memoir that encourages us to live into our best self. It is a read more than worthy of your time and will linger in your head and heart."

Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred - M. Jacqui Alexander

"A unique and provocative crossover text, Rosemarie Freeney Harding and Rachel Elizabeth Harding's Remnants troubles the boundaries of authorship, of genre, of discipline, of voice and agency. It hovers at the boundaries of the sacred and secular, but knits them together in the daily lives of practitioners and communities for whom a division is untenable, unthinkable even. It impels us to think deeply about the meaning of politics and the kinds of hidden intimacies that make committed public engagement possible, without succumbing to the unhelpful public/private binary. We need the stories of the kinds that are recounted here."

Alice Walker

"Remnants is an extraordinary gift. It is a kind of Rosetta Stone of the African American Woman's soul—all the 'remnants,' the bits and pieces Rosemarie carefully saved, remembered, nurtured, in her ancestors, relatives, and self coming together in this extremely useful compendium of wisdom, of sureness and insight that we will be able to use for generations to come."

Editorial Reviews

"Remnants will appeal to those who are interested in religion and social transformation. Social change advocates, justice seekers, grassroots organizers, nonviolent revolutionaries, race critical theorists, theologians, clergy, historians, womanists, ethicists, ancl educators will all find gems within Remnants.... Remnants provides hope for a better humanity."

Mennonite Quarterly Review - Dean J. Johnson

"Co-authored by Rachel and her late mother, [Remnants] is in its very composition both intimate and collaborative. ...It is a book of returning to the source as a resource for the future and present. There are lessons about human connection and resilience, and our capacities to be better to one another. Out of the particulars of these two lives, a window opens into Black life more broadly, in all of its complexity and interconnectedness with the vast networks of humanity."

Public Books - Imani Perry

[A] spirited compilation of ecumenical history, folk wisdom, fiction, memoir, and poetry. . . . The central message of Harding’s life is abiding love, passed down through generations, strengthened in the aftermath of grief, racial terrorism, and trauma. The book also tells the unusual story of Mennonite House, a pioneering center of interracial activism in Atlanta co-founded by Harding and her husband, and offers other insights that shape its powerful narrative.

Publishers Weekly

2015-02-17
A collaborative memoir in two voices that celebrates the life, creativity, and accomplishments of a little-discussed but no less important female civil rights activist.Rosemarie Harding (1930-2004) never achieved the iconic status of Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr. Yet she made many significant contributions to the civil rights movement, especially in the work she did to connect spirituality to the larger project of social justice. In this memoir, Harding tells the story of her life through a series of personal essays, fictional stories, and poems, which her daughter, Rachel, interweaves with her own memories and observations. The child of Georgia-born African-Americans who had migrated north to escape racism and violence, Harding grew up in the relative safety of Chicago. But when she was in her early 20s, she returned to the South with her husband as part of a church-based mission to use reconciliation and peacemaking as tools in the struggle for civil rights. Christianity was only one of the spiritual traditions upon which Harding drew for her work. Over time, she incorporated insights from others—including Tibetan Buddhism and Afro-Brazilian Candomblé—to help the African-American community transcend generations of "collective trauma." In the words of her daughter, Harding's ultimate goal was to teach people how to transform their pain and anger into "something useful...a song, a dance [or] some poetry for those following behind." Her own life eventually became a study in finding spiritual balance when she was diagnosed with an especially pernicious form of diabetes. Fighting for her dignity, Harding would come to a deeply visceral understanding that the journey to wholeness began from the " ‘remnant' quality of spirit" within the self that allowed for hope to shine through, even in the most desperate of circumstances. A wise and humane memoir.

Kirkus Reviews

"I could not put this book down.  It is a work of love and a testament to the power of love between a mother and her daughter and an abiding belief in the possibilities we have to help create a more loving, humane world.  This is a book of astounding beauty and wisdom.  This is a memoir that encourages us to live into our best self. It is a read more than worthy of your time and will linger in your head and heart."

Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil - Emilie M. Townes

"A unique and provocative crossover text, Rosemarie Freeney Harding and Rachel Elizabeth Harding's Remnants troubles the boundaries of authorship, of genre, of discipline, of voice and agency. It hovers at the boundaries of the sacred and secular, but knits them together in the daily lives of practitioners and communities for whom a division is untenable, unthinkable even. It impels us to think deeply about the meaning of politics and the kinds of hidden intimacies that make committed public engagement possible, without succumbing to the unhelpful public/private binary. We need the stories of the kinds that are recounted here."

Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred - M. Jacqui Alexander

"Remnants is an extraordinary gift. It is a kind of Rosetta Stone of the African American Woman's soul—all the 'remnants,' the bits and pieces Rosemarie carefully saved, remembered, nurtured, in her ancestors, relatives, and self coming together in this extremely useful compendium of wisdom, of sureness and insight that we will be able to use for generations to come."

Alice Walker

"I could not put this book down.  It is a work of love and a testament to the power of love between a mother and her daughter and an abiding belief in the possibilities we have to help create a more loving, humane world.  This is a book of astounding beauty and wisdom.  This is a memoir that encourages us to live into our best self. It is a read more than worthy of your time and will linger in your head and heart."

Emilie Townes