Chapter Sixteen
Is This Martin’s Dream for Me?
From their first meeting, the conversations in Sandra’s Huddle were very raw. The curriculum focused on helping people explore their relationship with Jesus, but their conversations about faith inevitably intersected with conversations about race. When one of the white women admitted to voting for Trump, another Black woman responded plainly. “I do not trust white women,” she said. The other women in the group nodded in understanding. “It is not my responsibility to educate them,” the woman continued. “Get your own house in order before you come to me.” Sandra loved it. The Huddle reminded her of what it felt like to attend a Black church. Unlike her other experiences at Crossroads, it was a place where she could bring her full self as a Black woman, a mother, a follower of Christ, and an advocate for justice. The women in the group shared meals together, daily texts, and frequent social interactions. For Sandra, these women became an important part of her journey to rediscover her own identity as a Black woman.
Sandra still had to confront the pain points she had been avoiding in her marriage. After her camping trip a year earlier, she committed to trying to make her marriage work—but in a way that allowed her to be fully herself. Instead of walking away from conversations about race, she wanted to dive into them.
But they were struggling. Most days, her husband left the house before the children woke up and came home after they went to bed. Household duties accumulated endlessly: breakfast, dishes, school lunches, drop-off, grocery shopping, laundry, errands, pickup, naps, snack time, dinner, baths, bedtime. She and her husband couldn’t venture into the conversations she wanted without time to have them. Despite sometimes despairing, Sandra kept trying, fueling an ember of hope with her faith.
Patterns of patriarchy infusing the choices Sandra and her husband made about the division of household labor were not uncommon in evangelical Christian (and many other) marriages. Women took care of domestic duties; men ruled the roost. It had not always been so. In the nineteenth century, Victorian Christianity had actually emphasized gentility and restraint for both men and women. Internecine wars within white evangelicalism, however, begot aggression as fundamentalists, modernists, and other groups fought for primacy in the faith. As historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez documented in her aptly titled book Jesus and John Wayne, aggression became equated with masculinity in ways that shaped assumptions about the appropriate division of household labor. As the twentieth century progressed, white evangelicals realized they could gain more adherents by playing into patriarchal conventions in society, feeding the masses that which felt familiar and safe. Patriarchy became further entrenched. By the twenty-first century, many evangelical women had joined Sandra in resisting that pattern.
Sandra remembered her father’s reproach years before, when she had first considered marrying a white man: “I did not raise you to be some white man’s housewife.” Sandra had scorned her father in that conversation, but his words stayed with her. Now, as she moved through her beleaguered days, she kept thinking about her father’s words. It’s like I’m a house slave, she realized with a shudder. Once she had that image in her head, she couldn’t dislodge it.
As her home life deteriorated, Sandra’s relationships with the women in the Huddle and on the Justice Team became even more vital. When she was with those groups, she felt an acceptance she lacked at home.
She texted her husband before her weekly Huddle meeting to make sure he would be home in time to watch the children. He had been late the week before, forcing her to scramble at the last minute to find alternate childcare arrangements. He did not respond. Finally, she called him to ask what time he would come home. He sighed and enumerated all the problems she was creating by pulling him away from work. Layers of desire (to attend the Huddle), duty (to be faithful to her husband’s needs), and doubt (what was the right thing to do?) collided in Sandra’s mind. She knew he was trying to make her feel guilty, but she refused to comply. She had to prioritize her own needs, and she knew she had to see the women from the Huddle.
“Fine,” he finally said. “How long will you be gone?”
“We’ll only be meeting for an hour. And I need a little time to get there and back,” Sandra said. She knew the meetings often ran over time, but she worried her husband would not come home if he thought she would be gone too long.
“I’ll come if you can be home in ninety minutes,” he said.
She knew that would not be enough time. She considered objecting, but hung up instead.
As soon as her husband arrived home to watch the children, Sandra jumped in the car and raced to her friend’s house. When she walked inside, seeing the other women immediately made her shoulders relax. She could feel her lungs expanding as she breathed in air that felt lighter. The other women hugged her and invited her to sit down. One of the white women was in the middle of a story describing how the Black Lives Matter sign on their front door had been vandalized. This woman and her family lived in a largely white neighborhood in Cincinnati. A Black Lives Matter sign on their porch had been stolen nine times during the last year. This time, the thief stole their sign in the middle of the night and replaced it with a Confederate flag.
The women in the Huddle were pained but unsurprised. The callous assertion of white supremacy into their lives no longer astonished them. They shifted into a discussion of the Bible reading for that week. Sandra glanced nervously at her watch. Thirty minutes had already passed. She tried to pay attention to the conversation, but was visibly distracted. Her tension increased with each passing minute, prompting the other women to look curiously at her. Sandra knew they wanted to understand the source of her anxiety.
She had already shared with them the difficulties she and her husband had talking about race. But she wasn’t sure how to explain the fights they had about childcare, household chores, and the complex structure of their lives. On the one hand, she felt like it was her responsibility to take care of the house and the children, and she loved being with them. But her husband had been making her feel increasingly guilty about the way she was running the household. His objections made her feel insecure. She was no longer sure who was right.
She kept glancing at her watch. About eighty minutes after she had left home, a break in their conversation emerged. Sandra jumped up to leave, ignoring the quizzical looks from her friends. She abruptly hugged them all goodbye and rushed out of the house. She didn’t have time to address their curiosity.
She jumped into her Mazda minivan and started racing home. Her husband called her, but she ignored it. She heard the familiar ping of a text from him coming through. When she hit a red light, she sent a quick response: “Five minutes away.”
When she walked in the door, he said, “You’re late. I’ve been calling you.” Sandra ignored him. She started picking up toys around the house and putting them in the right places. The familiar motions soothed her. Blocks in one bin. Art supplies in another. Stuffed animals in the corner. But he kept following her around, repeatedly asking why she was late. She put dirty clothes in the hamper, empty cups in the sink.
“You’re not listening to me,” her husband said. “Tell me why you were late.”
Something inside Sandra broke. Sandra had spent most of her life allowing other people to answer the fundamental question What should I do? for her. It was a deceptively simple question whose answer required people to make a complex assessment of what they valued and how they were going to go about attaining it. Parents dictated the answers for their children. Schools dictated to students. Employers dictated to employees. But somewhere in the morass of growing, learning, and working, humans had an ineffable need to carve space to answer that question for themselves. Adulthood should have bestowed on Sandra the autonomy to answer the question independently, but it did not. Instead, her church, her husband, her white friends—they all tried to endow her with a statement of what she should value in life and how she could strategize to attain it.
As her husband escalated his attempts to bend her to his will, driving her from the solidarity she craved with her Huddle, Sandra realized that she had a sphere of influence she had never claimed. Different people would always value different things. Sandra and her husband might never want the same things. But despite how different they were from each other, they each possessed the right to search for ways to make the next day better than the one before. Sandra did not have to conform to his values. Instead, she had to carve her own space to act, to find ways for their spheres of influence to exist alongside each other. She had to claim her own autonomy.
Sandra whipped around. She looked directly at her husband, staring into his eyes as she yelled back. He was already on edge. The exchange erupted immediately into a shouting match. This time Sandra refused to back down. They fed off of each other’s anger. The shouting got louder, until eventually, he stormed out of the house.
Sandra convinced her husband to enter into counseling with her. She had already been divorced once, and she didn’t want to get divorced again. Sandra pushed aside her fights with Chuck and the church over Issue 1 and the church’s stances on racial injustice. She needed the church’s support. It was still, after all, her church. She reached out to Darin and explained what had been happening. He offered church funds to pay for their marriage counseling.
Sandra and her husband saw each other in counseling and in the moments they had to get together for the children. She reestablished a set of routines with the kids and her household that worked for her. An avid journaler since childhood, Sandra began writing in the mornings again before the children awoke. The rare moment of solitary quiet gave her an opportunity to be in regular conversation with God. She read self-help books and threw herself into Bible study with the Huddle. She was not ready to open up to the entire group because she still felt some shame about her situation, but she engaged wholeheartedly with the weekly explorations of her relationship with Jesus. These discussions became a way for Sandra to ask herself what kind of person she wanted to become.
She wrote a poem in her journal, “Is This Martin’s Dream for Me?,” reflecting on the sacrifice that her ancestors had made to fight for civil rights. Was she living up to the ideals they had imagined for their Black descendants? She thought about her father’s sharp admonition about marrying a white man. She had ignored his advice and was now raising biracial children, worried they might lose their Black identity.
In counseling, Sandra finally forced her husband into conversations about their relationship that he had refused to engage in before. She shared her poem with him and described how it felt when he downplayed her Black identity. Their goal was to learn to disagree productively with each other. For the first time, they were able to have a discussion that didn’t devolve into a shouting match. After a couple of months, Sandra felt like she could sleep at home again on the weekends. It took several more months to figure out a way they could both feel comfortable. Through counseling, they negotiated a set of guidelines about communication, independence, and household responsibilities. She wasn’t sure what his acquiescence to these guidelines meant, but she was certain that she was standing up for herself more than she ever had before. Sandra prayed that all would be well.