Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods is now available wherever books are sold.
Many people think of a book as the product of one person spending innumerable hours in silence. I think that a book is more a chorus of voices, though it is also the product of one person glued to a chair trying to bring order to the chaos of the blank page. Today I think of all the members of the chorus that made this book come to life. I won’t try to list them all here, but there are dozens of friends, mentors, and colleagues who helped. There are several dozen people I interviewed, plus numerous librarians and archivists. And there is the team at Fortress Press. I tried to capture everyone’s names in the book’s Acknowledgements.
On this morning when this particular book hits shelves and mailboxes, I have many feelings. The primary one is gratitude. Some of the other feelings are hope that this book will find its audience; fear that it won’t; satisfaction at competing the work of six years; melancholy for the longing to get it done, now replaced by the uncertainty of what is next; nervousness while waiting for reader feedback.
But mostly I feel gratitude. I've written some of my thanks into the “Acknowledgements” at the outset of the book. I've told many people directly. I've inscribed it into the title page for many readers. And I mean it all. I'm overwhelmed with thankfulness.
This work has been difficult, both intellectually and spiritually. It would not have been completed without a host of people who assisted in every step of its production. Today is a hugely important milestone in the journey from idea to completed project.
Mike Collins asked me about this on Charlotte Talks last week. (That's a popular local radio talk show, for the many of you outside Charlotte.) Why a book? And to what end? My response is that I'm clear on what this milestone is and is not: I wrote a book. It is big and complex and full of original research, and yet, according to Collins, “it reads like a novel.” That’s an enormous accomplishment. But a book is not justice.
I'm committed to using this work to the best of my ability to provoke, cajole, inspire, agitate, catalyze, bother, facilitate, irritate, promote, and otherwise influence the work of justice in the world.
To those of you reading, thank you. I hope this story seizes you the way it did me. I want to know what you think. Even more than what you think, though, I pray that this work will affect what you do to work for justice in the world. I’d like to hear about that as well.
Have Book, Will Travel: Authors are always ready to talk about their work. I have seminars, sermons, and book talks ready to go. For local groups, my walking tours get you into the city and onto the streets where all the stories of exclusions and invisibilities that I’ve written about still live. Not local to Charlotte? This work speaks to your context as well. As Chanequa Walker-Barnes says in the Foreword, “This is not just a North Carolina story. It is not even a unique story. But Greg’s telling of it is.”
In particular, I’m looking for some west coast connections for late September-early October, and am looking to fill out some Northeast US travel in mid-October. Contact me at grjarrell@gmail.com for booking.
One Last Note: Here’s one of my favorite releases of the last few years.
My copy should be here in the next few days. I am SO excited to own this book and read it again. I'm grateful and still in awe that I was able to be part of that Fortress Press team.