num_pages: 240
description: From the New York Times contributing opinion writer and award-winning author of Reading While Black a riveting intergenerational account of his familys search for home and hopeFor much of his life Esau McCaulley was taught to see himself as an someone who through hard work faith and determination overcame childhood poverty anti-Black racism and an absent father to earn a job as a university professor and a life in the middle class. But that narrative was called into question one night when McCaulley answered the phone and learned that his fatherwhose absence defined his upbringingdied in a car crash. McCaulley was being asked to deliver his fathers eulogy to make sense of his complicated legacy in a country that only accepts Black men on the condition that they are exceptional hardworking perfect. The resulting effort sent McCaulley back through his family history seeking to understand the community that shaped him. In these pages we meet his great-grandmother Sophia a tenant farmer born with the gift of prophecy who scraped together a life in Jim Crow Alabama; his mother Laurie who raised four kids alone in an era when single Black mothers were demonized as welfare queens; and a cast of family friends and neighbors who won small victories in a world built to swallow Black lives. With profound honesty and compassion he raises questions that implicate us What does each persons struggle to build a life teach us about what we owe each other? About what it means to be human? How Far to the Promised Land is a thrilling and tender epic about being Black in America. Its a book that questions our too-simple narratives about poverty and upward mobility; a book in which the people normally written out of the American Dream are given voice.
language: English
title: How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South
publisher: Convergent Books