The Half Wall
Close Readings of Inheritance
The half wall was not particularly remarkable.
It sat in the balcony of First United Methodist Church in Starkville, Mississippi, on the left side if you were facing the chancel. Painted white, it stood only about mid-calf high. An adult could easily step over it. In some places, the pews terminated into it, creating a literal barrier. In others, it simply divided the aisle.
I noticed it as a child not because it was architecturally interesting but because it was inconvenient. If you wanted to move from one side of the balcony to the other, you had to step over it.
So I did.
Over and over again.
I do not remember asking anyone why it was there. I simply accepted it as part of the architecture.
Years later, I began to wonder. Even now, I wonder if the wall is still there.
I do not get back to First United Methodist Church very often, and I know there have been renovations since my childhood. Perhaps it is gone. Perhaps it remains exactly where it always stood.
What I know is that I eventually began to wonder why it had been there in the first place.
I do not know its original purpose. I cannot say with certainty that it existed to separate Black worshipers from white worshipers. But in a church in Mississippi, with an entirely white congregation and an entirely Black Methodist church sitting directly across the street, the possibility is difficult to ignore.
Even if that was not its purpose, the wall still raises questions. Did anyone else ever wonder why it was there?
Were there people in the congregation who knew exactly why it was there?
Did earlier generations leave it because they had forgotten its meaning, because they thought it no longer mattered, or because no one had ever thought to ask?
Or did they leave it because they knew exactly why it was there? I do not know.
I only know that, years later, a small white wall in the balcony of a church became a question.
The wall, and the mere possibility that it could represent something sinister, eventually caused me to ask larger questions.
What else had I inherited without taking notice? What assumptions had become so familiar that I allowed them simply to become the architecture of my life? What stories, habits, and ways of seeing had been handed to me so gradually that I no longer recognized them as inheritances at all?
I have spent much of my life asking questions like that.
And yet, when I think about what I inherited, I cannot begin with the wall. I begin with First United Methodist Church itself.
The church that formed me was entirely white in my experience. My youth group was entirely white. Across the street stood the Black Methodist church, a reminder that even congregations sharing the same tradition sometimes inhabited different worlds, even when they shared the same street corner.
I did not think much about that as a child. It simply was.
What I can say is that First United Methodist Church did not teach me to fear people who were different from me or to regard them as less than myself. Quite the opposite. Through children’s Sunday school, sermons, hymns, liturgy, pastors, youth group, and the ordinary rhythms of church life, it taught me that God loved me and that God loved everyone else too.
Looking back, I think the church gave me many of the theological tools that would eventually lead me to ask difficult questions about the world I had inherited.
I remember another moment years later.
During my senior year at Starkville High School, my graduating class gathered in the gymnasium to take our class picture. There were 199 of us. The teachers directed us into the bleachers and told us where to sit generally, but they left it to us to figure out the details.
No one assigned seats.
No one told us where to go.
And yet, by the time we settled into place, all of the Black students were on one side and all of the white students were on the other, with an aisle separating the two groups.
No one seemed surprised. I certainly was not.
It simply happened.
Looking back, I find that moment more unsettling than I did at the time. We had all grown up together. Starkville was not a large town. We knew one another. We were friends and classmates. We had shared classrooms, ball fields, and much of our childhood.
And yet we still separated ourselves.
Years later, I would come to think of that class photograph as another kind of wall. No one had built it. No one had intended it. And yet there it was, a barrier we somehow constructed together without ever speaking of it.
Some underlying force was driving us.
I do not believe we invented that force ourselves. We had received an inheritance. Some of it had been taught explicitly. Some of it had seeped into us so gradually that we hardly noticed it. Some of it may have been little more than habit and familiarity. Whatever its source, it had become part of the architecture of our lives.
The thing about inheritances is that they seldom come to us in a clear or orderly way. They come to us as gifts and burdens, wisdom and assumptions, treasures and blind spots. Some help us see the world more clearly. Others obscure our ability to discern the truth.
The work of faith is learning the difference. I inherited many gifts.
I inherited a love for God and for the church. I inherited hymns and liturgy, the rhythms of the Christian year, and an early sense that God might be calling me into ministry. I inherited the safety of a congregation that gave me room to ask questions and a place where I learned that faith mattered.
Most of all, I inherited the story of Jesus.
It may have been little more than childhood Sunday school theology, but sometimes childhood Sunday school theology is the most Christlike of all. Before I learned all the reasons people give for drawing boundaries around God’s love, I learned that Jesus loved people.
I learned that he touched lepers, ate with sinners, welcomed children, spoke with Samaritans, and identified himself with the least of these. A golden thread seemed to run through all of Scripture: God loves people and expects us to do the same. God forgives people and expects us to do the same.
Even as a child, I found it difficult to believe that isolating people, discriminating against people, or treating people as other could possibly be acceptable in the eyes of God.
Not all of my inheritance came from institutions. Some of it came from people. As a child, the most important person in my life was my great-grandmother.
In my eyes, she was perfect.
I know enough about people and memory to understand that she was not actually perfect. She was a country Baptist woman from Mississippi, and it is entirely possible that she carried assumptions and prejudices that I was too young to see.
But that is not what I remember.
What I remember is kindness. Gentleness. Holiness.
Long before I had the language for it, I saw in her a person who seemed to be striving toward what John Wesley called Christian perfection—not sinlessness, but a life increasingly ordered by love.
What I remember most is making biscuits with her. Country biscuits.
I doubt I was much help. I probably made a mess more often than I contributed anything useful. But she never seemed to mind. She made room for me beside her at the kitchen counter and invited me into her work.
And, if I am being honest, I have spent much of my adult life trying to lose the pounds she helped me gain.
That is how children often learn love. Not through grand lessons or profound speeches, but by being welcomed, by being included, by being given a place at someone’s side.
The people who loved me best were not perfect people. They were products of their time and place, as we all are.
But they also handed me gifts.
They taught me kindness and gentleness. They taught me hospitality and generosity. They taught me that faith mattered and that people mattered.
And those gifts eventually gave me the tools to examine the blind spots that came with them.
I also received gifts from a tradition that was not fully my own.
I learned this in small glimpses: through funerals, through the occasional joint service, through Christmas community gatherings. Over the years, I came to love the music, the preaching, the energy, the emotion, the hand fans moving in unison, and, of course, the food.
I discovered another way of telling the story of Jesus.
The Jesus I encountered there was deeply familiar and yet wonderfully new. He was proclaimed with an urgency and importance that made it clear he had a deeper or different meaning in the life of that community of faith. There was a call for deliverance that was unique from my experience, born from an inheritance different from my own.
I sometimes wonder what gifts we deprive ourselves of when we allow walls—literal or figurative—to remain standing.
My own tradition contained both inheritances and counter-inheritances, moments of conformity and moments of courageous resistance.
As a youth, I encountered Keith Tonkel. Only later did I become aware of his role in Born of Conviction, a 1963 statement in which twenty-eight white Mississippi Methodist ministers publicly opposed racial segregation, and of the courage it took for clergy to challenge the assumptions of their culture.
That realization was something of an epiphany for me. It opened my eyes to the problems of inheritance.
The signers of Born of Conviction understood that Christian faith sometimes requires us to challenge the assumptions of our culture, even when doing so is costly. Sometimes deeply costly. Life-trajectory-altering costly.
I sometimes wonder whether some of those lessons are slipping away.
Years later, one of my professors at Duke Divinity School, Dr. Amy Laura Hall, taught us the discipline of close reading.
Nothing was exempt from examination. Every assumption required examination.
Texts. Traditions. Institutions. Practices. Inheritances.
Everything could be read closely. Everything could be interrogated. Everything could be asked to reveal what it was saying and what it was hiding.
I have often thought about her while reflecting on that small white wall in the balcony of my childhood church.
Looking back, I realize that Dr. Hall gave me the words and the mechanism to do what George and McKinley, two older Louisiana pastors, had been asking me to do for many years.
She taught me how to examine inheritances, to interrogate assumptions, and to read closely the stories, symbols, and practices that had shaped me long before I knew to question them.
The wall may have had an entirely innocent purpose. I still do not know. But close reading taught me that the question itself matters.
Even if the wall meant nothing, someone unfamiliar with its history might reasonably ascribe meaning to it, drawing that meaning from the context and history of the South.
Even if it had another purpose entirely, it still communicated something. The same is true of all inheritances.
We inherit stories, symbols, practices, and instincts. Some reveal truth. Some obscure it. Some require us to ask difficult questions, not because we are looking for reasons to condemn our ancestors, but because we are trying to understand ourselves.
Perhaps that is one of the responsibilities of faith: to look closely at what we have inherited, to tell the truth about it, and to decide what deserves to be carried forward and what must be left behind.
A few weeks ago, my friend Tasha told me that after living in her neighborhood for years, she suddenly realized that every single street bore the name of a Louisiana plantation.
Some of the names were not obvious because they preserved the names of plantations long erased from memory.
She had driven those streets countless times. She knew every turn and every house. Yet she had never really seen the names.
Now she could not unsee them.
The names had not changed. She had. Or perhaps she had simply learned to read more closely.
That is how inheritances often work. They remain invisible until something causes us to ask a question. Once we do, the landscape changes.
The plantation names were not walls in any literal sense. Yet they functioned much the same way. They were remnants of an inheritance hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone to ask a question.
The South is simply my inheritance. It is not the only place that leaves complicated inheritances.
During my time in Belfast, I learned that inheritances are often written on the landscape. A painted curb or a mural could tell you where you were and something of the history that had shaped a neighborhood long before anyone introduced themselves.
Northern Ireland is hardly unique. Every place carries its own inheritances, its own memories, and its own wounds. The North has them no less than the South—Ireland and America.
Every culture leaves gifts and burdens to those who come after it. Every generation inherits stories, symbols, assumptions, and wounds.
The question is not whether we have received an inheritance. The question is what we will do with it.
We are not responsible for what previous generations handed to us. We are responsible for what we do with it.
The measure of every inheritance is the story of Jesus.
Not the story of Jesus encumbered by our prejudices, our fears, our politics, or the baggage we have asked him to carry.
The story of Jesus as clearly as we can possibly see him.
Part of the journey of faith is the lifelong work of discerning who Jesus really is and who Jesus expects us to be.
Perhaps that is why I still think about a small white wall in the balcony of my childhood church.
I still do not know why it was there. Perhaps I never will.
But it taught me to ask a question.
And sometimes a question is the beginning of seeing.
If these essays have encouraged you, challenged you, or helped you see something differently, I would be honored if you shared Drawing Water from the Well with a friend.