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Jamall A. Calloway on Imagining Eden
James Weldon Johnson’s poem “The Creation,” which anchors his classic collection, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1918), encapsulates everything I attempt to explain in my book, Imagining Eden: Black Theology and the Search for Paradise. Johnson’s poem relies on a particular African American hermeneutic that shows that when Black history, heritage, and experience are allowed to function as religious sources for theological reflection and biblical interpretation, we can unearth a treasure trove of truths lost when sources are restricted to evangelical rubrics. The first stanza is still incredible enough to make a reader stop and start over:
And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
I’m lonely—
I’ll make me a world.
At the outset, the poem reveals what it avoids. No mention of or investment in debating the creation of space-time. It is assumed. God is. And God moves. But that’s not the point. Johnson knows the first line will fly above controversy because he’s headed to a different zone that may spark it, a zone and register that is perhaps uncharted territory in typical theological texts: God’s interiority. According to Johnson, the voice of the poem, a Black preacher whose main source of reflection is his own imagination, thinks it’s not only possible but more than likely the truth that creation occurred because God was missing something. And that aching, that absence, that indescribable longing and yearning is something the preacher-poet in Johnson’s poem completely understands. It resonates and functions as the site of their connection. He knows loneliness, and therefore God must know it. He knows longing and yearning; therefore God must know it too.
He knows longing and yearning; therefore God must know it too.
As “The Creation” expanded in popularity to become one of the most anthologized poems in Black literary history, it also found a constant home across Black churches and Sunday schools. Children performed it in front of congregations. Adults recited it during the order of service. Even my mother-in-law, Adrienne Jackson, to this day reflects favorably on how she read the poem as a child, performed it with her best friend, and eventually dramatically read it to her children. Three little girls from child to toddler listened wide-eyed as she theatrically performed God searching and creating as portrayed in Johnson’s stanzas. And her story is one of millions.
This is where my book enters the conversation. I try to explain that moment with my mother-in-law and her children, that moment performed in Afro-Protestant and Catholic churches over the last 100 years. I try to expound theologically upon what that relationship is—the one between Black writer and biblical text, and the one where the parishioners assume both story and scripture are sacred compositions.
In Imagining Eden, I limit my analysis to the creation stories in the book of Genesis and my focus to popular novelists whose names are etched in history: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. All of them have written books that I consider sacred. And every one of these artists has followed Johnson’s lead and contributed to a discourse centered around creation and paradise. To show their theological depth and creativity, I pair each writer with a classical theologian. And in every chapter the two offer insights that I find inspirational, informative, and life giving. All in all, I believe Black art is capable of freeing. It is capable of liberating. And the more we engage it, the freer we become. I think God would have it no other way.
Jamall A. Calloway is an assistant professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University, an honorary research lecturer in the School of Religion, Philosophy, and Classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and the author of Imagining Eden: Black Theology and the Search for Paradise.