Book Review: The Wounds Are the Witness: Black Faith Weaving Memory Into Justice and Healing

Book Cover Images image of The Wounds Are the Witness: Black Faith Weaving Memory Into Justice and Healing

by Yolanda Pierce

    List Price: $25.99

    Broadleaf Books (Feb 04, 2025)
    Hardcover, 216 pages
    Nonfiction

    Book Reviewed by Denolyn Carroll


    The Wounds Are the Witness speaks to the often disregarded or denied cycles of pain and trauma among marginalized and disenfranchised people, who have suffered and continue to suffer in silence while a willfully amnesiac nation questions whether there is or has ever been any real offense, injury, loss, or anguish. Author Yolanda Pierce, professor and dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, responds soundly in ten chapters bookended by an introduction and a conclusion that together highlight the varied wounds that bear witness to generations of abuse and thwarted legacies. After all, as she quotes from Zora Neale Hurston, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

    Interweaving her catalog of evidence with personal anecdotes, pertinent questions, and an abiding faith in God’s ability to heal, Pierce takes the risk “to write about the racial wounds and trauma this nation has inflicted and is still inflicting.” Why?

    …[Because] to be silent is to risk that stories will be forgotten, root causes of pains will be ignored, and extraordinary moments of healing will go unrecognized as a provision of God’s justice. As a womanist theologian—one who reads the biblical text through the lens of Black women’s experiences and wisdom—I believe our stories are too important to forget, and I have set myself to the work of a particular kind of memory. For wounded people, landscapes, and communities exist not only as a legacy of traumas and harms but as evidence of the undeniable power of memory and the unstoppable quest for justice.

    In Chapter 1, “Carrying the Bones: Wounded Remains,” Pierce calls into testimony stories told through the excavated bones of her forebearers: “When my enslaved ancestors weren’t allowed to speak—when their history wasn’t considered worthy of recording—their recovered bones found a way to speak, to testify,” she notes. “Their bones can give us a fuller account of not only their lives but of this country’s history and the ongoing cost of generations of genocide.”

    Even the soil bears witness. In Chapter 5, “The Soil Is Exhausted and So Am I: The Wounds of Creation,” Pierce references a trip to The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, that displays the history of slavery and racism in America. In one of the exhibits, she saw numerous large jars filled with soil from across the United States, each “engraved with the name of a lynching victim, along with the date and location where the person was killed.” She observes, “What deep sorrow this soil represents, what brutality this very dirt has known. It is a visual representation of spilled ancestral blood, still crying out from the ground.”

    Furthermore, Pierce adds, the soil in the areas from which these jars of dirt were taken is also exhausted—dead or dying “due to the hundreds of years of another form of racial violence: plantation slavery,” during which “unsustainable agricultural practices … depleted the soil.” Indeed, “Enslaved people easily saw the connections between how the soil was being treated and how they experienced bondage … how enslavers treated both them and the land as cheap, disposable, and exploitable resources, of which there seemed to be a never-ending supply.”

    As yet another example of her choice of voice over silence, in Chapter 6, “Trust Betrayed: Wounded in the House of a Friend,” Pierce notes the double-standards and hypocrisies in America’s treatment of its citizens of color. Regarding African American veterans, she asserts the following:

    …It is exceedingly difficult work to love the place that wounds you. America, while a beloved home, has deeply wounded so many of those who have loved and defended her best. In contemporary culture, we use the term wounded warrior to refer to active-duty military members or veterans who need mental or physical assistance when they complete a tour of duty or end their military service. But … when I hear of wounded warriors, I think, too, of the million-plus African American veterans who served during World War II and the deep psychological and spiritual wounds they endured.
    After honorably risking their lives in a war on foreign soil, they returned home to the contradictory messages of “thank you for your service” and “due to racism, we won’t be able to thank you for your service.”

    To remind us of the still existent gnawing wounds our history inflicted upon us, Pierce takes it to the cross, citing the story of Thomas, one of Jesus’s disciples who insisted on touching the Messiah’s wounds before he would believe He had resurrected from the dead:

    Even after Jesus had defeated death, he appears to the disciples as a man with wounds … Thomas’s request to touch and feel the wounds is to not only assuage his doubts but also to acknowledge the profound fact that healing takes time … If even the wounds of the risen Christ do not immediately close, why do we expect our own wounds to heal in such a hurry? (Chapter 8, “The Risen One: Until I Touch the Wounds”)

    From its achingly evocative title to its call-to-action conclusion, The Wounds Are the Witness is riveting. Pierce—a scholar of African American religious history, womanist theology, and religion and literature, as well as a public theologian, columnist, and activist—deftly pokes at an aspect of our ongoing individual and collective trauma that many would rather not touch. She is successful in part because she is a tell-it-from-the-heart faith-filled storyteller, who avoids the trap of hyperbole despite the profoundness of her topic. Her offering, grounded in theology, research, and real-life experiences, is at once pragmatic, unapologetic, and poetic. Each chapter is broken up into three sections preceded by a quote from the Bible or the likes of Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Pauli Murray, C. L. Franklin, E. B. White, Howard Thurman, and Nina Simone—great readability, plus gems at every turn.

    With The Wounds Are the Witness, Pierce, also author of Hell Without Fires and In My Grandmother’s House, presents timely critical insights into those “dangerous memories” that contain “the keys to resistance, agency, and hope.” Having gifted us with these attestations, she challenges us to, like her, “weave memory into the present”—lest we forget.


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