Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ is a theological presence in Austin’s memoir whose meaning is formed through Black church life, the interpretation of Scripture, and the losses that force Austin to reconsider whose lives count as worthy of mercy. The figure she encounters is not confined to private salvation: Jesus Christ attends to poverty, illness, racial injustice, imprisonment, and the possibility of belonging. Across the memoir, this understanding becomes a basis for anger at injustice and for a reconciliation that requires changed relationships and power, not merely good intentions.

Identity and First Encounter

Austin first meets Black Jesus at ten years old, after her father remarries and the family begins attending a Black church in Toledo. Before then, her experience of worship had largely come from school chapels, with Christian contemporary music, illustrated Bibles, testimony, and an invitation to accept Jesus Christ as Savior. Those services were treated as though their practices spoke equally to every body. The difference she discovers in the new church is therefore not simply a change in music or setting: it is an encounter with a faith in which Black people and their lived circumstances are fully present.

The memoir presents this figure through Austin’s immediate response: she falls in love with a Jesus Christ who sees the poor, the sick, and the hurting; who has plans for her beyond keeping her a virgin; and who loves and celebrates Blackness. This is a personal theological recognition, not a claim that the earlier chapel services lacked religion. Rather, their version of worship had not made the same connection between faith and the particular realities of Black life. In the Black church, Jesus Christ’s concern reaches beyond an individual soul to the conditions in which people live.

Worship, Scripture, and Belonging

The congregation makes that understanding tangible. Austin recalls the perfume in the fluorescent-lit hallway, the women’s elaborate hats and dark stockings, the men’s suits and snakeskin shoes, and strangers greeting the family warmly. Inside the sanctuary, sunlight falls through stained glass onto pea-green carpet as the organ plays and the congregation stands, sways, and claps together. The choir director creates a new version of the music rather than simply conducting a fixed arrangement; the choir answers with shouts, and the congregation joins in its own stream of hallelujahs. Austin’s account locates her encounter with Jesus Christ in a shared practice shaped by Black voices, bodies, and musical invention.

The pastor’s preaching deepens that recognition. He reads Scripture in its formal language and then retells its events in terms that sound contemporary and familiar: injustice, broken relationships, and the pain of being called names. His physical effort at the pulpit, where he moves until he needs a towel for the sweat on his forehead, gives the sermons a bodily intensity. Their recurring assurance is that God is with the congregation. Austin describes the church as a family whose members call one another brother and sister, then Auntie, Uncle, and Momma as their bonds grow closer. The care and belonging she experiences there help explain why Jesus Christ’s concern for people is not an abstraction in her account; it is encountered within a community.

Only in adulthood does Austin hear the name James Cone or read about Black liberation theology. By then, she understands that she had already encountered its liberating force in that Baptist church. The sermons take seriously people unable to pay utility bills or find transportation, people struggling with addiction, and people wounded by family members, former partners, or supervisors. They also speak of resisting sin and temptation, but in language Austin finds embodied and connected to actual lives. The church’s insistence that hardship is not the end of the story joins moral expectation to care rather than separating religious teaching from material need.

Anger as a Force for Liberation

Austin’s understanding of Jesus Christ also makes room for anger. As she learns to trust her own anger, write, preach, and speak, she recognizes that it can lead to creativity and connection rather than leaving her isolated. She relates this conviction to an episode in Scripture in which Jesus Christ confronts corrupt Temple officials: he overturns furniture, releases animals, blocks doorways with his body, carries a whip, and drives people from the building. In Austin’s reading, the disruption makes room for those at the margins, including the poor, the wounded, and children.

The episode matters because it contests the assumption that anger is necessarily destructive. Austin imagines that newspapers might describe Jesus Christ’s anger as destruction, while those without power would recognize the freedom it creates: the freedom to belong, to heal, and to participate fully in God’s house. This is her interpretive contrast, grounded in the actions she recounts. Jesus Christ’s anger is not presented as an excuse for harm without purpose; it confronts exclusion and clears space for people denied access. That scriptural example helps Austin understand anger as something that can support a vocation and challenge unjust arrangements.

The Accused and the Incarcerated

Dalin’s death makes this theology more demanding. After Dalin dies in prison, struck by lightning, Austin grieves and directs anger toward God, whom she believes could have saved him. When that first fury passes, questions remain about the state’s responsibilities toward incarcerated people, Dalin’s possible experiences of unjust police encounters, and mandatory minimum sentencing. His death leads Austin to study the criminal justice system in relation to the Black community and to ask what her theology says about Black lives unlike her own, beyond the privileges of her private white Christian education and ministry life.

Austin rejects the idea that Dalin’s life was less valuable because he failed to meet a standard of Christian innocence or perfection. She sees a parallel between the way Black people are labeled criminals and the way white criminals may still be regarded as people who did something wrong: Black people, by contrast, are made to earn the right to live. Jesus Christ changes the terms of Austin’s understanding. She recognizes Jesus Christ as accused and incarcerated, and as crucified with the charge against him displayed above his crown of thorns. This identification cannot bring Dalin back, Austin acknowledges, but it matters because her God knows what Dalin’s body endured. The consequence is a wider account of racial justice and reconciliation, no longer limited to relations between Black and white church members.

Reconciliation and Its Demands

Austin presents reconciliation as part of Jesus Christ’s work: through the cross, Jesus Christ becomes peace between God and humanity. The memoir connects that account to the Christian message that those in Christ become a new creation and are entrusted with a ministry of reconciliation. Jesus Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection provide the pattern through which Austin understands the possibility of reunion and transformation—not only in individual hearts or churches, but eventually in the wider world.

That theological claim does not make reconciliation a matter of protecting white feelings. Austin argues that it requires attention and power to move toward the oppressed and the powerless, and that diversity without a change to existing authority is insufficient. Jesus Christ’s ministry, as Austin understands it, gives her freedom to tell the truth, create, teach, and write without making white people’s reactions the condition for racial justice. She can join people already committed to transformation instead of waiting for universal white agreement. Thus the figure encountered in a Toledo sanctuary returns in the memoir as both a source of belonging and a measure of social change: Jesus Christ is with the poor, the wounded, and the accused, and reconciliation must take their lives and claims seriously.