Jerald Walker Livres

Personal essays exploring identity, work, family, and community through the prism of race and black culture.

Presents a memoir of growing up with blind, African American parents, who were members of Herbert W. Armstrong's cult, the Worldwide Church of God, which believed that their members were divinely chosen and all others would soon perish in rivers of flame. The substantial membership was ruled by fear, intimidation, and threats. Anyone who dared leave would endure hardship for the remainder of this life and eternal suffering in the next, which would arrive in 1975, three years after the start of the Great Tribulation. With more than a hundred thousand members and more than $80 million (the equivalent of $265 million in today's highest) at its height, the failure of the prophecy to materialize led the then-elementary-aged author to question his faith and imagine the possibility of choosing a destiny of his own