NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)–The last mental picture the book, “I Call You Friend,” leaves with readers is a rare one for contemporary America.
Four female friends — two black, two white — from very different backgrounds meet over lunch to discuss a book they’ve all worked on. The book is about race and real cross-cultural friendship, two subjects of personal significance and conviction running through each woman’s life.
“God is good. There is a race problem in this country. And we have experienced both,” the four friends say in the book’s introduction.
The women aren’t afraid to talk honestly and personally about race relations. Friendship, they say, is the missing piece in discussions about racial tensions.
Two of the women, Pamela A. Toussaint and Jo Kadlecek, put “I Call You Friend” onto paper, detailing through first-person narratives the unfolding lives, faith and friendship of Toussaint, Kadlecek, Andrea Clark and Elvon Reed Borst. The book was recently released by the Broadman & Holman publishing arm of LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention.
“Jesus was about the business of developing personal relationships across cultures — he came from heaven to earth! How can we do anything else?” the authors said in an interview conducted via e-mail. “Neither politics nor legislation nor, sadly, the church, have succeeded in bringing us into authentic relationships across race. Only friendship can do this.”
I Call You Friend shows the “coming up” of each woman through childhood; their individual “coming of age” through high school and college; their “coming together” in New York City; and a dialogue for the future that offers 25 ways others can improve cross-cultural relationships.
Toussaint, the only child of immigrants from the West Indian island of Grenada, grew up in the 1960s and ’70s in a middle-class black family in New York. In an America where black people had none of the confidence and sense of identity Toussaint saw on visits to Grenada, “Just living began to feel like one long exam.”
In suburban Colorado, Kadlecek grew up in the 1960s “feeling alienated and provided for, misunderstood and sheltered” in a “typically dysfunctional (white) middle-class family.” In the fifth grade, she learned for the first time about slavery.
One of 15 children growing up in an African American Arkansas farm family whose neighbors were Ku Klux Klan members, Borst became aware that she was living in two Americas by high school in the 1980s. “Life was just split in two: a white culture and a ‘colored’ culture. That’s the way it is.”
Raised by her “WASP-y but open-minded, liberal parents” in the 1960s and ’70s with a “sense of conviction and social consciousness,” Clark still was not prepared for an encounter with racial anger as a teenager in Baltimore. At a bus stop, an angry black girl spat on her cheek. “What had I done to her? Why did she spit in my face?” Clark wondered.
As their lives became woven together in New York, the women came to share a deep friendship, faith and mission that they wanted to tell others about.
“The more we talked about doing a book, the more we realized that there were not any books out there by women discussing race in the context of their faith,” Toussaint and Kadlecek said in an interview conducted via e-mail. “We also did not want it to be just another ‘how-to’ book, or an analysis of the current situation. We felt if we used the genre of story, it might reach more people. Jesus used stories more than sermons, didn’t he? We like to think our book is real, raw truth.”
Building friendships across race must be done in a safe and friendly environment, they said.
“This shouldn’t be difficult to create among Christians. It’s essential that personal stories shared are validated and not torn down or explained away, particularly the pain-filled experiences of many African Americans.”
Kadlecek added, “Until white people begin to enter into the pain of their black brothers and sisters while confronting their own sin of indifference, I’m not sure we’re going to see the body of Christ reflecting the unifying love that the world will notice.
“White Christians must begin to take the initiative in this effort and take steps to build authentic friendships. We need each other, and we must be able to admit that we are incomplete without each other.”
Readers of I Call You Friend are included in the book’s title, the authors said, explaining, “The reader is a friend because she/he, too, is invited to enter our friendships as a conduit to developing her/his own.”
“We’re hoping I Call You Friend encourages readers to say, ‘Hey, if they can do it, I can too.’ We also want to encourage people to develop natural friendships across race, based on common interests, and not to let differences keep them from pursuing those relationships.”
I Call You Friend can be purchased from LifeWay Christian Stores, other book stores or on-line at lifewaystores.com.
Searfoss is a freelance writer from Hermitage, Tenn. (BP) photo of the authors, Pamela A. Toussaint and Jo Kadlecek, posted in the BP Photos section of the Baptist Press area of www.sbc.net
