Julius Lester was born the son of a black Methodist minister in the south. His book Lovesong is a beautifully written account of his spiritual journey away from the conventions of his Southern heritage and Methodist upbringing, culminating in his personal self-discovery through a conversion to Judaism. Growing up in the turbulent civil rights era South, Lester was often discouraged by the disconnectedness between the promises of religion and the realities of his life. He used the outlets available to him to try to come to grips with this split and somehow reconcile the injustices he was witnessing with the purity of religion. He became a controversial writer and commentator, siding with neither blacks nor whites in his unconventional viewpoints. He became a luminal figure of the times, outside of the conventional labels of race, religion, politics, or philosophy. Lester’s spiritual quest would take him through the existential landscape of his Southern, Christian upbringing, into his ancestry, winding through some of the holiest places on the planet and into the spiritual depths of the world’s major religious cultures. His odyssey of faith would unexpectedly lead him to discovering Judaism as his true spiritual calling. Julius Lester is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including the bestselling Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama and Do Lord Remember Me . The recipient of numerous awards, Lester has written for the New York Times , the Boston Globe , and the New Republic . Now retired after forty years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, he lives with his wife in western Massachusetts. Lovesong Becoming a Jew By Julius Lester Skyhorse Publishing Copyright © 2013 Julius Lester All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-61145-802-2 CHAPTER 1 It is summer, any summer in the 1940s. I am with Momma and for two to four weeks we will be here, staying with her mother outside Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Grandmomma lives with her brother, my great-uncle Rudolph, in a frame house whose unpainted boards have absorbed sun and rain, frost and dew until they are as gray as restless sleep and as weary as the sleeper who awakens to a day for which he has no love. Grandmomma's house stands alone, removed from its neighbors and back from the main road like the monarch of an impoverished kingdom. To the east is a large field, "the orchard," Momma calls it still, because when she was a girl (and I can't imagine that), rows and rows of peach, apple and cherry trees flowered where now an infinite variety of weeds flourishes like immorality. On the other side of the "orchard," beside the railroad tracks, is another house, smaller than Grandmomma's, and even more weary. Grandmomma's sister, my great-aunt Rena, lives there with her husband, Fate McGowan. Behind Grandmomma's house is the chicken yard, henhouse and outhouse. Beyond these are deep woods, somewhere in the midst of which is the family cemetery. In all, there are forty acres of fields and woods enclosed by a sturdy wire fence, whose gate no one ever enters and we seldom go out. Beyond the fence, on the west, is a dirt road leading to and from the main one on the north. It is wide enough for a mule wagon as far as Grandmomma's gate; then it narrows to a dusty footpath and winds into the innards of Pine Bluff's black community. (We were "colored" in those days when Hope was the name some dreamer bestowed on a daughter, when change was what the white man at the store might give you when you bought something, and progress was merely another incomprehensible word on a spelling test.) I sit on the porch each day and watch children go back and forth to the little store on the main road. I am a child yearning to be with children, but these wear dirty and torn clothes. How am I supposed to play with someone whom dust coats like roach powder? They look furtively at me sitting on the porch in my clean and well- pressed clothes, socks and shoes(!). (Only now, looking back, do I realize that in the fifteen summers at Grandmomma's, no child ever came to the gate to ask me who I was, where I was from and did I want to play. I realize only now, too, that I never went to the gate so that they could ask.) I accept such separateness as unquestioningly as I do the air my body breathes. There is something different about us — Grandmomma, Uncle Rudolph, Momma and me. In the evenings we sit on the porch and watch as trucks, filled with fieldhands who work the white man's cotton, stop on the main road in front of the store. With much laughter and loud talking, they jump or climb off and meander down the side road that leads past Grandmomma's to their houses scattered over the fields behind like neglected thoughts. Their loud voices soften as they near Grandmomma's. "You niggers hush! Don't you see Miz Smith setting on the porch?" (That was Grandmomma's name when she wasn't Grandmomma.) A quietness as stifling as the heat falls u