An activist influential in the civil rights movement, Rosemarie Freeney Harding’s spirituality blended many traditions, including southern African American mysticism, Anabaptist Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, and Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Remnants, a multigenre memoir, demonstrates how Freeney Harding's spiritual life and social justice activism were integral to the instincts of mothering, healing, and community-building. Following Freeney Harding’s death in 2004, her daughter Rachel finished this decade-long collaboration, using recorded interviews, memories of her mother, and her mother's journal entries, fiction, and previously published essays. “[A] spirited compilation of ecumenical history, folk wisdom, fiction, memoir, and poetry. . . . The central message of Harding’s life is abiding love, passed down through generations, strengthened in the aftermath of grief, racial terrorism, and trauma. The book also tells the unusual story of Mennonite House, a pioneering center of interracial activism in Atlanta co-founded by Harding and her husband, and offers other insights that shape its powerful narrative.” ― Publishers Weekly "Co-authored by Rachel and her late mother, [ Remnants ] is in its very composition both intimate and collaborative. ...It is a book of returning to the source as a resource for the future and present. There are lessons about human connection and resilience, and our capacities to be better to one another. Out of the particulars of these two lives, a window opens into Black life more broadly, in all of its complexity and interconnectedness with the vast networks of humanity." -- Imani Perry ― Public Books " Remnants will appeal to those who are interested in religion and social transformation. Social change advocates, justice seekers, grassroots organizers, nonviolent revolutionaries, race critical theorists, theologians, clergy, historians, womanists, ethicists, ancl educators will all find gems within Remnants .... Remnants provides hope for a better humanity." -- Dean J. Johnson ― Mennonite Quarterly Review "I could not put this book down.  It is a work of love and a testament to the power of love between a mother and her daughter and an abiding belief in the possibilities we have to help create a more loving, humane world.  This is a book of astounding beauty and wisdom.  This is a memoir that encourages us to live into our best self. It is a read more than worthy of your time and will linger in your head and heart." -- Emilie M. Townes, author of ― Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil Rosemarie Freeney Harding (1930–2004) was an organizer, teacher, social worker, and cofounder of Mennonite House, an early integrated community center in Atlanta. She also cofounded the Veterans of Hope Project at the Iliff School of Theology. Rachel Elizabeth Harding, daughter of Rosemarie Freeney Harding and Vincent Harding, is Associate Professor of Indigenous Spiritual Traditions in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Denver, and author of A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness . Remnants A Memoir of Spirit, Activism, and Mothering By Rosemarie Freeney Harding, Rachel Elizabeth Harding Duke University Press Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-5879-4 Contents FOREWORD: Daughter's Précis by Rachel E. Harding, 1. (the light), I • Ground, 2. Rye's Rites (poem), 3. Grandma Rye, 4. There Was a Tree in Starkville ..., 5. Daddy's Mark, 6. Joe Daniels: Getting Unruly, 7. The Side of the Road, 8. Papa's Girl, II • North, 9. Snow and Spring in Woodlawn, 10. Shirley Darden, 11. Brother Bud's Death, 12. Death, Dreams, and Secrecy: Things We Carried, 13. Seasons, 14. Elegant Cousins and Original Beauty, 15. Warmth, 16. Altgeld Gardens, 17. Hot Rolls (short fiction), 18. Looking for Work, 19. The Nursing Test, 20. In Loco Parentis (short fiction), 21. Mama Freeney and the Haints, 22. Height, III • South, 23. Hospitality, Haints, and Healing: African American Indigenous Religion and Activism, 24. Mennonite House in Atlanta, 25. The Next-Door Neighbor, 26. Traveling for the Movement, 27. Koinonia Farm: Cultivating Conviction, 28. A Radical Compassion: His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Clarence Jordan, and Marion King-Jackson, 29. A Song in the Time of Dying: A Memory of Bernice Johnson Reagon, 30. The Blood House (a story outline), 31. Spirit and Struggle: The Mysticism of the Movement, IV • The Dharamsala Notebook, 32. Sunrise after Delhi (poem), 33. The Dharamsala Notebook I, 34. The Dharamsala Notebook II, V • Bunting, 35. The Bunting, 36. The Workshops and Retreats: Ritual, Remembering, and Medicine, VI • The Pachamama Circle, 37. Pachamama Circle I: Rachel's Dream, 38. Pachamama Circle II: Sue Bailey Thurman and the Harriets, 39. Pachamama Circle III: A Choreography of Mothering, 40. Mama and the Gods, AfterWords, 41. Fugida: Poe