Published by Eerdmans on February 13, 2024
Genres: Non-Fiction, Biography
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Catherine Meeks shares the wisdom she has garnered over the journey of her life, from her father’s sharecropping fields to the academy and beyond.
Today, Catherine Meeks is a national leader of racial healing and an esteemed retired professor of African American studies. But being a Black woman in America can be difficult. Join Meeks as she describes the adventures and adversity she encountered on her path to becoming an empowered voice for change.
Growing up in Arkansas under the terror of Jim Crow, Meeks learned firsthand about injustice and the desperation it causes. But with the support of her family, she moved to LA to study at Pepperdine. When a Black teenager was killed by a campus security guard, Meeks awakened to her prophetic voice, and a local women’s group gave her hope that racial reconciliation was possible.
She later led a group of students to West Africa, where she met her husband. Yet her years-long battle with rheumatoid arthritis severed their relationship, leaving her a single mother. Meanwhile, she worked tirelessly at Mercer University to expand the African American studies program, all while earning her MSW and PhD.
Quilting together these memories—bitter and sweet, traumatic and triumphant—Meeks shares her hard-earned wisdom: Learn how to discern the Creator’s work. Listen to the voice saying “yes” to opportunity. Become a wounded healer. Know when to practice silence and when to speak out. Readers will leave the pages of A Quilted Life enriched by Meeks’s unique perspective and insight.
A Quilted Life: Reflections on a Sharecropper’s Daughter is a beautifully woven autobiography that intertwines personal history with cultural commentary. Writing with the experience of a lifetime, Catherine Meeks reflects on her journey from sharecropper’s daughter to an activist and academic working for racial healing. It’s a journey that can be summarized in one sentence that Dr. Meeks gives in the introduction: “This racist world had plans for me that my soul did not accept.” A Quilted Life is the patchwork story of that resistance, as Meeks uses her life to explore the broader themes of race, heritage, and identity, offering readers an intimate portrait of strength and perseverance.
The book moves along chronologically, with Meeks deftly moving between a straightforward retelling of her life and offering insight on the larger cultural context. A Quilted Life tells a deeply personal, individual story, but a story that is also in its themes of hardship and injustice and perseverance, the story of so many. Meeks’ storytelling ability is unparalleled. She’s incisive and conversational. Her anecdotes are to the point and always very pointed. You really do get both the personal experience of her life and how she represents the grit and tenacity of so many Black folk struggling to survive in 20th century America.
A Quilted Life is a touching and thought-provoking work that offers a unique perspective on the Black experience in America. Too often, we are told that these things (slavey, racism, etc.) happened a long time ago. That we need to move on. That nobody alive today owned slaves. But here is the story of a woman still living whose grew up in the specter of slavery-by-another-name. It was not so long ago. The voices of the past not only survive in the history books, they are still among us, still fighting to correct the record, revealing the truth of history in all its tattered, messy, beautiful, holy glory.