How Far to the Promised Land

One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South

By: Esau McCaulley

Narrated by: Esau McCaulley

Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

From the New York Times contributing opinion writer and award-winning author of Reading While Black, a riveting intergenerational account of his family’s search for home and hope

“A riveting book that invites you into the personal journey of one of the finest writers alive today.”—Beth Moore, New York Times bestselling author of All My Knotted-Up Life

A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

For much of his life, Esau McCaulley was taught to see himself as an exception: someone who, through hard work, faith, and determination, overcame childhood poverty, anti-Black racism, and an absent father to earn a job as a university professor and a life in the middle class.

But that narrative was called into question one night, when McCaulley answered the phone and learned that his father—whose absence defined his upbringing—died in a car crash. McCaulley was being asked to deliver his father’s eulogy, to make sense of his complicated legacy in a country that only accepts Black men on the condition that they are exceptional, hardworking, perfect.

The resulting effort sent McCaulley back through his family history, seeking to understand the community that shaped him. In these pages, we meet his great-grandmother Sophia, a tenant farmer born with the gift of prophecy who scraped together a life in Jim Crow Alabama; his mother, Laurie, who raised four kids alone in an era when single Black mothers were demonized as “welfare queens”; and a cast of family, friends, and neighbors who won small victories in a world built to swallow Black lives. With profound honesty and compassion, he raises questions that implicate us all: What does each person’s struggle to build a life teach us about what we owe each other? About what it means to be human?

How Far to the Promised Land is a thrilling and tender epic about being Black in America. It’s a book that questions our too-simple narratives about poverty and upward mobility; a book in which the people normally written out of the American Dream are given voice.

©2023 Esau McCaulley (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Esau McCaulley’s riveting memoir holds together tensions that many of us pry apart: systemic injustice and personal responsibility, accountability and forgiveness, honesty and sympathy. This book is prophetic without being preachy, and heartwarming without being cloying. . . . A triumph of storytelling.”—Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary

“In these pages are words that redeem time and refresh the human spirit. . . . The timeliness of McCaulley’s honest, hope-filled story—told with depth, precision, and purpose—feels like a balm for the weary soul.”—Charlie Dates, senior pastor of Salem Baptist and Progressive Baptist

“With uncompromising honesty and deep introspection, McCaulley complicates the narrative of ‘overcoming racism and poverty as a hero.’ . . . Powerful and necessary.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“McCaulley gives his readers an offering to peer into the window of his soul and that of his southern Black family. It is a story of the convergence of structural racism and the grace of God, which carries them on as they traverse the rugged terrain of life to the promised land.”—Ekemini Uwan, public theologian and NAACP Image Award–nominated co-author of Truth’s Table

A real, honest, painful, joyful, generous sharing of a black family’s stories

This book wove together the author’s family story in a way that reminded me that we all have these complex family lineages filled with possibility for redemption and hope right alongside the pain. It was an honest glimpse into the life of a black family in Alabama that I am grateful for him sharing—it has deepened my understanding of what black families in the US south have gone and are going through. And I’m so glad Esau McCaulley narrated his own book. It added so much realness and connection.

Making sense of complex family history

It's so easy for us to categorize people as all good or all bad. In Dr. McCaulley's search to make sense of his family members who seemed to be bad characters, he ends up discovering the stories of his family. His book shares with us his lament, his hope, and where he saw the presence of God.

Beautifully written

A beautifully written story. I couldn’t stop listening…finished it in one day. I am deeply touched by Esau’s story and even more so by his telling of it. I can’t really do it justice…it is a must read.

An excellent story of Redemption

Esau has woven a captivating story of God at work in the life of a family. Heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time. He speaks about race in a way that we can all see ourselves in the story and points us all towards something transcendent.

Beautiful story

Beautiful story of God’s redemptive work in the lives of one family. May we all look at our loved ones with the grace God extends us.

Awesome story

Loved this book. 2nd book I’ve read by this author. He is a great communicator!

Eye opening with enjoyment and self reflection

I appreciate hearing this story. It helped me to process and bring light to my own upbringing. Appreciate the understanding offered through this book.

I loved this book!

I’ve been deeply impacted by Esau’s interviews on podcasts and the few New York Times columns that I’ve been able to read of his over the last couple of years. This book is so deeply moving. I shed lots of tears. I can’t wait to share it with others.

Powerful & Authentic

With grace and authenticity Esau McCaulley shares his story and that of the family that shaped him, offering a glimpse into a world that some of us have never known and will never know. With riveting prose, he invites his audience to a deeper understanding of what it means to be Black in America. With deep wisdom born of hurt, struggle, and love, Dr. McCaulley reminds his audience that people are complex, each with our own stories, and that none of us are beyond the reach of the God of the Exodus.

Memoir is about community, not the just individual

I do not remember what first drew my attention to Esau McCauley, but it was a bit before he became a professor of New Testament at Wheaton (my alma mater). From that point, I have read Reading While Black, his children’s book, and many articles he has written for the NYT and other places. (His book on Lent is on my to-read list.) Generally, if I notice an article that he has written, I make time to read it. If I see an interview or talk with him, I listen to it. I listened to all of the two seasons of his podcast. I have also done a Zoom class through Nashotah House that he taught. I do not “know” Esau McCaulley; he certainly does not know me, but I have a good sense of his writing style and general approach. The reality of the internet, social media, and writing is that one can feel closer to someone’s story than they are. John Dyer has called this ambient intimacy. It isn’t a real relationship or intimacy, but it feels real.

Good memoirs can create that sense of intimacy, but there is so much to the story that is never revealed in 200 or so pages. What makes a good memoir is editing what to share and what not to share. After I finished How Far To the Promise Land, I listened to McCaulley’s interview on the Seminary Dropout Podcast. That interview did an excellent job of framing the memoir and what he was trying to do without retelling the whole story. I will commend Esau’s writing and audiobook narration but avoid retelling many of the book’s details.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece in Christ and Pop Culture Magazine about the problems of white readers reading black stories, and I always want to be careful with how I read and process black stories. The book was not written primarily for me, but that does not mean I cannot find appropriate value in reading it. One of the issues that McCaulley names in his interview with Shane Blackshear is that readers want to see material success as the happy ending (21-minute mark). McCauley grew up in poverty, the child of a disabled Black single mother. Today, he is a New Testament professor with a Ph.D. and has achieved much of that material success.

One of the book’s themes is that racism is real, which has created structural hindrances to full flourishing, but that people are also capable of good and bad choices within those strictures. And that chance, or providence, plays an unknown role as well. It is never just one thing: the Heracio Alger hero story, the structural forces, or the chance occurrence. We all have all three and complicated histories that we may not understand ourselves. We all came from somewhere. And that location and people have influenced our lives in many ways that we will never fully understand, even if we attempt to investigate them. (And many of us will never investigate them.)

Early in the book, we know that Esau McCaulley’s father died, and he would give his father’s eulogy. He had to learn more about the man who played such an influential and mixed role in his life. A man that he did not really know. Again, from the podcast, McCaulley says that he was trying to point not just to himself as the main character of the memoir but to those around him. “These lives that you do not value, God was at work there.” God worked in his father’s life, even if the result was not the perfect ending we might want. And the other family and friends that also grew up in Huntsville, AL, around McCaulley had value, whether society values them or not.

I am a couple of years older than McCauley. I can see how he tells a story that could be many people’s. Life has not changed as much as many want to think that it has. In the podcast and the book, he references asking his grandfather what Brown v. Board meant to him. His grandfather said they didn’t know about it. They didn’t have a TV; nothing really changed in the short term. Esau’s mother went to an integrated school, but it was a hostile integration. My mother was a couple of weeks younger than Ruby Bridges, but the Louisville school district that she went to in early elementary while her father was in seminary did not integrate until the school year when I was born. Wheaton, where McCaulley now teaches, released a report on the history of race at the school yesterday, and the first black professor was not hired until the 1980s, just a few years before I started there. My memory says that there were six minority faculty in the early 1990s when I was there. This history of overt racism was recent.

I want to carefully hold the stories told in How Far to the Promised Land. McCaulley mentions that part of the impetus for writing this book was being asked at a panel discussion about the “most racist thing that has ever happened to you.” And I am wary of recounting black trauma as fodder for white education. How Far to the Promised Land is a story of joy, faith, and pain. It is a gift not just because it is well written but because it is framed as the type of story that attempts to present a fuller picture than simple stereotypes want to allow to be painted.

As I read it, I feel obligated to hear the story well so that it isn’t just a story but an impetus toward the eschatological end where everything is made whole.