Zora Neale Hurston was a preacher’s daughter who had a questioning mind. She thought about babies' teeth, for example. Everyone knows babies have to have teeth. Why don’t babies come already equipped?
Such simple questions, raised in childhood, led to a more difficult one: “if Christ, God’s son, hated to die, and God hated for Him to die, and having everybody grieving over it ever since, why did He have to do it? Why did people die anyway?”
The same story moves countless people to embrace faith and leaves others baffled.
The quotation is from Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road. I came across it in Christopher Cameron’ Black Freethinkers,which is filling one of the many holes in my education.
Some of the most interesting people in this part of Texas were German freethinkers who settled in places like Comfort and Sisterdale in the 19th century. It’s hard to imagine Texas towns without churches, but for decades, there were such places.
I’ve known about the European freethinkers since I was a teenager living in New Braunfels. Black freethinkers?
So much has been written about the influence of Black churches that I’d lost track of all those who, like Hurston, simply chose another way.
• Christopher Cameron, Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism; Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2109.
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