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As the author, a native of Alabama who grew up in “a neighborhood for people who were broke but not yet on government assistance,” writes, it’s difficult to believe in a God who allows suffering, especially the suffering of children: “Where was God on the slave ship, in the cotton fields, in courtrooms where innocent men and women were condemned to death for crimes they did not commit?” Such questions, in the end, center on the problem of evil, by McCaulley’s account, a constant preoccupation of the Black church. His faith is genuine, not motivated by the fact that, he writes, there are three paths out of poverty for someone who grew up in his circumstances: sports, the church, or dealing drugs. The author had no interest in the third option, recognizing that no drug dealers in the neighborhood lived beyond a certain young age. He chose football instead, which won him a scholarship to a university whose “spectrum ran from white conservatives to white liberals,” the latter of which thought themselves able to speak about how to repair the Black world without interacting with any Black people. Still, college allowed McCaulley to leave a home marked by addiction, imprisonment, and danger—one reason kids played sports in that neighborhood, he says, was to have a place of safety from street life until the adults got home from work—to a place that, once an injury sidelined him, allowed him to “search for a positive vision of my life that included more than being different from my father.” He clearly found it, along with marital happiness and professional fulfillment, even while fully recognizing from experience that “the path to the promised land is not always clear.”

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