Spirited Brunch is an open book

After seven years of Spirited Brunching, some participants in the annual self-guided snack tour of downtown Charleston congregations have worked out which houses of worship to visit, and in what order to visit them. But since the lineup changes slightly every year, and because there are always locals and visitors who’ve never Spirited Brunched before, we like to give attendees a chance to trade intel just before they hit the streets.

To warm up for the pre-party, we invited Kevin to talk about his new book, and what Spirited Brunch goers might want to keep in mind when they stop by Emanuel.

HANNA RASKIN: I’d guess many of our readers hadn’t heard of Mother Emanuel before the shootings, and it sounds like you may fit in that group as well. 

KEVIN SACK: That’s absolutely the case with me. I had never heard of the place until the night of June 17th, 2015. I’m embarrassed to say that now because I spent considerable time in Charleston as a journalist and as the Southern bureau chief of the New York Times. But it never crossed my radar until that night.

It was an hour or two later when they identified the assailant as a young white male who had made racist comments as he was shooting. That night, I started Googling the church, and while I was deeply affected by what had happened that night, I was also just fascinated by everything that had happened before that night. 

I got there a couple of days after the shootings and spent the first week or so working on a long profile of Clementa Pinckney that ran on the front page on the morning of his funeral. And then I covered the service, so I was at TD Arena when Obama sang “Amazing Grace.” His eulogy really helped solidify my thinking about this notion that you could tell this broader story of African American life in Charleston over a 200-plus-year period through this one institution.

RASKIN: Right, as the subtitle says, “Two Centuries,” which obviously predates emancipation. I’m sure this could be a graduate level course, but can you talk about religion as it was practiced by both free and enslaved Black people here? How much agency did they have in that regard?

SACK: Christianity posed this very thorny dilemma for the white enslavers of the South from the get-go. There was a real tension throughout the pre-Civil War era between those who felt conveying Christianity to the enslaved was part of God’s plan—and also an effective tool in keeping a sedate workforce—and those folks who understood that there was a lot of dangerous egalitarianism in Scripture.

In Charleston, there was huge church attendance by both free and enslaved Blacks in the late 1700s and early 1800s, but always under the close supervision of white monitors and white ministers. These were white-controlled churches, but because of the imbalance in the Lowcountry’s population, the Methodist churches in particular were dominated by Black worshippers.

Ultimately, in 1817, there’s this bold, subversive walkout by thousands of Black Methodists, led by a free person of color, a Black shoemaker named Morris Brown. They buy a piece of property on the Charleston neck and move into a wood frame church that quickly affiliates with the AME denomination, which had just been forming in Philadelphia.

That congregation lasted for four years, until the Denmark Vesey insurrection plot is uncovered; I would say about half of the people who were hung were affiliated with the church in some way. The church was then dismantled, board-by-board, under the orders of the authorities. And Morris Brown and other leaders of the church leave for the North, under threat of criminal prosecution, never to return.

RASKIN: Since you brought up the wooden building, Spirited Brunch is very much focused on physical structures. We know where Mother Emanuel is housed today is not that building, nor the one that succeeded it. But can you tell me about when you first went into the current building and if there’s anything you think tourgoers should be alert to when they’re within it?

SACK: My first time in the building was the third Sunday after the tragedy. My wife and I sat up in the balcony, and I remember the incredible warmth of the people that day—even though it was so soon after someone who looked vaguely like me had walked into the building and shot nine people to death. 

We were invited down to the basement, to the fellowship hall, where the shootings took place, and there was a repast of food that had been prepared by the ladies of the church, and people just couldn’t have been lovelier.

It’s really a stunning building. It’s a huge building, and it looks very much like it did when it was completed in the 1890s. There are still gas lamps inside. They’re not used anymore; they’ve just never been taken down.

One of my favorite components is, if you look up into the gallery, there’s a sheet of fabric that drapes all the way around the balustrade. It was explained to me that this was added to protect the privacy of the sisters from the wayward eyes of the brothers sitting below; it keeps you from seeing below the knees.

There are a couple of murals on either side of the altar, one of the crucifixion and one of the ascension of Christ. It’s interesting because they were painted by a Black artist in the 1940s, but Christ in both murals is very much a white man. That’s caused tension over the years within the congregation as other Black churches—including many in Charleston—have reclaimed the imagery of Christ. Emanuel hasn’t, but I think there’s a real desire to do something about that the next time that the murals are repainted.

When people walk in these days, they will immediately notice that there are wooden support beams holding up part of the ceiling and that there’s paint and plaster peeling from the ceilings. They’re trying to raise money to pay off loans for the first phase of an important structural renovation project, and then begin the second phase.

RASKIN: I wanted to return to the tensions over the murals, because I think there is sometimes a feeling of ‘Oh, these places have been here forever and there’s so much continuity in churches.’ There is, but my understanding is that a lot of religious history on the peninsula involves splits and schisms. I know I’m asking questions too big for this format, but can you talk a little bit about division and growth in the Black church in Charleston?

So, they’ve had trouble keeping up their membership, but now they don’t have the option of leaving, because they’re now a national historic site. And that’s a struggle, particularly when you’ve got a building with real financial challenges. 

RASKIN: Since the Spirited Brunch is built around people entering houses of worship with which they’re unfamiliar, do you as a reporter and author of this book have any advice for tourgoers going into other people’s spiritual spaces?

SACK: Well, I don’t know how much it applies to Spirited Brunch, which I assume is a casual afternoon. 

RASKIN: Yes, very much so.

SACK: But certainly, when you visit a church during worship services, my advice is to know something about the culture of the place. Dress is very much a part of that.

Emanuel’s pretty traditional: There are a lot of great hats. Men wear suits, as do the women. Now, on any given Sunday, one-third of the people there may be visitors, and they’re often dressed like visitors, in T-shirts and shorts and sometimes flip-flops. You can be sure that it gets noted by the regulars.

I think the congregation understands it’s something they have to live with. But I do think it’s incumbent on the visitors to not impose.

RASKIN: What else would you like to talk about? What else should people know about your book?

SACK: One thing we didn’t talk about is my journey here was certainly animated by this early fascination with the history of the church, but it was also animated by this sort of spiritual quest to figure out what it meant when those family members got up two days after the shootings and expressed forgiveness for the remorseless murder of their loved ones.

What I decided was that if there was an answer to be found to that question, it was going to lie somewhere in the history of the congregation and of the denomination. The epilogue of the book addresses that and concludes that the forgiveness offered at that bond hearing really was for those who offered it.

That has everything to do with the history of Black oppression and Black suffering in this country and the mechanisms that have been used by the Black church to deal with them. It’s better seen as a survival mechanism than an earnest prayer for the soul of this sinner.

That’s what the book research helped me understand better, and I hope will help readers understand better, particularly at this time: The African-American experience in a place like Charleston has been one of such relentless oppression, discrimination, mistreatment, and injustice that the only way to get out of bed is to forgive, to rid yourself of these toxins that otherwise will drive you to psychosis. Forgiving is the one thing that can’t be taken away by your victimizer. 

RASKIN: I may be in this mindset because we’re in the midst of Passover, and just had a Seder on Saturday night, but when you talk about survival, that sounds like a theme that Spirited Brunch tourgoers could carry from one congregation to the next.

SACK: It’s interesting that you mention Passover. I did this piece for the Times after the Pittsburgh synagogue shootings; it was just so evocative of Emanuel that I suggested that I do a piece comparing the two. And while I was up there, Reverend Manning, the pastor at Emanuel, flew up to meet with the rabbi in Pittsburgh, which gave me this great hook.

I’d stand outside the synagogue as people would come by to offer their respects and stuff. And I’d interview Jews from the community, and we’d start talking about Emanuel. Their attitude was, ‘Yeah, that’s kind of nice, but don’t talk to me about forgiveness right now.’

I started reading about it and the Jewish approach is very different. Forgiveness is possible, but only under very narrow circumstances. If you sin against God, if you violate the Sabbath, you can pray to God for forgiveness. But when you sin against fellow man, forgiveness only comes by going to the victim, apologizing and offering retribution or compensation. By definition, when the victim is dead, that’s not possible. It’s just a totally different approach.