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This chapter contains life histories of ten founding church elders, who are currently in their 80s and 90s. All of the narratives begin with a socio-historical snapshot of the elders' hometowns, followed by interviews covering their life experiences in both the North and the South. These experiences include employment patterns and salaries earned; “separate but equal” education during the Plessy v. Ferguson era; White on Black violence, such as false imprisonment and threats of and actual lynching; politics of sex between White men and Black women in the South; enculturation of White children in perpetrating racial violence and of Black children in surviving it; Black adult strategies for negotiating southern White terrorism and for migrating to and adjusting within urban life; economic survival strategies, such as sharecropping in the South and Black women's performing domestic “day labor” in the North; southern religious roots and new urban religious options; and colorism. The chapter concludes by exploring how these narratives inform Great Migration research.

In her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, Toni Morrison returns to several of the signature themes explored in her previous work: pernicious beauty standards for women, particularly African American women; mother-child relationships; racism and colorism; and child sexual abuse. As with Morrison’s other work, the story takes on mythic qualities, and the larger-than-life themes lend themselves to allegorical and symbolic readings that resonate in light of both contemporary and historical issues.

God Help the Child illustrates the possibility of confronting trauma to claim a worthy self through a complex process of testimony. Both Bride and Booker reconstruct past traumas, first by encountering people who activate buried memories and then by telling their stories to each other in the holding space they create. Together, Bride and Booker retrieve their childhood traumas to gain agency and self-esteem by “bearing witness” to their representative African American testimonies. In this way, Morrison’s novel becomes a symbolic holding space for African American trauma. The complicated components of testimony reveal the elements of African American trauma—inherited trauma from generations of racism, colorism, violence, abuse, and discrimination in housing, jobs, and education—that Bride and Booker must examine. This idea of community testimony connects specifically to African American culture through three avenues of shared experience: the church, music, and community suffering.

The second half of the book, beginning with the fourth chapter, turns more to mixed-race identity and looks at the self-identification of Mulattoes in the eighteenth-century British colonies. People of mixed ancestry saw themselves largely through their upbringing in Christianity. In freedom petitions Mulattoes argued that they deserved freedom as they struggled to resist slavery and servitude. This chapter also explains and gives examples of early forms of colorism, or discrimination within non-“white” communities of color, based on light-skinned privilege. While Mulattoes and other people of mixed ancestry most often identified and associated with other Africans and Native Americans, others saw themselves or argued for their position above these groups. Also, people of mixed ancestry used their relatively light skin to engage in racial passing, which included temporary passing as free more often than simply passing as “white” on their way to freedom. In many ways, racial ambiguity allowed mixed-heritage people to engage in a practice of crafting identity in various ways as they struggled to gain freedom.

An African-Indian cultural economy continues to grow through music, dance, film, and fashion. This chapter focuses on Senegalese-Indian connections following the arrival of the first Senegalese scholars to Annamalai University in the 1970s and their negritude/Afrocentric politics. Senegalese love of Indian films grew into a wider media explosion of Indouphilie. While the trend emerged in local cinema-viewing societies, dance clubs, and arts schools, African global cultures came into their own, intersecting with and diverging from Bollywood and Bharatanatyam (Indian classical dance). Some West African performers like Germaine Acogny and Nollywood filmmakers have become highly critical of obsession with India, and they uphold Africa as a cultural mecca. African critiques of Indian cultural forms challenge consumerism, beauty defined by fair skin, and, at times, mimicry of the West and have begun to influence the Indian diaspora in Senegal and young Indians in India.