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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.