For more than two decades, Rev. Avis Williams and Mark Auslander have collaborated in historical research and community building in Newton County, Georgia. This is the place where Avis’ ancestors were enslaved and served as Baptist pastors, educators, and activists across two centuries, and to which Mark, a secular Jewish-American, is a relative newcomer. Together, they have navigated wellsprings of pain, emerging out of divides of distrust, race, and remembrance, even as they have struggled to honor Martin Buber’s dictum that “Play is the exultation of the possible” and the scriptural reassurance that “perfect love drives out fear.” (1 John 4:18). Along with Avis’ late mother Emogene Williams, they have worked to engage local low-income youth of color in original historical research and art-making about enslavement and liberation struggles. Together, they have worked to bring back to the county descendants of a family long ago separated by slaveowners, collaborating with an African American artist to nurture a shared space of uncompromising truth-telling. They have explored traces of Afro-indigenous landscapes of sorrow, dispossession and hope, and helped document a massive cancer hotspot that disproportionately impacts local families of color Each day, they learn from one another, about African American and Jewish historical experience, about being Black and being White in today’s America, and about how to listen carefully to one another in an era where all the shouting threatens to drown out the steady, quiet voices within.
