Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

I’ve been waiting for Lisa Sharon Harper to write another book ever since I read her book, The Very Good Gospel, a few years ago (twice). When I heard she was working on a book about her family’s story, I was even more excited. This book is an ABSOLUTE TREASURE. It took her three whole DECADES to complete the journey, the research, and the writing, AND SHE DID IT. This is one of those books where it’s literally IMPOSSIBLE to capture the essence and communicate the goodness in a single IG post, so I’m going to need all of you to promise me you’ll read the book. “Drawing on her lifetime journey to know her family’s history, Lisa Sharon Harper weaves a captivating story that begins with Maudlin Magee, Sambo Game, and their child, Fortune, Harper’s first nonindigenous ancestor born on American soil, and progresses through eight succeeding generations. Harper shows how American ideas, customs, and laws robbed her ancestors—and the ancestors of so many others—of their humanity and the opportunity to flourish. America was built upon systems and structures that blessed some and cursed others, allowing Americans of European descent to benefit from the colonization, genocide, enslavement, rape, and exploitation of people of color.” (inside book jacket) I got to take part in a Zoom conversation with Lisa when the book first came out, and it was such a gift. She is a brilliant and beautiful human being and a gift to all of us. THANK YOU, Lisa, for pouring your heart and soul into this gorgeous and powerful and important book.

In Fortune, Lisa Sharon Harper pieces together fragments of her family’s history from every bit of available evidence—living relatives’ memories, archival records, her own DNA, laws in the times and places they lived. She tells us about the African and Native American tribes her family came from, what their people were known for before they were enslaved. Shows them as parents and children ripped away from each other. When known detail is scant, she adds in imaginings of her ancestors washing dishes after a favorite meal, or holding a bucket of water on the farm as the census workers walk up. She puts flesh on their bones and lets us see her ancestors over generations, repeatedly coming up against the unjust, racist laws of the times in which they lived. This is not only a recounting of her family’s trauma, but also a guide for repair and collective healing. In a time when states are legislating against teaching about the history of racism in the United States, it is vital that we read this work. Letting ourselves feel and care for the fortunes of this particular family opens us to considering the ways that laws and systems have affected so many others, and thus considering our role in making things right. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Lisa Sharon Harper’s Fortune is an exceptional journey through the intersections of one particular family’s history and the history of the United States, painfully but beautifully illustrating the impact of national policies and prejudices on the lives of flesh-and-blood individuals. Tracing her family’s journey from some of the earliest slave ships of the Middle Passage through the Revolutionary Era, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, down to the present day, Harper exposes the pernicious myth that our choices are not significantly shaped by the circumstances we inherit from previous generations. On the contrary, our legacy demands not only the clear-eyed truth-telling that Harper offers, but also a commitment and responsibility to repairing the harms of the past that continue to haunt our present sufferings. This book is especially beneficial because it puts a face to figures and a story to statistics, humanizing the American drama writ both large and small. This book is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand the way historical traumas ripple through generations and communities and offers direction for the brave, responsible souls seeking to heal these generational wounds.

Fortune traces a family history that explores the brokenness from systemic oppression, civic injustices, and enslavement in American history. Fortune, the first ancestor born in American embodies the suffering from broken civic systems and white American ideology that robbed her and many descendants of human dignity, shalom, and flourishing. Harper traces her lineage and unveils the ways America was built by oppression, slavery, colonization, mass murder that raised one race at the expense of others. Fortune concludes with a kingdom vision that includes truth-telling, redemption, reparations, and forgiveness to bring healing and true unity as the people of God. It’s a vital summons for greatly needed change.

Lisa Sharon Harper opens this work defining the narrative gap, the space between the story we tell ourselves and what really happened. Our generational stories form us. By sharing the stories of her ancestors, Lisa gives us an account of how race broke her family and how it breaks the world. She points out that we have to understand how it broke so we can understand how to fix it. She then takes us on a wonderful journey with her ancestors challenging us along the way to explore our own stories. Through their stories and the history she shares you will learn and be challenged. The "what really happened" parts of the story are what we need to grapple with and understand. But she doesn't stop there. She encourages us to learn how we can be a part of the solution. This is a masterful work that will leave you challenged to continue the work.