LONGING FOR DARKNESS: TARA AND THE BLACK MADONNA By China Galland Penguin, 392 pages, $16
	LOVE CEMETERY: UNBURYING THE SECRET HISTORY OF SLAVES By China Galland Harper Collins, 275 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by SALLY CUNNEEN

China Galland is probably best known for her book Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna, the deeply moving report of her transcontinental search for the feminine divine. Originally published in 1990, it is now being reissued at the same time that her newest book appears, Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves.

China Galland

At first glance, the two might seem to have little in common. The first is intensely personal and spiritual, global and timeless; the second is communal, rooted in local earth and history. Read together, however, they follow a pilgrim moving from her devotion to Eastern goddesses, to a rediscovery of Mary, to a wider political and spiritual engagement with her own American culture.

I’ve known China ever since I wrote her a letter telling her how much I enjoyed reading her first book. She told me she credits her earlier searches for setting her on this new path, particularly the influence of a strong, compassionate Mary she had never known at home, despite her Catholic upbringing in East Texas. In the widely venerated images she encountered at Einsiedeln, Chartres, Montserrat and other shrines, she began to discover sources in Marian traditions that gave the mother of Jesus depth and richness “beyond any of the jeweled adornments she wears in the church.” The glass wall of perfection and purity that seemed to separate her from other women disappeared and the author found deep streams in Mary satisfying to the soul, “like the sweetness of water after great thirst.”

As pilgrimages were always meant to, China’s led her away from her strenuous journeys to other continents, sending her back home with a deepened, more communal sense of spirituality. She returned not to comfort and old ties, but to the awareness that the need to uncover the past and our relationship with it is as necessary in our hometowns today as in Nepal or Chartres.

During the years she journeyed to sacred places in Asia, Europe and Latin America, she came back regularly to her supportive husband and children in Mill Valley, Calif. Visiting her mother and cousins in East Texas, however, she discovered that her understanding of the spiritual had begun to change. She had seen earlier how the shrine in Chestochowa, Poland, sparked resistance to totalitarian rule and that dark Madonnas in Central and Latin America had served to enable people to resist injustice. Now, looking at Robert Lentz’s icon of Mary as Mother of the Disappeared on a convent wall, she realized that she was being led to change her “solitary path for the heat and controversy of community.” The compassionate dark Madonna made her realize that “there’s a point at which the spiritual and the political intersect.”

Revisiting her childhood home and relatives in East Texas in 2000, her eyes were opened to the racial and social injustice that had been almost invisible to her as a child. Researching her family history in Harrison County, a part of Texas that resembles more the plantation, cotton-growing South than the West of the movies, she met Nuthel Britton. The frail 80-year-old woman showed China the legitimate deed she had to Love Cemetery, of which she was the keeper, but told her it had been locked up for 40 years. Ms. Britton wanted to get in before she died, so that the graves of the relatives of those buried inside -- some had lived under slavery -- could be cleaned and honored.

China went to community spiritual leaders and found both Baptist and Catholic pastors sympathetic and cooperative. A committee was formed, including members of the local and county historical societies, a reporter, and residents with ancestors buried in Love Cemetery. Her book tells the simple, moving story of this dedicated group.

First the committee had to find the combination of the lock on the cemetery door, no simple matter, for while Texas cemeteries cannot be sold, Love Cemetery was surrounded by land that had been turned over many times for timbering to different owners. Local residents knew little of these transactions.

China tracked down the owner of the lock, a doctor in the North. Next came a daunting cleanup. A small assembly of local folk including her cousins and in-laws, among them an ex-naval officer and his Boy Scout troop, joined the group. Together they began the long, hard work of cutting through brambles and vines that choked and hid the simple graves. The group would pray together and celebrate afterward with good home cooking provided by the workers’ families.

In the difficult process of building relationships in a common cause, China uncovered through conversations and document-digging the history of this long-hidden land. She learned that after the slaves were freed, powerful whites tricked their land away from them and justified doing so. Her skill and persistence as a researcher helped bring about the successful reopening of Love Cemetery. A world traveler, she came to realize how naive she had been about her own country, and she made personal discoveries about her family as well. A number of the older citizens in those graves had worked for her great-grandfather; the tough wisteria vines that almost defeated the group’s saws and axes had started out as cuttings from his nursery.

It is no accident that China Galland’s two books have appeared at this time when the country as whole faces problems as divisive as those her group confronted in East Texas. Hearing the story of black and white neighbors working, praying and celebrating together with China’s relatives, we can understand why journalist Bill Moyers praises “the healing power of Love Cemetery.”

Looking at China Galland’s résumé as professor in residence at the Center for the Arts, Religion and Education at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., author of five books, lecturer, teacher, retreat leader on religion, race and reconciliation, one might miss the uniqueness of her lifework. To read her own words, however, is to see that her life has been essentially a spiritual pilgrimage, not the time-honored route to Compostela but one responding ever more compassionately to the reality and mystery of life around her.

Sally Cunneen is the author of In Search of Mary and most recently, The Icon Reborn. She can be reached at scunn24219@aol.com.

Related Web site
China Galland
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National Catholic Reporter, October 5, 2007