Martin Luther King, Jr. coined the phrase “beloved community” as a descriptor of his vision of “an inclusive, reconciled society shaped by love, justice, and nonviolence.” I would call that a macro view. But what if there is also a micro space where the beloved community exists?
In writing my three novels: Under the Circumstances, Magdala, and The Girl in the Red Beret, I did not intentionally seek to create micro beloved communities, but I now find that without planning it, I have written of such places because my characters in telling their stories have taken me to their beloved communities.
Under the Circumstances
Abandoned by her husband, Millie Martin Stapleton age seventeen, leaves her ailing mother and infant daughter and hitchhiked to a larger town to find employment. She leaves the home and community she has known all her life. She gets a job working in the kitchen at Miss Sarah’s Boarding House which is actually a high-end bordello a fact she discovers after a week of living there.
Cora Butterfield, a black woman, runs the kitchen and lives with her husband Lester, a successful plumber, in a carriage house turned apartment behind the main house. They have a young daughter, Magdala, named after Cora’s mother.
The kitchen is where this beloved community gathers: Cora, Lester, Millie, and Magdala. It is shelter for all four of them. 1927 in the Jim Crow South brought its own set of challenges for Cora and Lester as well as Millie, a poorly educated, displaced, white country girl. In that kitchen the world was kept at bay. It no longer mattered. It was the “out there.” In that kitchen it was beloved.
Magdala
This Magdala is Cora Butterfield’s mother. Her story begins in 1893 when she witnesses the lynching of her father. She leaves her small rural Georgia community with her mother and two sisters. They travel by train to Mason, Georgia, to live with her uncle and his family.
Magdala ultimately ends up working as the nanny for a white widower’s baby girl. I hesitate to tell much because I want you to read the book. But I will say there is an unlikely pairing which challenges the conventions of the times.
Fierceness is required to create a cordon around this beloved space. Someone may on occasion have to literally stand guard. But in that space is peace and tranquility the products of agape love, that selfless kind.
The Girl in the Red Beret
George and Carolyn Middleton’s story is set with the backdrop of World War II. They find each other later in life. George is a master sergeant in the Army. Fortunately for their future together his work at Camp Livingston Louisiana involves processing new recruits, not deployment to a theater of the war.
But the papers scream the news of war-torn Europe and battles across the archipelagos of the Pacific. The beloved space for George and Carolyn is a simple one-bedroom rental in Alexandria, Louisiana with Cajun neighbors who teach them to love Jambalaya.
There will always be circumstances that threaten the beloved community. But for Millie, Magdala, and Carolyn as long as they have that micro version of King’s bigger vision, they can weather the troubles that are sure to come in a 1927 or 1893 Jim Crow South or a world war. Please try reading my novels with that in mind. Maybe you will recognize your own Beloved Community.
