A Quaker writer's spiritual journey

Patricia Wild of Somerville

Barack Obama's historic candidacy has the nation debating its progress and the distance still to go on race. The question is personal for Somerville writer Patricia Wild.

In her new book, "Way Opens: A Spiritual Journey"(Warwick House Publishers), the Quaker author recounts the year 1962 for Lynda Woodruff and Owen Cardwell Jr., when they became the first black students to integrate Wild's high school in Lynchburg, Va. The book also tells how, four decades later, Wild, 63, reunited with her two former classmates at a time when her religious faith prompted her to explore her own privilege as a white woman in American society.

Woodruff had gone on to become a professor of physical therapy at North Georgia College and State University. Cardwell was the Baptist pastor of New Canaan International Church in Richmond, Va. The two trailblazing classmates had kept in touch, and they began a series of meetings with their white classmate that led to her book.

Wild is scheduled to do a reading at Porter Square Books in Cambridge Aug. 12. Excerpts from a conversation last week follow.

People should know first why you forsook your childhood Unitarianism for the Quakers.

For me, the more matter-of-fact retelling of the Easter story as a myth did not speak to my condition. One Sunday, at a Quaker meeting, I heard someone say, "We don't know what happened at Easter, but there is mystery." I also appreciate the Quaker testimony around peace.

Readers won't be surprised by the Jim Crow-era racism you describe. Yet you start the book reflecting on white privilege during a 2004 trip to Jamaica. That suggests you see the racial progress America has made since 1962.

As a white woman, I don't feel in any condition to make statements about our progress. African-Americans tell me things are a little bit better, but as we see in the controversy in The New Yorker cover, it's a lively topic.

What's your take on that cover?

I think there was an assumption -that more people were aware the editor and cover artist were [satirically motivated] - that isn't true.

Few would dispute that racism still exists. But as a spiritual woman, what do you make of folks like Obama, who urges absentee black fathers, for example, to mend their ways rather than blame racism?

Again, I don't feel like I'm in any position to make statements about this. There are all kinds of voices speaking in the black community, and I think it's sad that the African-American candidate has to not only be a spokesman for his own politics, but he's now made accountable for everything that everybody [black] says.

The privilege you speak of in the book comes as much from class as race. How does your religious faith inform your take on that?

I was in JP a couple of weeks ago giving a reading. A white woman who lived in the projects in Dorchester said, "I used to say, what white privilege?" But she has become close to her black neighbor. She said, "When she and I go into a store, the sales people are immediately trailing after her to make sure that she's not going to shoplift."

I see every day what poor people of Somerville who are white are enduring, and it's very hard. But racism is there [in America].

How did your Quaker faith mold your reaction 40 years later, when you [reunited] with Woodruff and Cardwell?

I have been schooled to stay present and be open. When I first was being chauffeured [to] Rev. Cardwell's church [he's now a minister], the radio was playing gospel music. Immediately I thought, what's here that I need to be paying attention to? Paying attention to the present, the small, still voice, is an ongoing lesson about being present for the holy.

What lessons should faith communities take from the civil rights era?

The first day Owen was in high school, [he] sat down for lunch, and I was standing 25 feet away, wondering what I should do. I have spent the rest of my life reflecting on that [and] my inability to do the right thing, to sit down with him. But I was terrified. One of the things the civil rights movement was about was community. People trying to save the world by themselves is a recipe for bitterness.

Owen Cardwell said that when you first reunited, he thought you were just "another guilty white woman." Are you?

Probably. The difference between me and another guilty white woman was that I was able to [look] at that guilt and what I wanted to do with it.

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