An activist influential in the civil rights movement, Rosemarie Freeney Harding's spirituality blended many traditions, including southern African American mysticism, Anabaptist Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, and Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Remnants, a multigenre memoir, demonstrates how Freeney Harding's spiritual life and social justice activism were integral to the instincts of mothering, healing, and community-building. Following Freeney Harding's death in 2004, her daughter Rachel finished this decade-long collaboration, using recorded interviews, memories of her mother, and her mother's journal entries, fiction, and previously published essays.

Foreword: Daughter's Précis / Rachel E. Harding  ix 1. (the light)  1 I. Ground  5 2. Rye's Rites (poem)  7 3. Grandma Rye  9 4. There Was a Tree in Starkville . . .  15 5. Daddy's Mark  21 6. Joe Daniels: Getting Unruly  24 7. The Side of the Road  29 8. Papa's Girl  32 II. North  41 9. Snow and Spring in Woodlawn  43 10. Shirley Darden  52 11. Brother Bud's Death  54 12. Death, Dreams, and Secrecy: Things We Carried  57 13. Season  63 14. Elegant Cousins and Original Beauty  66 15. Warmth  71 16. Altgeld Gardens  75 17. Hot Rolls (short fiction)  82 18. Looking for Work  92 19. The Nursing Test  96 20.  In Loco Parentis (short fiction)  97 21. Mama Freeney and the Haints  107 22. Height  113 III. South  115 23. Hospitality, Haints, and Healing: African American Indigenous Religion and Activism  117 24. Mennonite House in Atlanta  127 25. The Next-Door Neighbor  137 26. Traveling for the Movement  140 27. Koinonia Farm: Cultivating Conviction  144 28. A Radical Compassion: His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Clarence Jordan, and Marion King-Jackson  155 29. A Song in the Time of Dying: A Memory of Bernice Johnson Reagon  163 30. The Blood House (a story outline)  165 31. Spirit and Struggle: The Mysticism of the Movement  168 IV. The Dharamsala Notebook  179 32. Sunrise after Delhi (poem)  181 33. The Dharamsala Notebook I  182 34. The Dharamsala Notebook II  194 V. Bunting 199 35. The Bunting  201 36. The Workshops and Retreats: Ritual, Remembering, and Medicine  217 VI. The Pachamama Circle  227 37. Pachamama Circle I: Rachel's Dream  229 38. Pachamama Circle II: Sue Bailey Thurman and the Harriets  231 39. Pachamama Circle III: A Choreography of Mothering  237 40. Mama and the Gods  241 AfterWords  243 41. Fugida: Poem for Oyá  245 42. Class Visits: Love, White Southerners, and Black Exceptionalism  247 43. A Little Wind  265 44. (the Call)  268 Appendix: Rosemarie's Genealogies  271 Acknowledgments  283 Index  287