Too Precious to Lose

Omtale

A moving and inspiring memoir from a former Obama White House staffer, about his rural Maryland familys untold history, the merger of three churchesone Black, two whiteand how a radical embrace of community became their salvation, and his.Jason Green was raised on fellowshipliterally. Fellowship Lane, the once unpaved road he grew up on, served as a spiritual metaphor throughout his coming of age. A precocious preachers kid, Green felt a call to the ministry but ultimately devoted himself to the people in a different waythrough public service. After working on Barack Obamas presidential campaign, he spent four and a half years working in the White House as special assistant to President Obama.However, Greens government career was cut short by a devastating call that it appeared his ninety-five-year-old grandmother was on her presumptive deathbed. At her side, he listened while she detailed her life story dating back to her 1918 birth in Quince Orchard, a town that no longer exists. He was preoccupied with disbelief; how could he have never known the true legacy of his tiny community? How could a whole towns existence be erased but for the memory of a few surviving elders? Greens historical research uncovered a surprising trove of tales about the determination of his newly freed ancestors to build an African American house of worship, and how generations later, on the eve of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.s assassination, their progeny would be at the center of a brave decision to create an integrated church. Quince Orchards lost story is part of what Green calls the texture in the American fabric: the moral leadership of the Black church, the longstanding resilience of the Black community, and the transformative love of the Black family.Fueled by a new understanding of where he comes from, Green traces one family through a century of life in a single community, asking deeply personal questions about belonging and finding answers from the compassionate, communal-led lives of his forebears.