I am a Black Man...

In 1875, the town of Dalton's Crossing perched on the edge of the Tennessee hills, a little patchwork of weathered clapboard houses, a lopsided general store, and a church so white it seemed to have been scrubbed from the bones of the land itself. Joseph was its preacher-a black man, broad-shouldered and soft-spoken, who'd built his own church with the help of freedmen and the tinny laughter of children.
He was a man who believed in the power of prayer and hard work-preferably together-and he kept the lamp burning late at night to write sermons by the sputtering glow. Sunday mornings, he stood at the pulpit with his hands folded, voice ringing out over the congregation, reaching the souls of the men and women who'd braved the judgment of the old Confederates just to sit in his pews. On the evening before Christmas Eve, Joseph leaned against the battered fence behind the church and oversaw the rehearsals for the town's first-ever Nativity Pageant.
He had wrangled a donkey from Old Man Williams and painted plywood stars with the children, who took turns haggling over who would be Mary or the angel Gabriel. The pageant had become more than an act of worship-it was the heartbeat of the entire black community. When he first introduced a few sheep into the scene, they ate all of the hay in the manger where they had placed a beautifully carved figure of the infant Jesus.  Joseph quickly replaced it.