Midnight passed on "the last night of this world," December 31, 1999, and Casey Gerald still sat in his grandfather's Texas church. He felt too young to die, but the Rapture's failure left Casey to fight his way in a world unfit to embrace him. There Will Be No Miracles Here is Gerald's intimate memoir of trying to find a space to call home as a gay black man in America.
Gerald yearned to break free from his legacy. His grandfather was a popular pastor, his father a legendary athlete whose gridiron sacrifices cost him his family and brought him a prison sentence. Gerald's mother came and went until he found it easier to conclude she was dead. Aided by his grandmother and sister, Gerald managed to avoid the institutionalized cracks that threaten to swallow boys like him and wound up playing in a Yale football championship game and interviewing as a Rhodes Scholar finalist in a two-day span. Still, he struggled to find himself.
In this conversational, nuanced, political, meandering yet pointed memoir, Gerald, co-founder and CEO of MBAs Across America, reflects on the conflicts of becoming part of a system that uses "salvation stories" like his to perpetuate itself. Bitingly humorous yet brimming with pain, Gerald's book lays bare his yearning to be "a normal person" when, in reality, "the way we were taught to be men, to be human beings even, was a dead end." Knowing the "folks in charge" weren't looking out for him, he turned "at last, and in desperation, to books." As books helped save him, so may his save others. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review