The One Who Loves You

“I’m still getting the brakes fixed and when that’s done I’m coming to see you, probably in a couple of weeks. As I keep fixing this and that the car will finally become reliable from bumper to bumper and I can visit any time and often. I’ll call before I come down and, remember I’m Robert Conrad ‘Martin Luther King’ Manuel. The one who loves you … ”

As a child, Shannon Luders-Manuel felt like an outsider in every environment she entered. Born to a Black father and white mother who separated when she was three, Luders-Manuel grew up with her white extended family, in largely white areas of California. Throughout her life, she yearned to understand her charismatic, transient father—whose promises were rarely kept, who struggled with alcohol and violence, and whose love she desperately needed. How could she find a place among two worlds—one white and one Black—when they felt so different?

Luders-Manuel sought guidance in Baptist religion, becoming a born-again Christian at age fourteen, and eventually found herself in an abusive relationship. When her father entered hospice care when she was just twenty-four, she became his caretaker despite their long estrangement and hoped to find connection while she still could. Instead, she learned that neither man nor God could give her the home she needed—she would have to build her own sense of self.

The One Who Loves You eloquently speaks not only to mixed-race individuals but to anyone who struggles with being labeled by others and to those who seek to reconcile the most contradictory parts of their own identities.