The way to the promised land is not a trip from poverty to success but the journey to finding beauty even in dark places. McCaulley chronicles his lifelong effort to understand the community that shaped him and the struggle it endured to make a home for its loved ones. We meet his great-grandmother Sophia, a tenant farmer born with the gift of prophecy who scraped together a life in Jim Crow Alabama; his mother, Laurie, who survived a brain tumor and raised four kids alone in rough-and-tumble Northwest Huntsville; and a cast of family, friends, and neighbors who won small victories in a world built to swallow up Black lives. Along the way, McCaulley raises questions that implicate us all: What does each person’s struggle to build a life, regardless of its outcome, teach us about what it means to be human? Where might God be found in the trauma and miracle that is Black life in the American South? Written with profound honesty and compassion, How Far to the Promised Land is a weighty examination of our most pressing societal issues and the hope that keeps us alive.