Many of us received the e-mails after the election last November. A picture of the United States color-coded to reflect which states had voted for Kerry and which for Bush. The blue coastal fangs were dubbed "United States of Canada" and the red belly of the country "Jesusland." This is not why Julia Scheeres titled her memoir Jesus Land, but she should be commended on her timing.

Scheeres's memoir of her childhood is named for a sign she sees in the beginning of her junior year of high school. The sign is something she and her black adopted brother, David, stumble upon after their family relocates to rural Indiana:

Sinners go to:
HELL
Rightchuss go to:
HEAVEN
The end is neer:
REPENT
This here is:
JESUS LAND

Their mother is in favor of it. "Anything to spread the Good News," she says. Their mother believes the best thing you can do in life is be a missionary and die for Jesus Christ. Death is not without its role in the minds of Julia and David, either. "We have a thing for bone yards, as we do for all things death related."

Scheeres dives into her simply worded story with a rich description of biking on a hot summer's afternoon. She and David are off to a graveyard. Peaceful resters are not all they find. A bunch of territorial white boys don't seem to like their brand of fun. "If you looked up 'redneck' in the dictionary, they'd be there to illustrate," she writes, "and I'd poke fun at them to David if they weren't marching toward us with tight faces."

With words like "scorches," "swerve," "slams," "stomping," and "gasping" in just the first three sentences, I was yanked, not cradled, into Jesus Land so fast I didn't have time to wonder if I could stomach another cringingly true story of bigotry, abuse, and tragedy. Jesus Land is both a tale of the most sincere loyalty, a complicated and sometimes impossible love, and a fierce critique of a strict Christian upbringing (can any critique be fierce enough?). Its tiny glimmers of humor and hope make it just bearable enough to get through.

The first time I understood the inhumane atrocity that is racism, I was 10. I was a diligent weekly watcher of the television show I'll Fly Away, about a white Southern family and their black maid in the late 1950s. In reference to a story based on the murder of Emmett Till (50 years ago this last August), the words "They did more than kill that boy" still echo in my head to this day. I lay in bed that night with tight fists and tears, in disbelief of such brutality and because there was nothing I could do about it. And Julia's first understanding of her own helplessness? It developed when kids started asking David if his blood was green or his hair plastic. It developed in the face of inequitable punishments at home and derogatory proclamations from strangers. We begin to understand the life David was adopted into and subjected to through deviations from the story's timeline in the form of short, visceral, italicized sequences.

Under the guise of good Christian generosity—it would have been a sin to reject a black baby—David was brought into a situation that rendered him a secondary member of his own family and the community around it. Mr. and Mrs. Scheeres didn't have enough love for their own children, let alone a refugee of the outside world. Because it was the only family he knew, David clung to the Scheeres with the unrequited love and devotion that many "second-class" citizens seem to feel toward the United States. He had the carnal memory of something much worse, and so, despite injustices, he cherished his present reality. Only Julia returned his allegiance.

Very simply, Scheeres conveys the misery of a kinship subjected to every kind of scrutiny. Her style smoothly communicates the toughness and vulnerability of adolescence with the tenderness of adult reflection. Where I fall short in finding words to name all the ways bigotry and indifference are immoral, she does not.