C. E. Brock, illustration from Mansfield Park, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

“This is Goshen,” my mother and father would frequently say. The idea—that our home was the equivalent of the Biblical land of Goshen from Exodus—was simple, perhaps, but it said as much about my parents’ perceptions of the outside world as it did about their vision for our home. The world was unfeeling, unsparing, loud, chaotic—or, in their view, simply “evil.” It was in Goshen, after all, that the enslaved Israelites found refuge amid Egyptian brutality.

That pursuit of peace shaped their pivotal decision—when I was seven my Jamaican family left New York for Oklahoma. New York was, in some important sense, the world—its sophistication, its temptation, its unapologetic secularism. Oklahoma, by contrast, was in the world but not of it. It offered what my parents craved: stillness. Its flat plains, its grass more often brown than green, and the red-tinged soil of its western stretches conveyed a kind of geographic manifestation of sanctity. Its boringness was its spiritual appeal. Our neighbors prayed over their meals in public. Walmart greeters accompanied their smiles and hellos with unprovoked God bless yous. Oklahoma’s simplicity and relative silence wasn’t just a feature of the move—it was pitched as our family’s saving grace.

And yet, Tulsa—the city we came to call home—had its own darkness. Tulsa’s prosperity was built on erasure. On the dead bodies and stolen futures of Black and Indigenous communities. On the devastation of the Tulsa Race Massacre, a history that was deliberately shielded from our view. I would grow up in a city that claimed quiet as a virtue, but wielded silence as a weapon.

From the outside, it might also have seemed contradictory for our family to call our home a place of refuge. It was undeniably loud, often filled with more extended family than bedrooms. By the time I was six, when my younger brother was born, I had grown accustomed to being an only child in name alone. Cousins arrived in droves, often suddenly, each wave bringing more individuals bound to me by blood yet from whom I was divided by circumstances I could scarcely comprehend. Their parents—my aunts and uncles—had sent them away or found themselves unable to care for them, either from legal affliction, illness, or indifference. They sent them to our home, believing it would provide a better chance at life, one grounded in piety. I never fully understood how my parents managed to afford the revolving doors of our home. My father had a steady job in IT at a local hospital, and my mother was a licensed nurse. But the expanding number of dependents strained our resources—something I could observe without tangible insight into our finances. My father took on extra jobs, sometimes cleaning restaurants late at night and other times delivering newspapers before dawn, while my mother would sometimes pick up extra shifts from the nursing agency.

But Goshen was not an attempt at charity. It was, according to my parents’ interpretation of scripture, a tangible manifestation of holiness—defined by the original Greek word as something “set apart.” To my parents, being holy meant maintaining a distinct separation from the secular world. Our family’s rules, by even the most fervently Christian standards, were strict: no cursing, no movie theaters, no card games, parental controls and time limits on television, and no secular music. These restrictions were meant not just to maintain morality but to solidify our identity as distinctly different, apart from worldly contamination. Yet the cousins who filled our home brought with them new tensions: they were, after all, of the world. With their protests, whispered critiques, and open defiance, they revealed how peculiar, and even unnatural, our rules appeared from the outside. Their presence forced our household into a constant dialogue with the world beyond its walls. Every day in our household unfolded like its own novel of manners, conflicts occurring in miniature around deeply held beliefs on morality. And I began to see Tulsa itself and our home as analogous to those in Mansfield Park, one of the first books I came to read and love.

***

Summers in Goshen were extensions of the academic year, and even during the school year our school-assigned homework was always accompanied by mom-assigned additional homework. My mother didn’t quite understand why schools weren’t more intense. (This post-homework homework was one of the requirements against which my cousins grated most.) In the morass of stress that would come from filling out algebra workbooks during the summer—activities to which I attribute whatever success I’ve achieved—I would occasionally select a work of fiction during our weekly visits to the library. The library—which came in second only to church in my parents’ reverence—was the closest to recess during my childhood summers. In the stacks of the library my imagination ran wild, untethered, even briefly by the strictures of our regimens.

It was during these visits that I began to read Jane Austen’s novels in chunks while in the stacks. I knew that if I checked out these tomes, my mom might be tempted to assign reports based on these books. And those book reports would be vulnerable to my mother’s unsparing grading (a current events report, written at six years old, received a 56.5 percent in red ink—which I also credit with what modicum of success I’ve achieved and built familiarity with comfort with editorial marks). So, I confined my reading to the stacks. One book, Mansfield Park, seemed the least loved, the cleanest, the least bunny-eared of them—perhaps because it’s one of Austen’s less heralded works.

In Mansfield Park, I met Fanny Price, the quiet, poorer relative brought to live among wealthier kin. She wasn’t outspoken or conventionally heroic. Instead, Fanny had quiet dignity, an inner strength that readers often mistake for passivity. As I observed her careful navigation of Mansfield’s social structures, I saw not submission but subtle resistance—that mirrored the struggles my cousins faced within our family home. Fanny was never fully integrated into the family; she was cared for but never claimed.

Discovering that Austen herself was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman—a child of the rectory, like me (though my father and grandfather were lay ministers)—changed my understanding of her work. Austen’s father, George, was a cleric in the Church of England; she was raised in a house where faith, moral discipline, and careful discernment were daily practices rather than abstractions. Her structured moral worlds, fraught with the undercurrents of quiet resistance, spoke directly to my own experiences.

I have grappled personally with the tension Fanny’s character embodies: Should I have been more like her—quiet, accepting, obedient—or should I, like my cousins, have resisted openly, challenging my parents’ stringent rules? I wondered if the first movie I saw in theaters, The Fellowship of the Ring, really necessitated a full analysis of its Christian themes presented to my parents, to convince them that I should be permitted to go. I’m not sure. I didn’t find the gumption to rebel until college, where my separation from my family felt significant enough to architect a life of holiness, or even just goodness, on my own terms. Austen’s novel held up a mirror to my internal debates about identity and belonging, obedience and rebellion. Austen articulates this struggle through Fanny while encouraging the book’s characters—and by extension all of us—to consider our internal moral compasses: “We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” This made Austen’s subtle moral interrogations deeply resonant with me at thirteen, as I was learning about the guide inside me.

Not all readers and critics have found this ambivalence convincing. Edward Said, among other things, criticizes Austen for remaining relatively silent about the source of Fanny’s extended family’s wealth: Caribbean slave plantations. For Said, this silence isn’t neutrality but complicity; it shows how British literature helped normalize imperial power by making its foundations seem natural and unspoken. This reading is compelling. But I never felt comfortable discounting the narrative power of silence in Austen’s work. In the scene, after her uncle Sir Thomas returns from Antigua, Fanny asks him about the slave trade. Austen offers no reply from Sir Thomas and instead records only that “there was such a dead silence.” That phrase—dead silence—is jarringly final. It doesn’t just denote a pause in conversation; it registers a refusal. Fanny isn’t scolded for asking—her question is simply swallowed. Rather than having her character castigate slavery, Austen lets that absence ring out.

It reminded me of the silences at our dinner table whenever someone, usually a cousin and eventually me, would ask an uncomfortable question. Sometimes these were trivial, about a so-called curse word (to be clear: the command “shut up” could fit into that category). But even in more critical moments, we were forced to reconsider how we thought about holiness and our world apart. It often wasn’t outright confrontation but rather questioning and ambivalence. Fanny became for me a model of this kind of engagement, her work not only reflective of but formative for my understanding of literature’s moral possibilities.

Austen made me feel like I belonged in the making of literature. This was partly because of Fanny—not because she was a writer but because she was an observer, a careful reader of her social world. She recognized the inconsistencies around her, and quietly challenged moral complacency. Literature and scripture, I came to realize, both require interpretation, and a willingness to engage with contradiction and ambiguity.

Through Mansfield Park, she gave me words for the some of the silences and ambivalences I grew up with.  Literature could make legible the consternation between the holiness we were taught to aspire to and the duty to live in the world.

Caleb Gayle is the author of the forthcoming book Black Moses coming out in August. He is a professor at Northeastern University, a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine.