Lark’s Flight is the story chronicling the life of the author Carolyne Lark Swayze, raised during her formative years by her maternal grandparents, James and Rowena Lark. Beginning from the plantations of the Lowcountry of Georgia and South Carolina, the Larks would, for close to forty years, provide dedicated service to the Mennonite Church. Even as James became the church’s first Black bishop, the organization’s alignment with the Jim Crow laws of the Antebellum south belied any notion of racial egalitarianism, and under the hegemony of the Mennonite church, the Larks, as church planters, provided extensive service throughout the United States and Canada among urban Black communities, beginning in Chicago. But at what price?
The author addresses what she perceives as the masked pain of a family head-on and takes readers along on her journey of self-discovery, heeding the call that leads her back to where it all began and home.
