The recently released Epstein files have unveiled something most of us in the Black community already knew in our bones: poverty makes our children prey. Among the three million pages documenting Jeffrey Epstein's predation lies a disturbing pattern—his particular fascination with Mississippi, America's poorest state, where he paid tuition for students at Piney Woods School, covered airfare to his Caribbean island, and made loans to cash-starved parents. The documents reveal a man who studied child poverty statistics the way a hunter studies migration patterns, sharing PDFs about economic burdens on families, poverty rates, and states with the worst healthcare systems.

Piney Woods School itself was founded in 1909 by Dr. Laurence Clifton Jones, who arrived in rural Rankin County with $1.65, a Bible, and a dream to educate the children of impoverished Black sharecroppers. He started teaching under a cedar tree to students who paid with vegetables, nails, and labor. It was built by and for us, a sacred space carved from nothing because we understood that no one else would educate our children. For over a century, Piney Woods has been what womanist theologian Katie Geneva Cannon calls a site of "moral agency"—where Black people refused to wait for white benevolence and instead created the conditions for our own survival.

But Epstein's entanglement with this institution reveals an old, cruel pattern: the exploitation that arrives dressed as philanthropy. The tuition payments. The scholarships. The promises. This is not charity—it is the strategic deployment of resources to manufacture access to the vulnerable.

The Architecture of False Promises

In 1962, sixty years before Epstein's files surfaced, white segregationists orchestrated what they called the "Reverse Freedom Rides." The White Citizens' Councils lured approximately 200 Black families from Southern cities onto buses with promises that echoed across Black communities: guaranteed jobs, free housing, a better life up North. Lela Mae Williams boarded a Greyhound in Arkansas with her nine youngest children, dressed in her finest clothes, believing the Kennedy family would greet her in Massachusetts. Radio advertisements and flyers spread the word about opportunities in faraway places. The recruiters specifically targeted single mothers with numerous children and men with criminal records—people who were desperate, people who were dreaming.

When the buses arrived in Hyannis, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, there were no jobs. No housing. No Kennedy family welcome. Just reporters' cameras pointed at Black families realizing they had been used as pawns in a segregationist game designed to embarrass Northern liberals and expose their supposed hypocrisy. Some families found work eventually. Many didn't. Most were stranded, hundreds of miles from home, their hope weaponized against them.

The pattern is consistent across centuries: identify Black poverty, offer false salvation, extract what you need—whether that's political capital, sexual access, or the satisfaction of watching people suffer—then disappear when the promise comes due.

The Womanist Witness: Survival in the Hands That Tend

Alice Walker defined womanism as being "committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female." This is not abstraction. This is the theological and practical work that Black women have always done: tending the community when promises fail, building schools under cedar trees when the state won't educate our children, finding housing when buses drop families in strange cities with nothing.

When those families arrived on the Reverse Freedom Rides, it wasn't politicians who saved them. It was community members—largely women—who provided food, opened their homes, and helped find jobs. When Epstein's pattern of exploitation targeting Mississippi's poorest children came to light, it will be Black women doing the work of healing, organizing, demanding accountability, and building protective systems.

Womanist theology teaches us that God is found not in the promise of rescue from above, but in the hands that wash, feed, teach, and fight. Delores Williams, in Sisters in the Wilderness, traces how Hagar—the enslaved, sexually exploited, and abandoned woman in Genesis—survived not through divine intervention that changed her circumstances, but through God's presence in her own resourcefulness and vision. Black women have always been Hagar, making a way out of no way, surviving what should have destroyed us, and most critically, refusing to wait for salvation that isn't coming.

The Theology of the Cedar Tree

Dr. Laurence C. Jones almost didn't survive to build Piney Woods. He was nearly lynched by white men who thought he was "preaching against white people." But he talked his way down from that rope, and some of those same men later donated money to his school. This is not a story about redemption through white charity—it is a story about Black refusal to die or to stop building, even when the rope is already around your neck.

The first class at Piney Woods happened under a cedar tree on the "old Mordecai Harris place." That cedar tree, now symbolically recreated on campus, represents a theological truth that womanist scholars have been articulating for generations: our sacred spaces are the ones we make ourselves, in the margins, with nothing. Not the grand cathedrals built by people who enslaved us. Not the institutions that require our children to prove their humanity for admission. The cedar tree. The log. The sheep shed that became a dormitory.

This is the harvest we planted ourselves. This is the God who shows up not in Harvard's endowment or in wealthy benefactors' suspicious generosity, but in the hands of a 24-year-old Black man from Missouri with $1.65 and the arrogance to believe he could build a school anyway.

When the Harvest Is Poisoned

Epstein's connection to Piney Woods and other Mississippi institutions forces us to ask hard questions about the theology of need and provision. When your children are hungry, when poverty is multi-generational, when the state has systematically denied resources—how do you discern between a gift and a trap? How do you accept help without accepting harm?

Sarah Young, a survivor support specialist with the Mississippi Coalition Against Human Trafficking, reviewed the Epstein emails and noted what trafficking survivors always know: "Abusers leverage anything to get access to victims, including food, shelter and even scholarships." In a state where 24 percent of children live in poverty—the highest child poverty rate in the nation—desperation becomes the infrastructure that predators navigate.

This is the cruelest dimension of systemic poverty: it forces impossible choices onto people who are already doing the impossible work of surviving. A parent watching their child's potential waste away in under-resourced schools is not wrong to accept a scholarship from someone offering it. The sin is not in the acceptance; the sin is in the offering—the deliberate exploitation of need that was created by policy, by racism, by a state that has always starved Black communities and then criminalized our hunger.

Womanist ethics refuses to place the burden of moral perfection on the oppressed. As Katie Cannon writes in Black Womanist Ethics, Black women have had to develop moral agency under circumstances that make traditional ethics impossible. You cannot apply the ethics of plenty to the conditions of scarcity. You cannot judge survival strategies from positions of safety.

We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For

June Jordan wrote: "We are the ones we have been waiting for." This is not metaphor. This is theology. This is the articulation of a truth that the cedar tree already taught us: no one is coming to save us. The cavalry is not en route. The promises will break. The scholarships will have strings. The buses will leave you stranded.

And still, we build. Still, we teach. Still, we tend each other.

The Reverse Freedom Rides families who stayed in the North didn't wait for the segregationists to make good on their promises. They found work. They raised their children. Betty Williams, daughter of Lela Mae Williams, grew up in a Boston housing project after her mother's promised meeting with the Kennedys never materialized. She survived. Her family survived. Not because the promise was kept, but because Black people have always known how to harvest hope from scorched earth.

Piney Woods School still stands. Despite tornados, financial crises, nearly 116 years of existing in Mississippi as an institution dedicated to Black excellence, it still educates approximately 300 students annually. Virtually all graduates attend college. This happened not because of Epstein's tainted money or any other white benefactor's largesse, but because of the original vision under the cedar tree: we will save ourselves.

The Work of Tending

Womanist theology calls us to the work of tending—not the work of waiting for rescue, but the active, daily, sacred work of caring for one another in systems designed to destroy us. This is not the false individualism of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps." This is the collective work of community survival, the work that Black women have been doing since the first of us were stolen from African soil.

When Epstein's files revealed his targeting of Mississippi's poorest children, the response cannot be to shame families for accepting help. The response must be to ask: why are our children so poor that a predator's scholarship looks like answered prayer? Why does Mississippi still rank dead last in child wellbeing? Why, in 2026, do we still have the highest child poverty rates in the nation?

These are not accidents. These are choices. Policy choices. Budget choices. The choice to under-fund Black schools, to deny Medicaid expansion, to criminalize poverty while enabling the wealth accumulation of people like Epstein.

And in the face of those choices, we make our own: we build schools under cedar trees. We open our homes to families stranded by false promises. We do the work of tending, even when we're exhausted, even when we're under-resourced ourselves, even when the larger systems designed to care for communities are actively trying to destroy them.

The Harvest That Sustains

Womanist theology does not promise easy answers or clean victories. It does not say that oppression will end if we pray hard enough or organize well enough or vote in the right election. What it says is this: in the midst of systems designed to kill us, we can still tend life. We can still plant. We can still harvest.

The cedar tree at Piney Woods is a harvest. Every graduate is a harvest. Every family that survived the Reverse Freedom Rides and built lives in Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles is a harvest. Every Black woman who has fed someone else's child, taught someone else's teenager to read, hidden someone running from violence, organized against injustice—that is harvest.

Epstein is dead. The segregationists who orchestrated the Reverse Freedom Rides are dead. But Piney Woods still stands. Black families still thrive, despite everything designed to prevent our thriving. The cedar tree is still teaching.

This is not about waiting for white people to keep their promises or for systems to suddenly care about Black children. This is about recognizing that we are the harvest. We have always been our own provision, our own answer, our own deliverance.

Alice Walker wrote that a womanist "loves the Spirit." Not the spirit of institutions that betray us, or wealthy predators who exploit us, or political systems that starve our children. The Spirit that shows up in the cedar tree. The Spirit that teaches under a log with nothing but a Bible and $1.65. The Spirit that survives false promises and makes new life anyway.

We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the harvest. And we will tend each other, as we have always done, long after every false promise has turned to dust.

"And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the Lord your God." — Leviticus 23:22

But we have learned: the edge of the field is all they will ever leave us. So we plant our own fields. We are our own harvest. And we glean for each other.