She seems to have a complicated relationship with her race. There’s a line you included where she says, “I’m white with the exception of the color of my skin.”

Why would somebody say that, or want to be a part of a culture that makes them aspire toward a different skin color?

Mueller: The question you just raised is one that I still think about and will probably think about for the rest of my life. Why would this woman—who is clearly full of incredible intelligence, skills, and perseverance—throw her lot in with a community that would not have her as a member? I really do believe, at the end of the day, she had faith in the gospel that she dedicated her life to.

She was from Connecticut. Her mother was a slave, and she kind of had a liminal existence—the line between slave and free was not so clearly demarcated in the North. She was a servant girl in a rich household. Apparently, she had some kind of relationship, and a mixed-race child came about. And so maybe she saw a way out of this situation or was looking for a community that would not care about this relationship. She converts, she moves to Nauvoo, Illinois, where she lives with Joseph Smith. She was promised, not just by the church, but by Joseph Smith’s brother, that she could be a full member of the community. He told her, “You can actually overcome your lineage and join a pure lineage.”

Obviously, today, hearing that kind of message makes us squirm because we don’t understand race that way. But more importantly, James really took to this promise. She isn’t looking to save her people. She’s looking to save her family. And to her that means finding community with people that I think she believed would last into the hereafter into the kingdoms to come. I think she heard this message of redemption, of racial redemption, and she held onto that story for the rest of her life—even as the church, once she gets to Utah, begins to reject people of African descent.

Green: You write about how the text of Book of Mormon helped to create a racialized culture—based on the text, Mormons aspired to being “a white and delightsome people.” How do these notions of white purity end up in a sacred Mormon text?

Mueller: Whatever you want to say about the origins of the Book of Mormon, it fits its time period really well. It’s very American. It tells a story of racial schism and how it came to be, dividing the world into a hierarchy of races, and that’s a standard American story—especially the idea that people born to a so-called darker-skinned race could not be redeemed.

The story of the Book of Mormon is not a black-white story, as Americans know it, where white is European and black is African. It’s an interfamily story. According to the Book of Mormon, an Israelite family came to New York in the 6th century B.C.E. The two main populations there are the light-skinned population called the Nephites and the dark-skinned population called the Lamanites, and the book traces this elaborate story of the rise and fall rise and fall of their civilizations. The Lamanites, according to the book, become Native Americans. They’re the native peoples who early European colonizers of America encounter.