When evangelicals Dolores and John Eads quit their jobs in 2001 (he was a hospital administrator and she was a teacher) to create and run the Light of the Village church in Prichard, Alabama, they settled in a neighborhood called Alabama Village. Although Prichard is just five miles south of Mobile, it’s a world apart.

According to the 2025 World Population Survey, Prichard is tiny, with 18,524 residents, 32 percent of whom live at or below the poverty line. Moreover, the survey reports that the average per capita income is $32,057. Unsurprisingly, 89 percent of the population is Black.

“City services barely exist,” Garcia writes. “In the Village, about a million gallons of water once supplied to homes and businesses drain out of decaying pipes every year.”

Indeed, Prichard could easily be described as a place that time and politics forgot.

Alabama Village, award-winning journalist J. Malcolm Garcia’s latest book, takes readers deep into the Village, one of Prichard’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods. All told, the book is a loving ode to the people there, but it is not a sugar-coated, feel-good portrait. Instead, readers are introduced to folks who deal and use drugs, often neglect their kids, and typically die young. A wall at Light of the Village memorializes 72 people, many of them teens or young adults, who lost their lives to violence between June 2009 and April 2025. It’s grim. At the same time, Garcia’s exposition allows readers to get to know Village residents, offering multi-dimensional portrayals that juxtapose people’s humor, savvy, and wit with the reality of limited opportunities. The resultant deprivation makes the idea of economic security and social well-being seem like something from Disney. 

One of the most compelling people in the book is Corey “Bigg Man” Davis, a showy drug dealer described as liking “easy money,” but who was also known to regularly deliver groceries to a disabled couple and shower local kids with gifts during the Christmas holidays. His 2021 death at age 30 when he was shot by someone who remains at large shocked no one. Nonetheless, he has not been forgotten.

John and Dolores Eads considered Bigg Man a friend, and as lay pastors, they officiated at his funeral. But early death, they told Garcia, is a fact of life in Alabama Village, so even though it is not something they can easily shrug off, they continue conducting Sunday services and weekly Bible study, run a free summer camp for area kids and provide food and solace to the community.

Garcia presents the Eads as remarkably judgment-free: They listen, offer counsel, pray and provide material and emotional support to those who visit the church. Their proselytizing, he writes, does not require the townspeople to submit to their beliefs or accept Christ, or even God, into their lives. This is as laudable as it is rare.

But the book left me with questions. For one, church director John Eads is presented in far more detail than Delores, the church’s director of youth ministry. Who is she? And what makes her tick? How a thriving church in one of the most economically depressed and violent areas of the southeastern United States is financed is unaddressed. It’s a gaping omission, and while it is Google-able—the church receives foundation grants and conducts near-constant fundraising events—a 2023 audit by The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability reported cash and in-kind donations totaling $641,542, with expenses totaling $746,759. Whether this deficit has been filled in the two-plus years since the audit remains an open question.

Despite these holes, Alabama Village is an important book, introducing a place that the Trump administration would likely consider squalid and in need of clearance. Garcia complicates this simplistic notion. The result is gritty, raw, and sad, but it is also humane and tender. What’s more, Light of the Village, as a community hub, knows that its efforts won’t necessarily save people from violence, poverty, or endemic teen pregnancy. But by accepting people and serving them without conditions, it is modeling what it means to care about people and treat them with respect and decency. 

This, alone, makes Alabama Village worthwhile. At a time of horrific backsliding on social welfare, the book offers a replicable prototype of meaningful human engagement. It’s something to champion.

• • •

Alabama Village: Faith, Hope, and Survival in a Southern Town
By J. Malcom Garcia
Steven Stories Press; 304 pages

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