Too Precious to Lose: A Memoir of Family, Community, and Possibility

A moving and inspiring memoir from a former Obama White House staffer, about his rural Maryland family's untold history, the merger of three churches—two white, one Black—that changed the trajectory of their lives, and how a radical embrace of community became their salvation—and his.

Jason Green was raised on fellowship—literally. Fellowship Lane, the once unpaved road he grew up on served as a spiritual metaphor throughout his coming of age. A precocious preacher’s kid, the ministry called out to Green, but ultimately he devoted himself to serving the people in a different way—through public service. After working on John Kerry’s presidential campaign, he spent four and a half years working in the White House as special assistant to Barack Obama. 


However, Green’s governmental path was cut short by a devastating call that his ninety-five-year-old grandmother was on her deathbed. At her side, he listened intently while she told him her every memory dating back to her birth in Quince Orchard, a town that no longer exists. He was preoccupied with disbelief; how could he have never known the true legacy of his tiny community? How could a whole town’s existence be erased but for the memory of a few surviving elders? Green’s historical research uncovered a surprising trove of tales about the self-determined mission of his newly freed ancestors to build an African American house of worship; and how generations later, on the eve of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assasination, that church's progeny would be at the center of a brave and fortelling decision to create an integrated church. Quince Orchard’s lost story is part of what Green calls the texture in the American the moral leadership of the Black church, the longstanding resilience of the Black community and the transformative love of the Black family.

A heart-stirring blend of memoir, history, and social justice, Too Precious to Lose traces one family through a century of life in a single community and all that was gained and lost along the way. Fueled by a new understanding of where he comes from, Green takes readers on a deeply personal journey asking his own questions about belonging all the while finding answers from the compassionate, communal-led lives of his forbearers. Too Precious to Lose is a modern return to a small-town’s past; a reclamation of a collective sense of hope and humanity in a much divided world. View Less