In his new book, “How Far to the Promised Land,” due out in early September, Esau McCaulley imagines what the headlines in the newspapers might have said if he had died that day: “Black Youth Killed in Drive-by Shooting: Crime Out of Control in Northwest Huntsville.” He would have just been another nameless Black victim of gun violence.

“People would have known exactly what my story was about,” Esau McCaulley said in a recent interview. “But they would have been wrong. That’s not the whole of who I was.”

In a follow-up to his award-winning book, “Reading While Black,” McCaulley, a New York Times columnist, New Testament scholar and theologian in residence at Progressive Baptist Church in Chicago, tells the story of growing up in a poor neighborhood in Huntsville, where he dreamed that football would offer him a way out.

When a knee injury derailed his major college scholarship hopes, McCaulley ended up playing at Sewanee, a Division III school known for its beautiful campus in the mountains of Middle Tennessee. There he met his wife, discovered his calling to ministry and found a life different than he could have imagined growing up.

“I felt trapped by the story that people were telling about me — this kid who escaped poverty and made it to the middle class,” he said. “That was the story people wanted to hear. But I felt like that wasn’t true. Because it made it seem like the only people who mattered were the people who succeeded.”

In his new book, inspired by the death of his father in 2017, McCaulley said he set out to find the beauty in the stories of broken and complicated people, including many in his family and the neighborhood. “Their struggles, even if they did not end well, can still be filled with glory,” he said.

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