—

    I started playing music around the apartment, songs that I knew my mother liked. I wasn’t really optimistic that music would get her out of bed, but I hoped that it would, at the very least, soothe something inside of her. I played schmaltzy pop-country songs like “I Hope You Dance.” I played boring hymnals sung by tabernacle choirs. I played every song on Daddy Lumba’s roster, imagining that by the end of “Enko Den” she would be up, boogying around the house like she used to when I was a child.

I also started cleaning the apartment more, because I figured she probably liked the familiar scent of bleach, the way it clung to your nose hairs hours after you’d used it. I’d spray the toxic all-purpose cleaner onto the windowsill in the bedroom and watch the mist of it float off and away. Some of those particles probably reached her in the bed.

“Gifty,” she said one day, after I’d wiped the window to gleaming. “Would you get me some water?”

Tears sprung to my eyes as I said, “Yes, of course,” with so much glee you’d have thought she was asking me to accept a Nobel Prize. I brought a glass of water back to her and watched her sit up to drink it. She looked tired, which seemed improbable to me given that she’d done nothing but rest since she got here. I never thought of her as old, but in a little more than a year she would be seventy, and all of those years were beginning to write themselves onto her sunken cheeks, her hands, hardened from labor.

I watched her drink the water slowly, so slowly, and then I took the glass from her after she’d finished. “More?” I asked.

She shook her head and started to sink back down under the covers and my heart sank with her. Once the duvet was completely draped over her, covering her body, nearly to her chin, she looked at me and said, “You need to do something about your hair.”

I stifled my laughter and brought my hands up to my dreadlocks, wrapped them around my fingers. My mother didn’t speak to me for a month the summer I came home with the beginnings of locks. “People will think you were raised in a dirty home,” she argued before falling silent for nearly the entire length of my stay, and now those locks had her speaking again, if only to chastise me. Holy is the black woman’s hair.

19

In college I took a poetry class on Gerard Manley Hopkins to satisfy a humanities requirement. Most of the other science majors I knew took intro to creative writing courses to fulfill the requirement. “It’s an easy A,” one friend said. “You just, like, write down your feelings and shit and then the whole class talks about it. Literally everyone gets an A.” The idea of an entire classroom full of my peers talking about the feelings I’d somehow cobbled into a story terrified me. I decided to take my chances with Hopkins.

My professor, an incredibly tall woman with a lion’s mane of golden curls, walked into the classroom ten minutes late every Tuesday and Thursday. “All right, then, where were we?” she’d say, as if we’d already been talking about the poems without her and she wanted us to catch her up. No one ever responded, and she’d usually glare at us with her piercing green eyes until someone surrendered and stammered out something nonsensical.

“Hopkins is all about a delight in language,” she said one day. “I mean, listen to this: ‘Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded.’ He’s taking so much pleasure out of the way these words fit together, out of the sound of them, and we, the readers, get equal pleasure reading it.”

    She looked ecstatic and pained as she said this, like she was halfway to orgasm. I wasn’t getting equal pleasure from reading it. I wasn’t even getting a quarter of the pleasure my professor seemed to be getting simply from talking about it. I was intimidated by her and I hated the poetry, but I felt a strange sense of kinship with Hopkins every time I read about his personal life, his difficulty reconciling his religion with his desires and thoughts, his repressed sexuality. I enjoyed reading his letters and, inspired to some romantic ideal of the nineteenth century, tried writing letters of my own to my mother. Letters in which I hoped to tell her about my complicated feelings about God. “Dear Ma,” they started, “I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not believing in God is compatible with believing in science.” Or, “Dear Ma, I haven’t forgotten the joy I felt the day you walked me down to the altar and the whole congregation stretched out their hands, and I really, truly felt the presence of God.” I wrote four such letters, all of which could have been a different petal on the flower of my belief. “I believe in God, I do not believe in God.” Neither of these sentiments felt true to what I actually felt. I threw the letters away, and I gratefully accepted my B– in the course.

* * *

—

Nana had always been conflicted about God. He hated the youth pastor at First Assemblies, a man in his early twenties who had just finished Masters Commission, a kind of training camp for future spiritual leaders, and who insisted that everyone call him P.T. instead of Pastor Tom.

P.T. was interested in relating to the youth on their level, which for his relationship with Nana meant that he was constantly making up slang terms that he assumed black teenagers were using. “Whattup, broseph?” was a favorite greeting of his. Nana could hardly even look at him without rolling his eyes. Our mother chided him for being disrespectful, but we could tell that even she thought that P.T. was kind of an idiot.

    Nana was thirteen when he graduated from children’s church and moved on to youth group services. I missed him during Sunday school when the children’s church pastor pulled out her puppets and Nana reluctantly went across the hall to listen to P.T.’s teachings. I started to get a little restless in those services, squirming around in my seat and asking to go to the bathroom every five minutes, until finally the pastors decided it would be all right for me to go to Sunday school with Nana as long as I returned to children’s church during regular service hours. In those early-morning classes, Nana sat about as far away from me as possible, but I didn’t mind. I liked being in the same room as him, and I liked feeling older, wiser than the other children my age who were stuck listening to the children’s church pastor’s little sketches, which, by that time, had grown tiresome. I was, even then, desperate to prove my competence, my superiority, so being the youngest in the youth group felt like a kind of arrival, a demonstration of my goodness.

Like the children’s church pastor, P.T. talked a lot about sin, but he wasn’t partial to puppets. He paid little attention to me and interpreted Scripture as he saw fit.

He said, “If girls only knew what boys think about when they wear those low-cut things and those high-cut things, they wouldn’t wear them anymore.”

He said, “There are a lot of people out there who’ve never heard the Gospel, and they’re just busy walking in sin until we spread the good news.”

He said, “God glories in our commitment to him. Remember, he is our bridegroom and we are his bride. We must be faithful to none other.”

P.T. was forever smirking and drumming his fingers on the lip of the table as he talked. He was the kind of youth pastor who wanted to make God hip in a way that almost felt exclusionary. His wasn’t the God of bookworms and science geeks. He was the God of punk rock. P.T. liked wearing a shirt that proclaimed JESUS FREAK across the front. The word “freak” written there next to “Jesus” was purposefully combative, incongruous, as if to shout, “This isn’t your mother’s Christianity.” If Jesus was a club, P.T. and other youth pastors like him were the bouncers.

    One day Nana called bullshit on an exclusionary God. He raised his hand, and P.T. paused his drumming, tilted his seat back. “Shoot, bro,” he said.

“So what if there’s a tiny village somewhere in Africa that is so incredibly remote that no one has found it yet, which means no Christians have been able to go there as missionaries and spread the Gospel, right? Are all of those villagers going to Hell, even though there’s no way that they could have heard about Jesus?”

P.T.’s smirk set in and his eyes narrowed at Nana a bit. “God would have made a way for them to hear the good news,” he said.

“Okay, but hypothetically.”