What I’m saying is I didn’t grow up with a language for, a way to explain, to parse out, my self-loathing. I grew up only with my part, my little throbbing stone of self-hate that I carried around with me to church, to school, to all those places in my life that worked, it seemed to me then, to affirm the idea that I was irreparably, fatally, wrong. I was a child who liked to be right.

We were the only black people at the First Assemblies of God Church; my mother didn’t know any better. She thought the God of America must be the same as the God of Ghana, that the Jehovah of the white church could not possibly be different from the one of the black church. That day when she saw the marquee outside asking, “Do you feel lost?,” that day when she first walked into the sanctuary, she began to lose her children, who would learn well before she did that not all churches in America are created equal, not in practice and not in politics. And, for me, the damage of going to a church where people whispered disparaging words about “my kind” was itself a spiritual wound—so deep and so hidden that it has taken me years to find and address it. I didn’t know what to make of the world that I was in back then. I didn’t know how to reconcile it. When my mother and I made prayer requests for Nana, did the congregation really pray? Did they really care? When I heard the gossip of those two women, I saw the veil lift and the shadow world of my religion came into view. Where was God in all of this? Where was God if he was not in the hushed quiet of a Sunday school room? Where was God if he was not in me? If my blackness was a kind of indictment, if Nana would never be healed and if my congregation could never truly believe in the possibility of his healing, then where was God?

My journal entry from the night I heard Mrs. Morton and Mrs. Cline talking:

    Dear God,

Please hurry up and make Buzz better. I want the whole church to see.

I knew, even as I was writing that entry, that God didn’t work that way, but then I wondered, how exactly did he work? I doubted him, and I hated myself for doubting him. I thought that Nana was proving everyone right about us, and I wanted him to get better, be better, because I thought that being good was what it would take to prove everyone wrong. I walked around those places, pious child that I was, thinking that my goodness was proof negative. “Look at me!” I wanted to shout. I wanted to be a living theorem, a Logos. Science and math had already taught me that if there were many exceptions to a rule, then the rule was not a rule. Look at me.

This was all so wrongheaded, so backward, but I didn’t know how to think any differently. The rule was never a rule, but I had mistaken it for one. It took me years of questioning and seeking to see more than my little piece, and even now I don’t always see it.

* * *

—

My mother went insane when Nana relapsed, and I went quiet. I burrowed inside my own mind, hiding there, feverishly writing in my journal, hoping for Rapture. These were in fact the end times, not of the world but of my belief. I just couldn’t see it yet.

I was quiet, and I was angry at just how easily and quickly everyone in our lives had turned on Nana. Even sports could no longer protect him. When Nana was king, Pastor John would sometimes call him up onto the stage on Sundays, and the congregation would stretch out our hands and pray for his upcoming week, for victory in all the games that he was about to play. Up there, with his head bowed, our hands outstretched in coronation, Nana received every blessing. And when game time came and his team won, all of us were gratified. “How great is our God?” we would sing during praise and worship, and we would believe it.

    On the days, rare though they were, when Nana’s team lost, I would listen to that spark of rage rush through the crowd.

“C’mon.”

“Get your head in the game.”

This was basketball in Alabama, not football. People didn’t care as much, and yet still, this was the nature of their caring. Before Nana had made his team important in our state, the stands had been nearly empty at every game, but when his team got good, every spectator became an expert.

Nana played exactly two games during his addiction. He was a mess out there, sloppy and unfocused. He missed shot after shot; he dropped the ball and sent it careening toward the bleachers.

“Where’d this fucking coon learn how to play?” one angry fan shouted, and I couldn’t believe how fast the fall, how quick the turn.

When Nana was down, Pastor John stopped calling him up to the altar to receive our prayers, our outstretched hands. He played those two games as though he had just recently heard what basketball was. On the night of the last game he ever played, he was booed by everyone in the stands. Both sides, both sets of fans, joined their voices in chorus. Nana threw the ball as hard as he could against the wall when the referee made a call he didn’t like. The ref kicked him out of the game and everyone cheered as Nana looked around, raising his middle fingers at all of us and storming off the court. In the stands that night, booing, I saw Ryan Green. I saw Mrs. Cline. I saw my church, and I couldn’t unsee.

* * *

—

    Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength…Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these. I thought about that verse a lot in those days. Three pages of my childhood journals are filled with that verse, copied over and over again until my handwriting gets sloppy, lazy. I was trying to remind myself to love God, to love my neighbor.

But the instruction is not simply to love your neighbor. It is to do so in the same way as you love yourself, and herein was the challenge. I didn’t love myself, and even if I had, I couldn’t love my neighbor. I had begun to hate my church, hate my school, my town, my state.

Try though she might, my mother couldn’t convince Nana to come to church with us again after our Sunday in the last pew. I was relieved, but I didn’t share that with her. I didn’t want everybody staring at us, making their judgments. I didn’t want further proof of God’s failure to heal my brother, a failure that I saw as unbelievably cruel, despite a lifetime of hearing that God works in mysterious ways. I wasn’t interested in mystery. I wanted reason, and it was becoming increasingly clear to me that I would get none of it in that place where I had spent so much of my life. If I could have stopped going to the First Assemblies altogether, I would have. Every time I thought I might, I would picture my mother up there at the altar, twirling and falling, singing with praise, and I knew that if I didn’t go to our church with her she would simply go alone. That she would simply be alone, the last person on Earth who still believed that God might heal her son, and I couldn’t imagine anything lonelier than that.

37

Now I want to write about Nana’s addiction from inside it. That’s how I want to know it, as though it were my own. I took meticulous notes of his final years in my journal. I wrote like an anthropologist with Nana as my sole subject. I can tell you what his skin looked like (sallow), what his hair looked like (uncombed, uncut). I can tell you that he, always too skinny, had lost so much weight that his eyes started to bulge against the sunkeness of his orbital sockets. But all of this information is useless. The ethnography of my journal is painful to read and unhelpful besides, because I can never know the inside of my brother’s mind, what it felt like to move through the world in his body, in his final days. My journal entries were me trying to find a way into a place that has no entrances, no exits.

Nana started stealing from our mother. Small things at first, her wallet, her checkbook, but soon the car was gone and so was the dining room table. Soon Nana was gone too. For days and weeks at a time he went missing, and my mother went after him. It got to be so that she and I knew the names of every receptionist and every cleaning lady of every motel in Huntsville.

    “You can give up if you want to,” my mother would sometimes hiss at the Chin Chin Man over the phone, “but I will never give up. I will never give up.”

The Chin Chin Man called regularly in those days. I’d talk to him on the phone for a few minutes, answering his boring questions and listening to the way time and guilt had changed his voice, and then I would hand the phone over to my mother and wait for the two of them to finish fighting.

“Where were you?” my mother once said to him over the phone. “Where have you been?” It was the same thing she said to Nana on the nights when he would slink in through the back door, coming down from a high, reeking to high Heaven, not expecting to find our mother holding vigil in the living room.