Transcendent Kingdom(20)

    At times, my life now feels so at odds with the religious teachings of my childhood that I wonder what the little girl I once was would think of the woman I’ve become—a neuroscientist who has at times given herself over to equating the essence that psychologists call the mind, that Christians call the soul, with the workings of the brain. I have indeed given that organ a kind of supremacy, believing and hoping that all of the answers to all of the questions that I have can and must be contained therein. But the truth is I haven’t much changed. I still have so many of the same questions, like “Do we have control over our thoughts?,” but I am looking for a different way to answer them. I am looking for new names for old feelings. My soul is still my soul, even if I rarely call it that.



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I have only a few memories of the Chin Chin Man from before he left, and even those are memories that might have been created from my mother’s stories. Nana was ten and he remembered everything about our father. I would ask him question after question, about his hair, the color of his eyes, the size of his arms, his height, his smell. Everything. In the beginning Nana would answer patiently, always ending with “You’ll see for yourself soon.”

In that first year, when we all thought the Chin Chin Man was coming back, we did everything we could to keep our lives the same, to make our home a place our patriarch would recognize when he returned. My mother, who was always the disciplinarian except in extreme cases, would sometimes find herself in those extreme cases shouting, “Just wait until your father gets home!” Those words still sparked fear in us, were still enough to convince us to behave.

    Nana started playing even more soccer. He tried out for the advanced league and made the team. They practiced every day and had games that took them to Atlanta, Montgomery, Nashville. It was a huge strain on my mother, as all of the parents were expected to pay for the equipment and uniforms and travel expenses. Worse still, they were expected to chaperone at least one of the away games.

The day of the Nashville game, she had no one to watch me. She’d already taken the day off work. At that point she was a home health aide for two families, the Reynoldses and the Palmers, and though neither family was as abusive as Mr. Thomas, her work doubled but her pay didn’t keep pace. My father’s job had kept more regular hours, and so he was the one who acted as my caretaker while my mother went from the Reynoldses to the Palmers and back again. When he left, my mother resorted to paying an old Bajan woman whose daughter she knew from the home health company. I loved this old woman, whose name I have since forgotten. She smelled like fresh ginger and hibiscus, and for years any whiff of those things would conjure up an image of her. I loved to sit in her lap and snuggle into the pillow of her fat stomach and feel it expand as she breathed. She kept ginger candies on her at all times, and she fell asleep so often that it was easy enough for me to rifle through her purse and steal one. If she woke up and caught me, she’d spank me or she’d shrug and laugh and I’d laugh too. It was our little game, and I usually won. But the day of the Nashville game, she’d gone back to Barbados to attend her friend’s funeral.

I rode the team bus to Nashville on my mother’s lap. She had packed a cooler of oranges and grapes and Capri Suns and mini water bottles. The night before, she’d washed Nana’s jersey by hand because a grass stain hadn’t come out in the washing machine. She didn’t trust washing machines. She didn’t trust dishwashers either. “When you want something done right, do it,” she would often say.

    Nana’s team was called the Tornados. There was one other black kid on the team and two Koreans, so Nana didn’t have to worry as much about bearing the full brunt of taunts from angry, racist parents. He was still the best kid on the team, still the reason so many parents got red cards, but it was a comfort to him to not feel so alone.

On the bus ride that day, I wouldn’t sit still. This was the summer before I started kindergarten, nearly a year after the Chin Chin Man left, and I could feel the end of my freedom encroaching. I was wilder than usual. On more than one occasion I’d been brought home by a neighbor after getting into some mischief, and my mother had long since stopped telling me to wait until my father got home. I ran up and down the aisle of the bus. I tugged the hair of the child in front of me until he yelped. I flailed like a fish in my mother’s arms until she released me. The drive from Huntsville to Nashville only takes about two hours, and I was determined to make every passenger feel every minute of it.

My mother kept apologizing to the other chaperones and sending me a look that I knew well. It was her I cannot beat you in front of all these white people, but just you wait look. I didn’t care. If a beating was inevitable, why stop? I spent the last fifteen minutes of the bus ride sing-shouting “The Wheels on the Bus,” while the soccer team plugged their ears and groaned. Nana ignored me. By that point he was an expert at that.

Two referees in impractical cowboy hats waited for us as we pulled into the parking lot of the soccer fields.

The boys and their parents rushed off the bus, no doubt eager to get away from me, but I had already stopped my singing and returned to my calmer, more peaceful self. Nana was seated next to the emergency exit window, his head leaned against the red bar in a way that looked uncomfortable.

    “Come on, Nana,” some of the kids said as they made their way out, but Nana didn’t get up from the seat. He lightly banged his head against that red bar, over and over and over, until everyone left, and it was, finally, just the three of us. My mother, Nana, and me.