Transcendent Kingdom(24)

    My outburst broke the dam, and after that day I started speaking up more in class. My grade recovered, though my small group didn’t bother hiding their disdain for me. I don’t think any of my ideas were ever taken seriously until someone else repackaged them as their own. After all, what could a Jesus freak know about science?





18





I have been saved and baptized in the Spirit, but I have never been baptized in water. Nana was baptized in water as a baby at my parents’ church in Ghana, where they have a more capacious attitude toward the rules and conventions of Protestantism than most American Pentecostal churches have. There was a kind of “more is more” attitude toward religion at my mother’s home church. Bring on the water, the Spirit, the fire. Bring on the speaking in tongues, the signs and wonders. Bring on the witch doctor, too, if he cares to help. My mother never saw any conflict between believing in mystics and believing in God. She took stories about vipers, angels, tornadoes come to destroy the Earth literally, not metaphorically. She buried our umbilical cords on the beach of her mother’s sea town like all the mothers before her, and then she took her firstborn to be blessed. More is more. More blessing, more protection.

When she had me in Alabama, she learned that many Pentecostals here do not believe in baptizing babies. The denomination is characterized by the belief in one’s ability to have a personal relationship with Christ. To choose the Lord, to choose salvation. A baby could not choose to accept Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior, so while Pastor John would be happy to say a prayer for me, he wouldn’t baptize me until I chose it myself. My mother was disappointed by this. “Americans don’t believe in God the way we do,” she would often say. She meant it as an insult, but still, she liked Pastor John, and she followed his teachings.

    When my friend Ashley’s little brother was born, my family was invited to his christening. Ashley stood onstage in a white dress and white shoes with crystal kitten heels. I thought she looked like an angel. Colin cried the entire time, his face red, his mouth sputtering. He didn’t seem to like it very much, but his entire family was radiating happiness. Everyone in the room could feel it, and I wanted it.

“Can I be baptized?” I asked my mother.

“Not until you’re saved,” she said.

I didn’t know what it meant to be saved, not in the context of religion. Back then, when people at church talked about salvation, I took the word literally. I imagined that I needed to be near death in order for salvation to take hold. I needed to have Jesus rescue me from a burning building or pull me back from the edge of a cliff. I thought of saved Christians as a group of people who had almost died; the rest of us were waiting for that near-death experience to come so that God could reveal himself. I suppose I’m still waiting for God to reveal himself. Sometimes, the children’s church pastor would say, “You have to ask Jesus to come into your heart,” and I would say those words, “Jesus, please come into my heart,” and then I would spend the rest of the service wondering how I would ever know if he’d accepted my invitation. I’d press my hand to my chest, listen and feel for its thumping rhythm. Was he there in my heartbeat?

Baptism seemed easier, clearer somehow than almost dying or heart-listening, and after Colin’s baptism I became obsessed with the idea that water was the best path to knowing that God had taken root. At bath time, I would wait for my mother to turn her back and then I would submerge myself in the water. When I lifted myself up, my hair would be wet, despite the shower cap, and my mother would curse under her breath.

    Black girl sin number one: getting your hair wet when it wasn’t wash day.

“I don’t have time for this, Gifty,” my mother would say as she brushed out my curls, braided my hair. After my third surreptitious DIY baptism, I got a spanking so bad I couldn’t sit without pain for the rest of that week. That put an end to that.



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When the wounded mouse finally died, I held his little body. I rubbed the top of his head, and I thought of it as a blessing, a baptism. Whenever I fed the mice or weighed them for the lever-press task, I always thought of Jesus in the upper room, washing his disciples’ feet. This moment of servitude, of being quite literally brought low, always reminded me that I needed these mice just as much as they needed me. More. What would I know about the brain without them? How could I perform my work, find answers to my questions? The collaboration that the mice and I have going in this lab is, if not holy, then at least sacrosanct. I have never, will never, tell anyone that I sometimes think this way, because I’m aware that the Christians in my life would find it blasphemous and the scientists would find it embarrassing, but the more I do this work the more I believe in a kind of holiness in our connection to everything on Earth. Holy is the mouse. Holy is the grain the mouse eats. Holy is the seed. Holy are we.



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    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.