Transcendent Kingdom(46)

    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.



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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.



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    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.