This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America(39)

My grandmother Sylvana was a prayer warrior. Every morning, she would seclude herself in her closet and pray for all her loved ones. Plenty of times she would dream about fortune or misfortune portrayed through symbols, such as vines and birds. I wasn’t quite sure that Irie was a prophetess. She seemed too young, and she wasn’t trained in biblical doctrine. But her unwavering voice forced me to believe with all my might that something was coming to me on Wednesday at noon.

A few days passed, during which I was starting to warm up to the idea of attending the University of Miami. I liked Miami, loved it actually. I loved the palm trees and the beaches, and the carefree attitude that Miamians all seemed to have. I thought I could get used to an ibis as my school’s mascot. I even imagined myself holding up my hands like wings out of pride for my alma mater. And then I received a voice mail. I assumed that it was from my mother, telling me to take out the trash before I did anything else—she always left me messages like this—but I listened to it anyway. It wasn’t from her. It was from a woman at Princeton, who indicated that she had called me at noon. It was Wednesday.

Once I got home to my bedroom, I took a deep breath and called her back. I thought that I would have to go through an interview of some sort, some final fiery hoop to prove that I could do the work there, but when she answered the phone, she didn’t waste any time in telling me that I was accepted and that she would send an acceptance letter in a few days. I hung up the phone and started crying. When I called my mother, she screamed. Immediately, my house was infused with a fresh burst of happiness.

That same night, my mother drove me down to the church to give my testimony. I gave the testimony again at the following Sunday service, and Irie sat in the back, silently crying with her hands clasped near her face. I don’t know whether the congregation was captivated more by my story, or by the realization that the quiet single mother in the last pew was a prophetess. In retrospect, I realized that I needed that month in a holding pattern to really wait and see what God could do. Getting off Princeton’s waitlist demonstrated more of His glory because it seemed the most impossible outcome. Fourteen hundred names. Fourteen hundred names. There is no amount of math or science that can rationalize what had transpired. Irie had predicted the exact date and time that something great would happen to me, and it did. And this would not be the only time that Irie’s prophesies came true. During my commencement weekend, Irie texted me the words “bidding war” in relation to my writing dreams. She knew no publishing lingo, and only asked that I receive her message. Two years later, I did get into the midst of a bidding war; my proposal sold at auction, which is how this book came to be.



Enchantment, magic, and faith-based power have always been a pervasive force in African-American life. For slaves, accessing the supernatural was a way in which to undermine white domination and possess power in day-to-day conflicts. In his memoir, Frederick Douglass writes of a conjure man named Sandy Jenkins, a fellow slave who provides him with a root that will protect him if and when he finds himself in a confrontation with a “negro-breaker,” or slave disciplinarian. The black abolitionist and writer Henry Clay Bruce, who had been enslaved in Virginia, discovered a community of slaves who sought the help of a conjurer in order to thwart deportation and removal to a plantation in the Deep South, where conditions were presumably more brutal. At the last minute, their relocation was cancelled.4 Slaves moved from conjure to Christianity with little to no concern about the supposed incompatibility of these two belief systems.5 Slaves’ encounters with Christianity were deeply fraught—some had it foisted upon them, and others were actively barred from it. Indeed, white supremacy has been inextricably linked to Christianity in America. Some slave masters took up the task of converting their slaves so that they would remain obedient at all times. Many believed it was God’s will for Africans to be enslaved so that they would be brought closer to Christ. But masters tended to hate it when slaves actually made Christianity their own. Slaves were forbidden to have prayer meetings, so they met secretly in wood and ravines, among other places. Some masters forbid their slaves to go to church because they believed that they didn’t have souls. Despite all these adversities, including not being able to read the Bible for themselves, slaves crafted sermons, songs, and dances blended with ancestral African traditions and their present-day experiences.

The rise of Pentecostalism in the 1800s saw ritual healing and protection, as well as the notion of supernatural help, become more closely aligned with traditional Christian practice. Because black people in the United States lacked sufficient medical care, even after emancipation—if they were treated, it was often with contempt by white physicians—they turned to herbalists and conjurers for healing. Both Pentecostal prayer warriors and conjure specialists believed that the spiritual and natural worlds collided in their practice; they each relied on supernatural, invisible powers to restore the wholeness of an afflicted client, even today. For the former, God is the vehicle through which these miracles spring forth, whereas for the latter the source is more ambiguous. Some conjure specialists believe that their talents are divine, and others say that their powers derive from objects and charms that they have created.



Danielle Ayoka is a former prayer warrior who now describes herself as a clairvoyant, astrologer, and magic maker. I found her on Twitter because so many religious and spiritual black women who I follow regularly retweeted her advice and admonitions. She says that when she prayed at night as a child for negative thoughts to leave her mind so that she wouldn’t have nightmares, they would go out of her bedroom window and she would watch them slide away like a movie reel. She became a prayer warrior while at Norfolk State University, through her participation in a campus youth ministry. Like the women in my church, she would lay her hands on people, mostly black children, and they would cry, fall on the ground, or both. To strengthen her spiritual gifts, Ayoka would fast for five to seven days with only water for sustenance. She would read and study different religious texts for hours, abstain from sex and alcohol, and shy away from parties. In college, she began to study quantum physics and energy, which made her feel as if her needs were not being met by the kind of Christianity in which she was raised. She met a woman named Mya, who became her spiritual adviser. On All Saints’ Day, an important pagan holiday, Mya dreamed that a crow was pecking at Danielle’s forehead; she explained that crows represent consciousness in Native American religions. During Ayoka’s first healing session, when Mya instructed her to lie down, she all of a sudden felt her lymph nodes close up. When she told Mya she couldn’t breathe, Mya snapped and wiggled her fingers, and told Ayoka that she’d had a terminal illness in her past life that needed to be cleared up. Once Ayoka left the session, she felt lighter and happier and subsequently invested in energy sessions monthly. Not too long afterwards, she learned from her father that she comes from a lineage of Native American shamans. Now, she practices quantum healing, which involves manipulating energy in her clients’ bodies in order to shift it.