Transcendent Kingdom Read online

  He started laughing, leaned against the desk. “Yes, Gifty?”

  “Are you telling me that when I get a ‘like’ on my Facebook posts, dopamine is released?”

  “Why yes, right you are,” he said.

  “What about when I do something bad?” I asked.

  Han shrugged. “Depends. What kind of thing? How bad are we talking?”

  “Bad, bad,” I said, and he just laughed and laughed.

  35

  Dear God,

  I wish Nana would just die already. Please, just let this be over.

  36

  All of the self-help literature I’ve read says that you have to talk about your pain to move through it, but the only person I ever felt like I wanted to talk to about Nana was my mother and I knew she couldn’t handle it. It felt unfair, to pile my pain on top of hers, and so I swallowed it instead. I wrote journal entries that grew increasingly frantic, increasingly desperate, until I reached that one, heinous line.

  “God will read what you write, and he will answer your writing like prayers,” my mother once said. The night I wished for my brother’s death I thought, Good, so be it, but by the light of morning, when I realized that I had written a sentence for which I would never forgive myself, I ripped it out of my notebook, tore it to shreds, then flushed it down the toilet, hoping God would forget. What had I done? When Nana relapsed, I burrowed in my shame. I went quiet.

  I went quiet and my mother went insane. She became a kind of one-woman child hunter, driving up and down the streets of Huntsville searching for my brother. At church she would move up to the altar during praise and worship and dance around like a woman possessed. If the song made any mention of “falling on one’s knees” she would take it literally, thudding down immediately in a way that seemed painful.

  Church gossip is as old as the church itself, and oh how my church loved to gossip. Years later, Mary, the pastor’s daughter, would become the worship leader. Her toddler would run around the sanctuary every morning before she took him to the nursery, and everyone would smile sweetly at him, all the while remembering the circumstances under which he came to be. That gossip was as juicy as a peach. My congregation got fat on it, but when Mary got married we starved. Before that there was Nana and my mother’s ridiculous dances at the altar. If Mary’s pregnancy was a peach, then Nana had been a feast.

  Everyone knew that Nana had gotten hurt in a game, but it took them a while to catch up to his addiction. Every Sunday, when Pastor John asked for prayer requests, my mother and I would put Nana’s name in the basket. Pray for his healing, we said, and, at first, it was easy for everyone to assume we meant his ankle. But how long does it take God to heal a sprained ankle?

  * * *

  —

  “I heard he’s on drugs,” Mrs. Cline said. She was a deacon at the First Assemblies. Fifty-five years old, unmarried, straight as a broom with lips so thin they looked like a slit across her face.

  “No,” Mrs. Morton gasped.

  “Oh yes, honey. Why do you think he doesn’t come around here anymore? He’s not playing this season, so we know he’s not too busy.”

  “That’s sad. That’s sad he’s on drugs.”

  “It is sad, but—and I really do hate to say this—their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs. I mean, they are always on drugs. That’s why there’s so much crime.”

  “You’re right. I have noticed that.”

  I had been studying my Bible verses in the Sunday school room when I overheard that conversation in the hallway. If I’d heard it today, I know what I would have done. I would have marched outside and told them that there is no data to support the idea that black people are biologically more given to drugs or crime than any other race. I would have marched out of that church and never looked back.

  But I was ten years old and I was ashamed. I sat stock still in my chair and hoped that they couldn’t hear me on the other side of the door. I gripped the open flaps of my Bible so tightly that I left marks pressed into the pages. When they left, I let out the breath I was holding, and pinched the skin between my thumb and index finger, a trick I’d picked up to help keep me from crying. In that moment, and for the first time in my life really, I hated Nana so completely. I hated him, and I hated myself.

  * * *

  —

  I am not a psychologist or a historian or a social scientist. I can examine the brain of a depressed animal, but I am not given to thinking about what circumstances, if any, led up to that depression. Like everyone else, I get a part of the story, a single line to study and recite, to memorize.

  When I was a child, no one ever said the words “institutionalized racism.” We hardly even said the word “racism.” I don’t think I took a single class in college that talked about the physiological effects of years of personally mediated racism and internalized racism. This was before studies came out that showed that black women were four times more likely to die from childbirth, before people were talking about epigenetics and whether or not trauma was heritable. If those studies were out there, I never read them. If those classes were offered, I never took them. There was little interest in these ideas back then because there was, there is, little interest in the lives of black people.

  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.

  Those were the days of the broken things. Nana punched a hole through the wall. He smashed the television down onto the floor, and shattered every picture frame and lightbulb in the house. He called me a nosy cunt the night I caught him raving downstairs, and my mother ran up so that the two of us could hide from him.

  We blocked the door to my bedroom with a chair, but soon he was pounding against it. “Fuck you both,” he said, and we could hear the sound of his shoulder smashing against the door, and we could see the way the door wanted to give from its hinges, wanted to let him in. And my mother answered, loud in prayer, “Lord, protect my son. Lord, protect my son.” I was afraid and I was angry. Who would protect us?

  It was almost better when he was high. When he was high, he wasn’t sick; he wasn’t angry. He was subdued, quiet, gone. I saw him shoot up only once. On the couch, in the living room of our house, he plunged a needle into the crook of his elbow, and then he slipped away somewhere, oblivious to me and to everything else around him. I have never seen a needle since without thinking of him. I have preferred the flesh of mice to that of humans because I never want to put a needle into an elbow. I cannot see a median cubital vein and not see my brother nodding off and away on our couch.

  How do I talk about the day he died? I don’t remember that morning, and my journal entry from the night before says only: Buzz looked tired but good! I’ve read that line so many times in the years since, and the exclamation point still mocks me. I must have gone to school that day. I must have come home, made myself a snack, and waited for my mother to get home. I didn’t expect to see Nana, but I had seen him the night before and I wasn’t worried.

  I do remember that my mother didn’t come home on time. She was with the Foster family, new to her since Mrs. Palmer’s passing. She was back on day shift, so she usually got in by seven o’clock. Instead, that night, she shuffled in at eight, apologizing while unloading the car. Mr. Foster’s daughter was in town and the woman had talked her ear off.

  I’d made myself dinner and I offered some to my mother. We both stared at the c
lock, and then the door, the clock and then the door. He didn’t come in. We had developed a routine, an unspoken rule. Nana got two days before we hopped in the car and searched for him. He got four days before we called the police, but it had only come to that once, and that night was day one. We weren’t there yet.

  We didn’t know to worry, so when the police knocked on our door at about nine o’clock to tell us that Nana had overdosed on heroin and died in the parking lot of a Starbucks, we were blindsided. We’d thought our routine would save us, save him.

  I didn’t write anything in my journal that night or for many years thereafter.

  38

  I ran into Katherine at the sandwich shop about a week after I’d bumbled through our lunch. I saw her bent over before a wire rack of chips, trying to pick out which ones she wanted, and I turned on my heels to escape.

  “Gifty!” she shouted. I’d almost made it to the door. She jogged over toward me, a bag of sour cream and onion in hand. “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “Oh hi, Katherine. I’m doing great, thanks,” I said.

  “Why don’t you join me for lunch?”

  “I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “It’ll still be there after you eat,” she said, reaching for my hand. “I insist.”

  She paid for the chips and my sandwich as well, and we headed over to the high-tops at the far end of the shop. It was almost empty save a few undergrads who had made their way over to this graduate student part of campus, probably for the quiet, the decreased chance of recognition. I’d once been like that, so lonely that I craved further loneliness. Even after I’d made a few friends in college, I would still go out of my way to create whatever conditions I needed that might allow me to be alone. If I’d done it right that day, I wouldn’t be stuck eating with Katherine.