Transcendent Kingdom Page 7

  I was a good, pious child, committed to not sinning, and the definition that our pastor gave confounded me. It was easy enough to not do anything wrong or say anything wrong. But to not think sinfully? To not think about lying or stealing or hitting your brother when he comes into your room intent on torturing you, was that even possible? Do we have control over our thoughts?

  When I was a child this was a religious question, a question of whether it was possible to live a sinless life, but it is also, of course, a neuroscientific question. That day, when the children’s church pastor used her puppets to teach us about sin, I realized, with no small amount of embarrassment, that my secret goal of becoming as blameless as Jesus was in fact impossible, and perhaps even blasphemous. My pray-without-ceasing experiment had all but proven the impossibility of controlling my thoughts. I could control one layer, the most readily available layer, but there was always a sublayer lurking. That sublayer was truer, more immediate, more essential, than anything else. It spoke softly but constantly, and the things it said were the very things that allowed me to live and to be. Now I understand that we have a subconscious life, vibrant and vital, that acts in spite of “ourselves,” our conscious selves.

  In the book of Matthew, Jesus says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Here is a separation. Your heart, the part of you that feels. Your mind, the part of you that thinks. Your soul, the part of you that is. I almost never hear neuroscientists speak about the soul. Because of our work, we are often given to thinking about the part of humans that is the vital, inexplicable essence of ourselves, as the workings of our brains—mysterious, elegant, essential. Everything we don’t understand about what makes a person a person can be uncovered once we understand this organ. There is no separation. Our brains are our hearts that feel and our minds that think and our souls that are. But when I was a child I called this essence a soul and I believed in its supremacy over the mind and the heart, its immutability and connection to Christ himself.

  The week before Buddy the dog died, his golden hair started falling out in tufts. You’d pet him and come away with fistfuls of that luster. It was clear that he was coming to his end, but before he did, I went over to Ashley’s house and prayed for him. “Dear God, bless this dog and let his soul be at rest,” I said, and Ashley and I knelt down next to Buddy and cried into his soft body, and I had a vision of Buddy in the vet’s office, his soul rising out of that golden shell and floating up toward Heaven. It comforted me then to believe in a soul, a separate self, to picture Buddy’s soul alive and well, even if he wasn’t.

  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.

  * * *

  —

  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.

  My mother squeezed into the seat beside Nana and pulled me up onto her lap. She took his chin in her hand and turned him to face her. “Nana, what’s bothering you?” she said in Twi.

  Nana had tears in the corners of his eyes that were threatening to spill, and he was making a face that I’ve only ever seen in young boys, a face that is the façade of a man, hiding a boy who has had to grow up far too fast. I have seen that faux tough look on boys as they pushed shopping carts, walked siblings to school, bought cigarettes for their parents who waited in their cars. It breaks my heart now, to see that face, to recognize the lie of masculinity sitting atop the shoulders of a young child.

  Nana blinked his tears back. He sat up a little straighter, gently lifted our mother’s hand from his face, and returned it to her lap. “I don’t want to play soccer anymore,” he said.

  Just then one of the referees came onto the bus. He saw the three of us squeezed into those small seats and gave us a sheepish grin, lifting that cowboy hat off his head and placing it onto his heart, as though my family was the national anthem, the yellow school bus a ballpark. “Ma’am, we’re ’bout ready to get this game started and there are a bunch of boys out there saying their star player’s still on this bus.”

  My mother didn’t even turn to look at the referee. She kept her eyes trained on Nana. We all remained perfectly quiet and still, and finally the man took the hint, put his cowboy hat back on, and got off the bus.

  “You love soccer,” my mother said once we heard the sound of the referee’s cleats crunching the gravel of the lot.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Nana,” she said sharply, and then she stopped and exhaled for so long I wondered where she had been keeping all of that air. She could have told Nana that she’d lost a day’s paycheck to chaperone this trip, that she was already on thin ice with the Reynoldses for missing work two weeks before when I wouldn’t stop vomiting and had to be taken to the emergency room. She could have told him how that emergency room bill was higher than she’d expected, even though we had insurance, that the night she’d opened that envelope she sat there at our dining room table crying into her scrubs so that we wouldn’t be able to hear her. She could have told him that she had already had to take on some extra work cleaning houses to afford the fees for the advanced soccer league, and that those fees were nonrefundable and she couldn’t get her time back either. All that time she’d spent working to afford a trip on a bus with a loud daughter and son who’d somehow realized in the two-hour-long bus ride that his father wasn’t coming back.

  “We’ll find another way home,” she said. “We don’t have to stay here for one more second, Nana, okay? You don’t have to play if you don’t want to.”

  We walked to the Greyhound station, our mother holding our hands the entire time. We took that bus home, and I don’t think Nana made a single noise. I don’t think I did either. I could feel that something had changed among the three of us and I was trying to learn what my role in this new configuration of my family might be. That day was the end of my naughtiness, the beginning of my good years. If our mother was angry or upset at us, me for being a terror, Nana for changing his mind, she didn’t let on. She wrapped us up in her arms during that long ride home, her face inscrutable. When we got home, she put all of Nana’s soccer gear into a box, sealed the box, and dumped it into the nether regions of our garage, never to be seen again.

  16

  I asked Katherine to lunch at the little Thai restaurant in the basement of the psychology building. I ordered from the brusque woman, who could sometimes make eating there feel like a punishment despite how good the food was, and wandered out to sit in the courtyard while I waited for Katherine to arrive. It was a sunny, beautiful day. The kind of day I often took for granted living in a place where the beauty of the school, of nature, seemed to come so effortlessly. This was in stark contrast to my time on the East Coast, where beauty was hard won, where every brilliant day had to be savored, the memories of them stored like acorns buried underground by industrious squirrels, just to get you through those punishing winters. That first winter in Massachusetts, with snow piled up to my knees, I’d missed Alabama with an intensity I hadn’t thought possible. I craved heat and light the way other people craved coffee and cigarettes. Sick and sluggish, I got a SAD lamp from mental health services and sat staring at it for hours, hoping it would fool me into believing I was back in the place where I assume my ancestors first instilled this need for warmth—in Ghana on a beach just above the equator.

  Katherine was half an hour late. I started eating and watched two undergrads argue in front of the bike stand across the way. It was clear they were a couple. One of the women circled her U-lock around her wrist while the other woman shouted, “I have a PSET due at three, Tiffany. You know that.” Tiffany didn’t seem to know, or maybe she just didn’t care. She was on her bike, zooming off within seconds, and the other woman just stood there, stunned. She looked around, trying to see if the fight had had any witnesses. I should have looked away, given her some privacy in her embarrassment, but I didn’t. We made eye contact, and her face grew so red I could almost feel the heat coming off of it. I smiled at her, but that only seemed to make her feel worse. I remembered what it was like to be that age, so aware of yourself and the theater of your private little shames. “I have my shit too,” I wanted to say. “I have worse shit than a PSET due at three, worse shit than Tiffany, even.” She narrowed her eyes at me as though she’d heard my thoughts, and then she stormed off.

  Katherine finally arrived. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, slipping into the seat across from me. “The Caltrain just decided to stop running for some reason.”

  Even in that haggard, breathless state, she looked beautiful. Long black hair piled messily on the top of her head, those braces-straight teeth—a telltale sign of someone who’d grown up with money and attention. They gleamed brilliant every time she smiled. I glanced at her stomach. Nothing. “That’s okay,” I said, and then I clammed up. I had invited Katherine on the pretense that I wanted to talk about our work. There were so few women in our field, and though it was important to have role models and mentors, I had done very little to connect with the other women in my department. I was the typical graduate student, clambering for the attentions of the hotshot male scientists, the ones who had discovered this thing, won that award. I wanted my name spoken in the same breath as theirs, my work written about in the same journals. Katherine, brilliant though she was, liked to wear a sweatshirt with the word STEMINIST splashed across the front. Every year, she manned a booth at the undergraduate career fair for women considering a career in science. When she’d asked me, my first week at Stanford, if I wanted to join the Women in STEM group she led, I’d said no without a second thought. I’d had a professor in college laugh when I asked if he’d be my advisor the year I declared my major. True, I had never taken a class with him, and true, he was the preeminent microbiologist on campus, but still, in that split second of laughter before he caught himself and said, “Why sure, dear,” I’d wanted nothing more than to turn into dust, to sink into the ground and disappear forever. I didn’t want to be thought of as a woman in science, a black woman in science. I wanted to be thought of as a scientist, full stop, and it mystified me that Katherine, whose work was published in the best journals, was content to draw attention to the fact of her womanhood. Even this question of a baby, of the little ovulation “o’s” her husband had snuck into his calendar just at the moment when Katherine’s career was set to take off, was itself a reminder of the millstone of womanhood we wore around our necks.

  I didn’t want to wear mine, and I wasn’t really interested in talking to Katherine about the research that she was doing. What
I wanted to talk about was my mother, her sleepy breath hum and weight loss, her vacant eyes, her sloping back. My dinnertime visits had done nothing to draw her out. After three days, I’d given up that tack and tried a different one. I called Pastor John and held the phone to my mother’s ear while he prayed.

  “Father God, we ask that you rouse this woman from her slumber,” he said. “Jesus, we pray that you lift her spirits. Remind her that all of her crosses belong to you.”

  He kept going like this for some time, and my hand started to shake as I held the phone. I might as well have been casting spells over her for all the good this was doing. After he had finished, I hung up and slumped down onto the edge of the bed, sunk my head into my hands. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. Behind me, my mother’s breath continued its hum. The sound reminded me of the video of the black mamba I’d watched when I was a child, even though that snake hadn’t made a sound. The hum was the only lively thing about my mother, and so I’d come to be grateful for it, whatever it was.

  What was the ethical thing to do? Was it right of me to let her stay in that bed courting death, practicing for it, even? I turned this question over in my head every day, playing out the possible scenarios, the things I could do, should do. I knew the statutes for involuntary commitment in California, and my mother didn’t meet those burdens. She wasn’t threatening to hurt herself or anyone else. She wasn’t hearing voices or having visions. She was eating, though only sporadically and only when she knew I wouldn’t be home to see her do it. It had only been a week, but the days dragged on, weighed on me. She told me she was “tired” and that she needed “rest.” I’d heard that before, but every time I thought of getting someone to intervene I thought of the last time and my courage failed me. The last time, when she’d gotten out of the hospital after her commitment, she’d looked at me and said, “Never again,” and I knew what she meant.