Transcendent Kingdom Read online

  I should have said all of this to Katherine. She was a great doctor, an empathetic person, but when I tried to broach the topic of my mother, my words turned to ashes in my mouth.

  “Are you all right, Gifty?” Katherine asked.

  She was giving me what must have been her psychiatrist’s stare, intense and questioning. I couldn’t hold her gaze.

  “Yeah, I’m just a little stressed. I want to get this paper submitted before the end of the quarter, but I can’t seem to make myself work on it these days,” I said. I stared out at the palm trees as a quick wind blew through their branches, causing the fronds to sway.

  Katherine nodded at me, but her gaze didn’t change. “Okay,” she said softly. “I hope you’re taking good care of yourself.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t even know what it would mean to take good care of myself, what that would look like. The only thing I was managing to take care of was my mice, and even they had had their bloody scuffle just weeks before. Me, my mother, my mice—we were all a little scuffed up, but trying in whatever ways we knew how. I thought about the winter day my freshman year at Harvard when I’d finally walked into counseling and mental health services to ask for a SAD lamp.

  “I think it’s the weather. I just feel kind of sad. Not all the time,” I said to the receptionist, though she had only asked for my name. When she handed me the lamp, she asked if I wanted to start seeing a counselor. “Freshman year can be tough,” she said. “You’re far from home, your classes are more rigorous than they were in high school. It can be helpful to talk to someone.”

  I hugged the lamp to my chest and shook my head. The rigor, the toughness, I’d wanted those things.

  17

  My sophomore year at Harvard was particularly brutal. The magic of my SAD lamp had worn off and I spent much of that winter trudging to class through snow that came up to my waist. I’d taught my mother how to make video calls on her computer, and so sometimes I would call her, thinking I would tell her how unhappy I was, but then her face would greet me on the screen, confused and annoyed by the technology, and I’d lose my resolve, not wanting to add my burdens to her own.

  To make matters worse, I was barely hanging on in my Integrated Science course. I did fine on the homework and tests, but the course had a project lab component that required working in small groups, and every day, as I sat mutely in class, I watched my participation points plummet.

  “The class would really benefit from hearing your thoughts,” my professor would sometimes write on the top of my assignments. Later, in my dorm room, I would rehearse the kinds of things I might say, telling my reflection about all of my project ideas, but then class time would roll around, and my professor’s eyes would fall on me and I would clam up. My small group started ignoring me. Sometimes, when the class split up to work on our projects, my group would form a circle with me on the outside. I’d shoulder my way in or, more often than not, wait for someone to notice.

  Most of the semester passed this way. Yao, who had established himself as the leader of our small group, would order everyone around, doling out our assignments for the night and shutting down any of the ideas proposed by women. He was tyrannical, misogynistic, but the rest of the group—Molly, Zach, Anne, and Ernest—were easygoing and funny. I enjoyed being around them, even though they merely tolerated me.

  Zach was the clown. At five foot two, he was shorter than both Molly and me, but he used his humor and his intelligence to fill up whatever room he was in. Most days he spent half of our group time trying out little bits on us as though we were judges on a stand-up comedy reality show. It made it hard for us to know when he was being genuine or when he was setting up an elaborate joke, and so, though he was funny, everyone approached anything he said with some amount of discomfort.

  “I passed by these dudes in the quad who were handing out little orange Bibles,” Zach said one day.

  “They’re so pushy,” Molly said. “They practically shoved one into my pocket.” Molly was both smart and striking, but she was often dismissed because her voice, with its lilting, questioning sound, made people assume they could ignore anything she had to say.

  “If they touched you, you could scream sexual harassment,” Ernest said. “I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time someone used Christianity as a cover-up for sexual assault. This is Boston, after all.”

  “Oof, harsh, dude,” Yao said. He turned to Zach. “Did you take the Bible?”

  “Yeah, I took it and then I climbed onto John Harvard’s lap and just started waving it around shouting ‘GOD DOESN’T EXIST! GOD DOESN’T EXIST!’ ”

  “How do you know God doesn’t exist?” I said, interrupting their laughter.

  They all turned to face me. The mute speaks? their faces said.

  “Um, you’re not serious, are you?” Anne said. She was the smartest one in our group, though Yao would never admit it. Before this, I’d sometimes catch her watching me, waiting to see if my silence harbored brilliance, but now she looked at me as though I had finally confirmed her suspicions that I was a complete idiot, a mistake of the admissions process.

  I liked Anne, the way she would sit back and listen to the rest of the group fumble before swooping in at the last second with the right answer, the most clever idea, leaving Yao grumbling and huffy. I was embarrassed to have earned her ire, but also, I couldn’t help myself. I doubled down. “I just don’t think it’s right to make fun of other people’s beliefs,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, but believing in God isn’t just ridiculous, it’s fucking dangerous too,” Anne said. “Religion has been used to justify everything from war to anti-LGBT legislation. We aren’t talking about some harmless thing here.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way. Belief can be powerful and intimate and transformative.”

  Anne shook her head. “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” she said, and I shot her a killing look.

  “Opioids are the opiates of the masses,” I said. I knew what I sounded like. Wild, crazed.

  Anne looked at me as though I were a lizard molting before her very eyes, as though she was finally seeing me, some spark of life. She didn’t press.

  Yao cleared his throat and moved the group on to a safer topic, but I had already exposed myself. A backwoods bama, a Bible thumper. I thought of the religious student groups on campus that spent some of their days hanging up flyers in the dorms’ common rooms, inviting people to worship. Those flyers had to compete with the hundreds of other flyers, for dance marathons, Greek parties, spoken-word shows. They didn’t stand a chance. And, though I hadn’t worked out how I felt about the Christianity of my childhood, I did know how I felt about my mother. Her devotion, her faith, they moved me. I was protective of her right to find comfort in whatever ways she saw fit. Didn’t she deserve at least that much? We have to get through this life somehow.

  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 m
other’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.

  * * *

  —

  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.

  * * *

  —

  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.

  I also started cleaning the apartment more, because I figured she probably liked the familiar scent of bleach, the way it clung to your nose hairs hours after you’d used it. I’d spray the toxic all-purpose cleaner onto the windowsill in the bedroom and watch the mist of it float off and away. Some of those particles probably reached her in the bed.

  “Gifty,” she said one day, after I’d wiped the window to gleaming. “Would you get me some water?”

  Tears sprung to my eyes as I said, “Yes, of course,” with so much glee you’d have thought she was asking me to accept a Nobel Prize. I brought a glass of water back to her and watched her sit up to drink it. She looked tired, which seemed improbable to me given that she’d done nothing but rest since she got here. I never thought of her as old, but in a little more than a year she would be seventy, and all of those years were beginning to write themselves onto her sunken cheeks, her hands, hardened from labor.

  I watched her drink the water slowly, so slowly, and then I took the glass from her after she’d finished. “More?” I asked.

  She shook her head and started to sink back down under the covers and my heart sank with her. Once the duvet was completely draped over her, covering her body, nearly to her chin, she looked at me and said, “You need to do something about your hair.”

  I stifled my laughter and brought my hands up to my dreadlocks, wrapped them around my fingers. My mother didn’t speak to me for a month the summer I came home with the beginnings of locks. “People will think you were raised in a dirty home,” she argued before falling silent for nearly the entire length of my stay, and now those locks had her speaking again, if only to chastise me. Holy is the black woman’s hair.

  19

  In college I took a poetry class on Gerard Manley Hopkins to satisfy a humanities requirement. Most of the other science majors I knew took intro to creative writing courses to fulfill the requirement. “It’s an easy A,” one friend said. “You just, like, write down your feelings and shit and then the whole class talks about it. Literally everyone gets an A.” The idea of an entire classroom full of my peers talking about the feelings I’d somehow cobbled into a story terrified me. I decided to take my chances with Hopkins.

  My professor, an incredibly tall woman with a lion’s mane of golden curls, walked into the classroom ten minutes late every Tuesday and Thursday. “All right, then, where were we?” she’d say, as if we’d already been talking about the poems without her and she wanted us to catch her up. No one ever responded, and she’d usually glare at us with her piercing green eyes until someone surrendered and stammered out something nonsensical.

  “Hopkins is all about a delight in language,” she said one day. “I mean, listen to this: ‘Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded.’ He’s taking so much pleasure out of the way these words fit together, out of the sound of them, and we, the readers, get equal pleasure reading it.”

  She looked ecstatic and pained as she said this, like she was halfway to orgasm. I wasn’t getting equal pleasure from reading it. I wasn’t even getting a quarter of the pleasure my professor seemed to be getting simply from talking about it. I was intimidated by her and I hated the poetry, but I felt a strange sense of kinship with Hopkins every time I read about his personal life, his difficulty reconciling his religion with his desires and thoughts, his repressed sexuality. I enjoyed reading his letters and, inspired to some romantic ideal of the nineteenth century, tried writing letters of my own to my mother. Letters in which I hoped to tell her about my complicated feelings about God. “Dear Ma,” they started, “I’ve been thinking a lot about whether o
r not believing in God is compatible with believing in science.” Or, “Dear Ma, I haven’t forgotten the joy I felt the day you walked me down to the altar and the whole congregation stretched out their hands, and I really, truly felt the presence of God.” I wrote four such letters, all of which could have been a different petal on the flower of my belief. “I believe in God, I do not believe in God.” Neither of these sentiments felt true to what I actually felt. I threw the letters away, and I gratefully accepted my B– in the course.

  * * *

  —

  Nana had always been conflicted about God. He hated the youth pastor at First Assemblies, a man in his early twenties who had just finished Masters Commission, a kind of training camp for future spiritual leaders, and who insisted that everyone call him P.T. instead of Pastor Tom.

  P.T. was interested in relating to the youth on their level, which for his relationship with Nana meant that he was constantly making up slang terms that he assumed black teenagers were using. “Whattup, broseph?” was a favorite greeting of his. Nana could hardly even look at him without rolling his eyes. Our mother chided him for being disrespectful, but we could tell that even she thought that P.T. was kind of an idiot.

  Nana was thirteen when he graduated from children’s church and moved on to youth group services. I missed him during Sunday school when the children’s church pastor pulled out her puppets and Nana reluctantly went across the hall to listen to P.T.’s teachings. I started to get a little restless in those services, squirming around in my seat and asking to go to the bathroom every five minutes, until finally the pastors decided it would be all right for me to go to Sunday school with Nana as long as I returned to children’s church during regular service hours. In those early-morning classes, Nana sat about as far away from me as possible, but I didn’t mind. I liked being in the same room as him, and I liked feeling older, wiser than the other children my age who were stuck listening to the children’s church pastor’s little sketches, which, by that time, had grown tiresome. I was, even then, desperate to prove my competence, my superiority, so being the youngest in the youth group felt like a kind of arrival, a demonstration of my goodness.