‘The Secret Lives of Church Ladies’: Black Women’s Desire Meets Religious Expectations
Deesha Philyaw’s collection of stories grapples with Black women’s search for joy against the constrictions of the church.
Black women are just getting used to seeing rounded descriptions of themselves in fiction, so a collection of stories that presents us as full people feels like a celebration. In Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw has written a love letter to southern Black women and the Black church that recognizes the contradictions and limitations of what the clergy asks of them. Reading this collection as a Black woman who struggles with her faith, it hits the sweet spot where a deeply relatable struggle is illuminated and I no longer felt alone. The act of reading Philyaw’s novel feels like receiving a hug from all of your ancestors and aunties, biological and voluntary, all at once.
Finding Sanctuary in Our Sexuality
Philyaw’s compassionate portrayals punctuate moments when Black women’s desires and needs come up against church expectations.
The Church Ladies (or Church-Adjacent Ladies) in these stories keep secrets, act selfishly or irrationally, struggle to love themselves, literally slip and fall and get back up again.
They balance desire and survival within a rigid system of respectability. Yet, at the heart of all these stories is a yearning for freedom. Freedom in their bodies, in their sexuality, in their thoughts. They search for that freedom in hotel rooms, cars, conferences, others’ homes, some of them away from the South.
Messages of hope and love are mixed with judgments against people for who they love, how they act, and how they dress. In the story “How to Make Love to a Physicist,” the narrator grapples with the possibility that the world may be larger than the church with a beautiful, subdued line that can be applied to any demand the world asks of Black women:
“You are thrilled and terrified at the prospect. Terrified because all you’ve ever known of religion is that it demands more than you can ever give.”
The women in these stories grapple with different points in a timeline of what happens in a life after church, whether they’re contemplating it, leaving, or they’ve already left. Leaving a church can be considered a coming of age, or a midlife transition, away from the practice and beliefs that has been ingrained since birth. A portion of life (Sunday mornings, bible study, choir practice) is gone, and readjustment can lead to questioning and self-reflection. These stories are great when they grapple with the fear of the unknown outside of the church, and whether the need for freedom can overcome that fear.
Finding My Own Religion
Reading these stories meant so much to me as I considered the role of the church in my own life and my family members’. While my extended family is a mix of practicing and not-practicing, most of them are spiritual and believe in God. I didn’t attend church as a child, but gospel has been a soundtrack to my life; my childhood home is down the street from a Black church and I wake up to the choir every Sunday (and some Saturday) mornings. Like the women of this collection, I’ve struggled between a desire to love the church and the realities of what the church demands of its parishioners.
About once a year I consider whether to start attending regularly — usually when I feel particularly lonely.
Whenever I go to a Sunday Service, either with my grandmother, a Sunday School teacher, or for a sorority function, I end up weeping my eyes out at the beauty, the reckoning, the sermon analyzing and relaying of God’s word. But then the pastor makes a comment about homosexuality or promiscuity, and I remember that I do not agree with the fundamentals of this structure.
The women of Church Ladies are like me, struggling with the structure that the church and their God-fearing loved ones demand. Though these stories don’t give any absolutist solutions, they offer a calming balm to anyone who has struggled against the expectations of the Black church.
Finding New Voices
There’s also the sense of pure, uncensored representation in this book. In a recent talk with author Kiese Laymon, Philyaw praised her experience editing Church Ladies, explaining that her editor at West Virginia University Press respected her authority on Black culture and deferred to her regarding related edits. Laymon asked Philyaw whether she would have been able to write the book within the traditional corporate “Big 5” publishing structure. She answered that she wasn’t sure, and I’m not either. Church Ladies reads like a safe space where Black women don’t have to measure their speech or actions against white expectations.
Church Ladies has the vibe of Black indie movies, of TVOne reruns. It lets Black women stay complicated in a world that pushes them into the roles of vixen, mammy, or aggressor. And it’s not just the roles of white popular culture. The struggle of being a whole complicated person, experiencing sexual desire and conflict within the Black church is honored, when each woman struggles against the restraints.
The collection is also a beautiful example of fiction that shows how relationships between two people are never solely about those two people. Motivations come into conflict even between people who love each other unconditionally; these moments happen between mothers and daughters, sisters and lovers. The story “Eula” shows a relationship limited by the Bible’s demand for a heterosexual relationship, despite the comfort the two women find in each other. These relationships, the struggles in the present paired with flashbacks of great memories, are beautifully and skillfully written, and they feel universal and specific in the same breath.
Though the rise of Black representation in fiction has been great, so many of the works that have been celebrated show Black women in a place of pain and struggle. For a work that’s a dedication and love letter to the full reality of Black women, turn to the National Book Award finalist The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw.
