Jesus was her ‘Drug’ of Choice
I was taught that when people cried, screamed, or moved their bodies rapidly during church service, they were “caught up in the spirit”. True to the form of a child, I accepted that with blind faith and dare not question it, lest I hear the rattling of a rack of leather belts before being put back in a child’s place.
When I was a baby, she sang to him as she washed me from head to toe.
Oddly, the smell of Johnson & Johnson Baby Shampoo triggers my earliest memories of him.
Prince of Peace, Redeemer, Emmanuel.
If I stood still for too long, she would whip out her Bible and start reading it to me.
At her funeral, every person gave remarks that mentioned my grandmother’s incredible faith.
I had been raised in Sunday school, sang in the youth choir, and wore all white during each baptism. Fear of hell led me to be dipped in the water and brought back up more than a few times, but I still did not have what she had.
Silly me, I used to wish I had faith just like my grandma.
I aspired to love Jesus as fervently as she did.
Be careful what you wish for, it might come true.
The longer you live, the more you start to understand stuff old people once said.
There are moments and life situations that swoop in like a flood.
In limbo somewhere between drowning and resuscitation, I wish I knew then what I know now.
Whipping my car down that old familiar street, parking outside a canary house, there she was.
Peeking out the back door window, dark eyes surrounded by yellow skin and loose curly silver hair.
“Grandma, how are you?” I asked with a pep in my voice.
As she opened the door to let me in, “Thank God for Jesus!” was her response.
I smiled like the naïve little girl that I was, ready to eat what she had made for dinner and wash it down with Jell-O while rewatching episodes of Columbo.
I sat with her, ate from her table, borrowed her nightgowns, and slept in the bed with her, but it is only now that she is gone that I can truly see her.
I once asked her about her grandparents wondering if she had known them like I thought I knew her.
She swiftly put her head down and sank into the chair, “Oh in those days things just happened…”
I was confused and now even more curious, “What about her grandma and her grandpa, what were they like? Did your mother believe in Jesus too?”
“My mother was very much a devout woman” She began to share.
People from outside this community just do not understand the heaviness that comes with Blackness. I learned that day that my great-grandmother was the product of a sexual assault between an Irish landowner and a housemaid. When the business he had failed, Mr. O’Grady just picked up and went back to Ireland, leaving behind a trail of half-caste suckling babes.
My great-grandmother’s mother was said to be milk chocolate brown like me, she died when my great-grandma was a teenager, no one has said what she died from. I was not even 10 years old and POOF! Just like that, I was awakened to something that had been in the air, but as every family function passed, I could not quite figure out what that feeling was or where it came from.
Fast forward to a few months ago, I unintentionally made my Auntie cry with my pesky family questions as she talked about great-grandma. The tears fell from her natural Blue eyes surrounded by mocha brown skin. She wiped the tears with her bare hands to the side, slowly reaching back as if she was moisturizing her silky wavy hair. “Mama, Mama, Mama, she was so beautiful and they just used her!” she muttered as if she herself was carrying the hurt and shame of Mama’s experience on her back.
I used to babysit for a White couple that had a house near a shoreline when I was in High School, not once did I ever think that just by showing up to work someone would see me and feel entitled to have access to my body. I wonder if great-great-granny knew that rape was a possibility…what did her mother or other older Black women tell her when she was coming of age and going to work as a domestic?
Did they know what could and probably would happen and not tell her?
Was she initially shocked or did she feel it coming?
Was rape a form of punishment?
What did it take to get up and go back to that job day by day after the first time it happened knowing you had no other means of survival?
When her body was swollen with a child, what was happening in her heart and mind? My great-grandmother and her mother were “born free”, but given the circumstances, for all intents and purposes, they were still structurally enslaved.
Back then, happiness or a mere sense of contentment did not come in the form of some pill. What do you do with the rage and sense of repeated violation in a world where you are trapped in a box of perceived worthlessness and constant dismissal of your humanity?
The Bright and Morning Star, the Way, the Truth, and the Light.
Oh, Grandma I see you, I get it now, whether he was thought to be real or not is irrelevant.
In those days they did not have anything else to hold on to but a chance of a better life after a sure death.
The organ roared and the cymbals clanged, voices lifted high, I sat next to her on the pew and passed my granny tissues as her tears rolled while calling out to Jesus.
Grandma was not caught up in the spirit, she was in pain.
Despite her fair complexion, she still occupied a Black female body, hence she was conditioned to suffer in silence, church was the only place it was acceptable to let it hang out under the guise of praise.
If I could just spend one more day with her, I would ask, “Grandma, how are you REALLY doing? You do not have to give me a holy answer.”
While she was with us, I bet none of her children or grandchildren ever tried to understand her beyond, “Thank God for Jesus!”
Maybe if she had given a real response, they would not have been able to handle it.
Up at dawn, beating the roosters and the sun, the woman cooked and cleaned almost every single day.
She often washed and ironed our clothes even after we were big enough to clean up for ourselves, working from sunup to sundown and humming her hymns.
The last time I fooled myself by trying to tackle domestic work just like she did, I landed in my bed that night with a Tiger Balm patch on my back and struggled to grab my smartphone from the nightstand to make a chiropractic appointment.
On Thanksgiving me and my sister showed up at our dinner reservation in Manhattan. We ate good food we had not lifted a finger to help prepare and later leisurely collapsed in a food coma.
I know Grandma and her sisters were looking down at us, half of them shaking their heads and the other half secretly glad we are defying roles that they fulfilled out of a sense of obligation whether it made them happy or not. Maybe the constant cooking and housework was their way of soothing themselves, keeping busy, and not feeling worthy of the luxury of just rest.
I wonder if the abundant lives me and my sister relish in this era are a manifestation of hope, dream, or a silent prayer from one of our foremothers when they had to submit to the lewdness of their employers, our nonconsensual forefathers. Maybe I ought to stop asking questions so as to not make myself cry and just be grateful.
Despite the progress, this current time is not without challenges for us womankind. I have been the only woman and person of color on several business trips, including overseas. During these trips, I never reveal what room I am staying in or allow myself more than a wine spritzer in mixed company. I could care less if people think I am square or paranoid.
I once had a super talented white female colleague confide in me the story of being sexually by multiple men on a business trip at the same hotel I had stayed in when I traveled for another company to do diversity recruiting.
She was good at what she did, playing the corporate game, and hanging tough with the male colleagues at a bar right before it happened. She later reported the assault and to make a long story short, the executives that had raped her have thriving careers unscathed by what they did. “Roslyn, I’m a white woman and the system failed me, I cannot imagine how they are going to treat you,” she told me as we had high noon tea earlier this year. She still carries the scar of the experience.
She and women, like my grandmother often suffered in silence, I will never know what events or circumstances provided the potency in her tears on that pew.
When I was leaving for college, my other grandmother clearly had knots in her stomach fearing for me what most women fear but will not utter it. “There is no such thing as being too careful, make sure you look all around you when you go places, and for God's sake please stop driving by yourself at night!” she raised her voice to drill it into my head without stating verbatim what she was afraid of.
I learned very quickly there was a diner-sized menu option of things to fear. When the unthinkable occurs, I too am pressured to be silent so the next time I am choosing between a hard time and potentially doing hard time I am going to get a lift from that old faithful Lilly of the Valley.
I know she is somewhere up there, not quite sure where I am going.
If I do end up in hell, I have some burning questions for Satan.
The increasingly cynical part of me can admit I spent most of my life getting one side of the story, I want to walk up to the devil like he’s some guy standing in a bodega.
“Hey! All that stuff God, his son, and others say about you, is it true?” I would ask.
“Did you intentionally tempt Eve first to defame all of her descendants, like to put the whole fall of humanity on a woman’s back so that men would get a perpetual pass to fail upwards?”
I would continue, “Did you invent misogyny?… Mr. Satan, Sir? Are you a misogynist?”
Until I get to the pearly gates and St. Peter decides whether or not to pull the lever to the trap door under my feet I am going to do what was done before me.
Running around the sanctuary with fire in my eyes, not knowing if was the
Holy Spirit reflecting back from my retina, a preview of hell, or the flames of rage from inheritance.
Up up and away hopping, hollering, and just letting it all hang out, what the old folks used to call an “ugly shout”. The kind where your mascara runs and you circle the pews looking like a raccoon. One where the ushers come and try to hold you down and nearby onlookers not praising are fanning the people caught up in the spirit
Yea, at this point, for me, it’s like that.
They can say what they want about me, those who are careless once cared too much.
If Jesus came in capsule form, then my grandmother would have overdosed ten times over.
Jesus was her drug of choice.
I guess yelling out “Jesus!” was safer than sucking away sorrows through the end of a pipe.
The time for my initiation has come.
Just when I am ready to implode, I’m gonna put on my good pantyhose, a long skirt with a blouse I don’t mind messing up.
Putting in extra pins in my hair.
Yup, I’m going to wear some shoes I can easily slip out of.
It does not matter whether or not they have a walker, I’m going early enough to grab a coveted corner seat right by the center aisle and I’m not giving it up for nobody.
When they start clapping their hands and baiting the congregation with the praise dance organ intro I’m gonna quietly shove my shoes under the pew in front of me, then start shuffling to put that bounce in my knees.
As the cymbals cry out I’m gonna jerk my head back and yell “Hallelujah!” so loud that it pierces the ceiling.
Wait for it, wait for it…
When the beat drops, I’m gone.
I’ll dash out of the pew like a running quarterback.
A Holy version of Micheal Vick in his prime.
Zig zag through the aisle to the altar.
Those white-clad ushers won’t be able to catch me.
Then when I get out of breath I’m gonna throw myself down and keep saying his name over and over.
Maybe I will throw in an “Oh Mary!” and “Joseph!” …something or somebody to help me.
Tears pouring, Fenty makeup running and soiling my clothes.
Sweaty, shaking, and hollering like I need an epidural or something.
As they bring purple blankets to cover my modesty then my initiation would be complete.
Jesus! Oh sweet Jesus!
Prince of Peace, Lily of Valley!
I’ll walk out of that sanctuary like when Tina Turner jumped out of the limo, well-dressed, but messed up.
Back straight, chin up, purse at my side, dignified with no shame.
Confident I got a fix strong enough to get through another week.
Finally full grown.
Jesus, my drug of choice.
