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NaPoWriMo: poems 1-3.

April is, of course, National Poetry Month. Last year I participated in the 30/30 challenge, writing 30 poems in 30 days. I’m trying it again this year, but I decided it on a whim, on the 2nd. So I’m a day behind. Every 3-5 days, I’ll post a digest of the few poems I’ve written (so as not to inundate you with daily posts). Occasionally, I may include some commentary, but that’s still up in the air. Let me know if you’re interested in the process; I’ll pontificate if it’s wanted. *shrug*

Anyway, here are poems 1-3, written between April 2 and April 4:

poem 1: surfeit

but tonight, let us feast
at the table of what wasn’t.
we will dine on the scraps of
an undercooked love,
use old letters as our linen,
dip our fingers into
the cleansing bowls of all
our ancient secrets. we
will sip hours on a claret
of could’ve-beens,
and at last, when our
rack of regrets is served
we will get through the brine
and the sinew. then, we
will suck dry the bones.

poem 2: picture day, overton elementary: chicago, 2011

(for ukailya lofton)

1.
the candies crinkled
and clacked in her plaits
and the smacking of seven-
year-old lips filled with
blue raspberry
cherry and
watermelon bliss
whipped down the full
length of the hall.
ukailya was having a ball,
green apple grins glossing her
mouth as she waltzed
from class to cafeteria,
cheerily letting her friends
pluck the low-hanging fruit
in her hair. and there, with
the promise of plentiful
wallet-sized keepsakes
of the day she was deemed
the sweetest girl in school,
she skipped into computer
class, the sparkle of flash
bulbs alight in her eyes.
come here, sweetie, her teacher
cooed like the serpent of Eden,
comb your hair into your face
with your fingers. it’s cute.

2.
strip her of anonymity.
auction her to the avatars
and trolls, who skulk
beneath bridges and
grab for young girls.
and when you have sold
her off, left her susceptible
to an echoing hall of taunts,
return to your post, where i
hope you are haunted, by
the wilt of her smile as
she says: “I feel sad that
she put my picture on Facebook.

I don’t think she liked it.”

poem 3: gleaning

i am no Ruth and you,
no Boaz, but were you
a silo, i’d scale your walls
and climb in, gather your sins
into baskets, trudge them out
to the threshing floor.

(our lives are more than the
parables preached about them.)

i’d linger on each stalk and lament
that the interesting bits of you
must be blown off by the winnowing
wind of a Savior who requires
pure grain for an unleavened bread.

(i would envy your weevils.)

but eventually, i would sacrifice
you for harvest; that can’t be
helped. some day, you will be
that perfect loaf and i will be a fish
divided for the throngs.

(we are not yet where we belong.)

Posted on by slb

Bertha Mason Syndrome.

In the deep shade, at the far end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.

[…]

She was a big woman, in stature almost equalling her husband, and corpulent besides: she showed virile force in the contest – more than once she almost throttled him, athletic as he was. He could have settled her with a well-planted blow: but he would not strike: he would only wrestle.

‘That is my wife,’ said he. ‘Such is the sole conjugal embrace I am ever to know – such are the endearments which are to solace my leisure hours! And this is what I wished to have’ (laying his hand on my shoulder): ‘this young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon. I wanted her just as a change after that fierce ragout. Wood and Briggs, look at the difference! Compare these clear eyes with the red balls yonder – this face with that mask – this form with that bulk; then judge me, priest of the gospel and man of the law, and remember with what judgment ye judge shall be judged! Off with you now. I must shut up my prize.’

— Chapter 26, Jane Eyre

It begins with a rejection, a hiding. At first, the wildness inside you is a faculty of which you are in full possession. You do not bare it lightly, do not wield it as one does a sword or an AmEx Black. It is merely an accent, a trinket with which to adorn yourself in the presence of a lover, of a spouse who should adore you.

You intend to offer him incremental revelations of your wildness. You may dance, for instance, nakedly in the parlor, may sing for him a private song in an unsteady and, thus, very vulnerable warble. Perhaps you will unspool the hair that polite society would prefer you kept pinned and straightened. It will swirl like a wind about your welcoming face; you will reach for his hand and guide his fingers through it, venturing an invitation you have never before extended. You will entrust to him a description of a time when you were lain bare, rubbed raw, exploited.

And it will be there, perchance, that he will first reject you. You will notice a slight disdain curled on his lips at the end of your confession, a recoiling at the texture of your hair. He’ll say nothing at first, for these are new, these fetters enmeshing you. You don’t yet know what it means to be bound, lifelong, to a person incapable of loving you.

It is assumed that the esteem is the first to go, that the initial rejection immediately triggers an erosion of self-worth. This isn’t so.

What is next is the dimming of vision. Once, and not so long ago, your fate was a painting within purview: a masterpiece on stark white canvas with you, in kaleidoscopic color, as writer, sojourner, and wife to a husband, near-worshipful in his gratitude for having you, rendered as clearly as if it’d been crafted by the delicate brush of Pre-Raphaelites. Now, it seems the work of a pointillist’s hand. In months, it will become as incomprehensible as cubism.

Without an image of the future on which to focus, you will become disoriented, leaving yourself susceptible to a stronger strain of insult. It will evolve from mere gesture to verbiage. He will never say: I hate you. But his tone will ever imply it. The accusatory “I thought you said”s and “Weren’t you supposed to”s, the “This is nothing close to what I wanted”s will wear down your ever immunity.

Before long, the figure you see in the mirror regards you with your husband’s relentless skepticism. When she reach for the apple of her cheek, to confirm the sunkenness you suspect, she jerks away, appraising you with a smug, superior eye. And in that instant, you know you’ve lost your only ally.

There’s nothing left, then, but the final stage, in which you are so distant, so feral, so unrecognizable as a woman of elegance and means that your warden-spouse believes you will not notice his parading of the governess he has positioned to replace you, into the attic where you are imprisoned.

Impossibly–and most cruelly–is the hairline crack this syndrome causes in your brain, which hears your husband paint himself the victim and, rather than allowing you the capacity to curse him, instead processes his lament as an echo with which you can only empathize.

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Black Love-Blockin’.

Topic #2 in my Ask-n-Blog series: “Can you write about the issues of black men relating to black women (and vice versa) and how media comes into play?”

I should preface this by saying that I didn’t ask for clarity on this question to find out what, specifically, the inquirer might be looking for in an answer. I think my response might be more organic that way. But if the topic-provider is dissatisfied, please get back to me with a follow-up question and I’ll tailor the response to your intent.

The Black dating scene is a junior high dance. “Good brothers” stand on one side of the floor. “Good sisters” are on the other. And despite each group’s claims that they desire to meet the other—and are, in fact, often skeptical that the other even exists—no one is willing to be the first to ask the other to dance. All anyone wants to do is complain about the DJ.

Everybody’s dressed up. We’ve all begun the work of making ourselves “quality partners” to an equally self-possessed party who might be looking for one. We’ve managed our emotions, taking the time between relationships to figure out our role in the failure of our last one. We’ve earned enough of our own money to afford the expenditures of a courtship. If we have children, we’ve arranged an amicable enough relationship with our co-parents to be able to assure a new significant other that there’ll be minimal drama. We have a home in which to privately receive guests and suitors. We have friends, hobbies, and professional pursuits that will ensure that we won’t be all up under whoever we’re dating.

We are disinterested in double lives. If someone were to date us, he/she wouldn’t find errant numbers, clothes, DNA from other current trysts hidden among our things. And if someone were to date us, he/she wouldn’t be on the hunt for this type of evidence.

We are able to trust again.

Now, this is my personal definition of what it means to be a “quality” potential partner. It’s cool if this isn’t your bag. But I’m gonna speak from this space.

“The media” would have us believe that there is no dance. CNN keeps (heedlessly) reporting things like this:

… More African-American women are deciding to adopt instead of waiting for a husband, says Mardie Caldwell, founder of Lifetime Adoption, an adoption referral and support group in Penn Valley, California.”We’re seeing more and more single African-American women who are not finding men,” Caldwell says. “There’s a lack of qualified black men to get into relationships with.”

The numbers are grim. According to the 2006 U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, 45 percent of African-American women have never been married, compared with 23 percent of white women.

Three years ago, NBC Nightly News’ Rehema Ellis interviewed, like, three black women about their marriage-less lives and how slim their pickings were and called those women representative of the black female median. Gorgeous, accomplished sisters are out here writing articles that encourage single Black women to plan for single parenthood, if they want children at all, since it’s totally unlikely they’ll find an African-American man they’ll want to spend the rest of their lives with.

I can’t speak for men, but these are the types of things that keep sisters on our side of the dancefloor. We’re giving perfectly acceptable suitors the side-eye, waiting for their other shoe to drop and fully expecting them to self-fulfill our stereotypical prophecies about how they’ll eventually fail us. We’re paranoid. Between our own failed relationships, our girlfriends’ horror stories, and the propagandist puff pieces network news keeps force-feeding us, it’s hard for us to believe that, among the all-dressed-up dudes across the aisle, there’s someone compatible to us.

But all this is immaterial, really. Every couple’s “issues relating to one another” have to do with their preconceived notions about how a person should behave and their difficulty letting go of those notions, in order to accept that an expectation of a thing is only a hope. How we manage realities different than the ones we’d like is the measure of whether or not we’re ready to invite someone else into the complicated, shimmering mess that is our lives.

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Seasonal Sibling Envy.

This week, I announced on my Facebook page that I’m taking blog topic requests. I’ll take a moment now to extend the same invitation to readers who may not necessarily be Facebook friends: if there’s anything you’d like me to write about in the next ten days (03.26.11-04.02.11), please email me. At any rate, the entry below is in response to my first query: Do you have siblings?

I was raised alone. Neither of my parents have any other biological children. I’ve come close to having siblings. I’ve had step-siblings, but ultimately, I was raised alone.

This was starting to freak me out, by my late 20s. Three years ago this month, my grandmother succumbed to an eight-year battle with Alzheimer’s. My father, my aunt, my uncle and I arrived at her bedside within a half-hour of her last breath. My grandmother had siblings–all older brothers; she was the last survivor. And as we sat in her room, in the assisted living home where she’d lived out her last years, I envied my father his siblings and my aunt, her husband. Within hours, a few of my first cousins–a brother and sister, four and five years younger than I–would arrive, but I shared none of the intimacy with them that they had with each other.

There’s something about the cusp of your thirties that makes you realize your mortality. If you’re fortunate, up to then, you haven’t experienced a great deal of close loss. Your grandparents are still alive, as are your parents. No one’s been ripped from you by untimely or arbitrary means.

But by 29, you will likely have known grief, perhaps even profound loss. You’re old enough to fully comprehend death’s permanence. Confronting the passing of others forces you to accept that, one day, you will be someone else’s loss. Someday, it’ll be you, drawing the last air this earth will offer you. And for me, the only child, this was becoming a pretty chilling thought.

I wasn’t raised to fear death. “Rejoicing” in someone’s “absence from the body” is a pretty common Christian tenet. To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, after all. We call our funerals “home-goings.” Sometimes, we play dissonant, uptempo music; it’s a very… communal, very organic experience. We grieve, to be sure. But we take a great, great deal of solace in everyone who remains on this side of glory–particularly our closest family. But what of the only child? When a repast ends and parents are off with their own siblings and peers, with whom can we process a loss, back at home?

Now, I wasn’t raised to lament being an only child, either. Growing up, birth (or… the absence of birth?), like death, was often considered the will of God. So that I didn’t have siblings seemed to have been a divine intention. Of course, I had no knowledge of such philosophical ends as a little girl. I didn’t know why I didn’t have a brother or sister. But I wasn’t the kind of kid who expendeda lot of energy wanting one, either. I don’t recall praying or asking for one. I didn’t spend much time in the presence of peers who had siblings. (I was home alone a lot, after the third grade. I wasn’t allowed outside until my mom was home from work and by then, it was often too dark to play. I also didn’t belong to any consistent play group. In the ’80s and early ’90s, playdate culture was still in its infancy.)

Until I was about 12, my closest friends were other only children*. We didn’t see much wrong with how we lived. We didn’t have to contend with the insecurity of constant comparison. No worries over whether or not our parents preferred one of us over the other. No inferiority complexes after our little brother proved himself to be a chess prodigy. No birth order psychology to overcome.

But it also meant a lot of time alone.

Ironically, my most isolated times were not during school years in Baltimore, where none of expended family lived. They were in Michigan where I had no fewer than four close-aged cousins on either side of my family. Grown-up family would facilitate extended sleepovers, and for a few nights a year, I’d catch a glimpse into the world of multi-child households.

By the time their parents returned to whisk them back to that world, I was so full of gossip, giggling, Truth-or-Dare, secrets, tiffs and reconciliations, that my eyes would well, my chest would clinch, and I’d mope for days following their departures.

Back at home, I had no such emotional outbursts. Like most only children, I re-acclimated to being alone rather quickly. I did it through imaginative play, reading chapter books, writing wild unicorn stories, and watching an inordinate amount of cable television.

Unless I marry and conceive in the next five years, my daughter will be an only child, as well. Having gone through it myself, I’m hoping to provide her with many opportunities to circumvent the loneliness.

* In kindergarten, my best friend was a middle child. But her brother was too little and her sister too old for me to find either relationship appealing.

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And It Hurts Coming Back to Life.

Feel everything. To resist is to prolong; you need to hurry. It will begin slowly, as an ache afar off, in a distant antechamber of the mind, this memory of a maize-colored boy with grey eyes, whose skin smelled ever of Cool Water. Think of him and his disinterest, think of the adolescent years you spent watching him want every girl but you, and of those brief moments of hope when your friends would play Telephone and deliver you the message that you were not as big a bore to him as you supposed.

Sensation will return first to your marrow. It will warm when you remember what it was to want and not receive. Absorb this hurt and other tinglings will return.

Reanimation is burdensome. You will find that coming back from years spent literally chilling in a cryonic chamber is not as simple as sci-fi tropes would lead you to believe.

Your looks have altered; an ashenness will ever overlay your brown. And though your irises may glisten again, the whites surrounding them are veined and yellowed. This frigid state has leathered you.

It will not be an easy adjustment, confronting old insecurities head-on, while battling these new ones. All the women to whom you’ve compared yourself have chosen to continue evolving, while you chose to pause, under pressure.

Many men who might’ve been matches have gone forward and grown while you froze.

Love will return; it is hardy. It has been known to thrive, even in tundras. But it will not be as unabashed as it was. In fact, love will be the last of the things you re-learn. You cannot redeem it at any location you’d left it before.

This isn’t a lost-and-found. There will be no retracing of steps. Forge new paths.

And in each new space, expose more. You are not the numb woman you were; you’re bionic: every nerve an electrode, a-sizzle, every bruise, an absorption of power.

Feel. This has been foolish.

No respite is worth the loss of recollection, no pain worth relinquishing feeling.

It is time to come back. Go forward.

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Fill her with wonder. Convince her that the feeling is less the flitting of butterflies and more the plumping of caterpillars: fuzz filling her insides and, at the first blush of reciprocation, it is the spinning of a chrysalis, the building of a silken borough that may open at the flutter of a first kiss or the airy bliss of barely touching hands.

This is what she needs to know of love.

It is tender missives full of youth’s hyperbole. In an amoebic form, it can begin in the sandbox. The boy who pastes his sloppy lips to the peachy round of her cheek may mean it.

He is not always a mimic.

This will be important for her to carry later. Tell her to pocket your promise: men do not always mimic.

They are not crude facsimiles of the fathers who failed their mothers. They are not the statistical likelihoods our cynical culture will claim. Not always.

There are some who are not conquistadors; they will not treat you as a creature to be branded or broken.

There are some who do not view you as an isle of escape; their gaze will not turn scornful upon learning than you are more than a port toward which they can sail.

Love is more than a welcome distraction. It is everything Paul’s first letter to Corinth suggests. But it does not always manifest itself as patient. It does not always know what it means to be selfless. It is rarely aware of how susceptible it makes us to hurt.

We must be careful with it and pray that it is careful with us.

Love is minutia, but it is also the momentous. Do not let your sentiment shortchange you. Never believe that it is only holding one another or whispering hopes under moonlight. It is the sharing of considerable assets. It is the saving to jet off to Greece. It is the dowry he stored for a marital house and the decision that you should be its cohabitant.

Love is an insulation from the shrapnel of the outside world’s criticism. It is a conduit for longing.

It looks like this when it has no able recipient** (ff to 5:16):

It feels like this, when under-explored:

Do not tell her that when it goes bad, it bulldozes. Don’t tell her it lays waste to what you were.

There are some things she should learn of her accord. Her love will lead her through a labyrinth quite different than your own.

Just pray that at its end, she finds a mirror. Hope that when she peers at the woman inside it, she still recognizes her as herself.

 

* Shout-out to Raymond Carver for the title of this post.

** The embedded clips here are from Richard Linklater’s 2004 sequel, Before Sunset. If you haven’t seen it or its predecessor, Before Sunrise, get yet to Netflix, post-haste. Add a baby and some melanin to Celine in that first clip and she is me.

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Philippians 1:3.

I thank my God upon every remembrance of you.

From ages 8 to 15, I was a member of a church called The Power of Faith Evangelistic Ministries—at least that was what the white-lettered name typeset on the electric blue awning said, out front. All we ever called it was Power of Faith.

The address was 5242 Park Heights Avenue, and it was right across from the famed Pimlico racetrack. During Preakness season, you could see the thoroughbreds galloping when you stood on the sidewalk after service. A few years into my attendance, some Asians opened a greasy spoon called Pimlico Chicken & Fish. There was bullet-proof glass separating them from us.

They sold chicken boxes—five wings and fries, slathered in ketchup of questionable freshness from a gigantic unmarked bottle; “shrimp” as big as three fingers; soda rumored to have been chemically engineered by White folks to sterilize African American men.

We ate there at least once a week.

It was its own world, Power of Faith, all the more surreal right now, from the vantage of adult reflection. To adequately describe the experience of growing up there, you would have to have access to certain points of Christian reference. You would need to have some concept of the Chick tract—and what it feels like to be 12, trekking through the Park Heights community, handing them out to drunkards and addicts and shop-owners.

You would need to understand how Children’s Church or Youth Group can feel like a kind of orphanage, just by virtue of its isolation from our parents’ main service experience, and how in our temporarily parentless haven, we spent much of our time relying on and confiding in a group of kids we saw up to three times a week.

You’d have to know what a shut-in and a three-day fast are, how it might feel to show up at your church after dark, with a blanket, a pillow, a grumbling stomach, and an excitement to whisper conversations to your friends, while your parents paced the sanctuary floor in prayer.

You’d need to be able to wrap your mind around being one of two teenagers left in that darkened sanctuary on a Friday night, waiting for your respective parents and listening on in silence while they commanded demons to exit some woman’s body in the church basement.

This was no ordinary upbringing. These were no ordinary church services, of the type that last two hours, where you leave your worship experience and your Sunday morning relationships at the exit door till next time.

Power of Faith was in your blood. Being a member there was like marrying into a family; even if you got divorced (read: left and joined another church), you still considered all the people you’d inherited there your aunts and cousins and sisters.

Whenever a new family joined, we children immediately checked out their kids, hoping to graft them into our group and see what unique energy they’d bring to the collective. Fortunately, most members were super-involved and showed up for Wednesday, Friday and both Sunday services, so we spent loads of time bonding with new kids.

Everyone in Power of Faith’s youth group was known for something. Lashawn was a genius and a singer; she’d grow up to become a physician. The Brebnors were three siblings from Trinidad; they’d let you live in their home for whole summers if you wanted and for an only child like me, that was a singular experience, being part of a home that was bustling with noise and laughter and drama, that was rife with rhythm and creativity. But it wasn’t until Nikia came to the church that I understood what it might be like to have a sister.

I’d been a member at Power of Faith longer than most of the kids in our group, but I’d always felt slightly isolated. I’ve always been retreating in large group settings and because of the infrequency of my smiling or laughter, I was often mistaken for sullen. Nikia wasn’t as socially withdrawn as I, perhaps because she had a number of brothers, but like me, her smile had to be earned, her humor was wry and she tended to stand off from a big crowd on occasion, to observe.

I had my first crush at Power of Faith. It began when I was ten and lasted till long after I left. Even now, I remember that boy with a kind of wonder. And when I think of what I’ll tell my daughter about love, it will begin with a description of the infatuation I felt for him.

Our entire youth group knew about that crush, but they were mostly polite and empathetic enough not to tease me mercilessly for it.

When the Walkers arrived from St. Louis—a single mother, her adolescent son and pre-adolescent daughter—the chemistry of our group was forever altered. The son, Jason, made fast friends with the guys in our gang; his easy grin and infectious laughter immediately put people at ease. His lanky, boyish good looks made him a hit with the ladies, too.

With the Walkers’ arrival, Power of Faith had its first encounter with liturgical dance. Jason’s mother, Laurene, had founded a troupe called Namyanka, which delicately blended African movement and worshipful music and gesturing. His preteen sister, Jessica, who had been dancing since she was two, was the troupe’s star performer. Jason played the djembe during a selection of numbers.

A few of the girls in our youth group joined and I was one of them (another was a tiny girl close to Jessica’s age who’d grow up to become Jason’s wife). I’d soon learn I didn’t have the confidence for public dance performance. That was more the domain of Dejelle and Jacqui Brebnor, whose long, lithe limbs seemed made for graceful gesticulation.

But there was something truly thrilling about being a part of a Namyanka rehearsal. Even now, I look back on our performance of James Weldon Johnson’s The Creation with an awe I only reserve for the works of art that have made the deepest imprints in my heart. It was while rehearsing for this that I began to really understand how amazing the Walker family was. As Sister Laurene recited Johnson’s words like an incantation and Jessica flailed and whirled with urgency and elegance, Jason kept our rhythm with his drum.

With each strike of his palm or the heel of his hand, he seemed less the elastic-limbed boy we saw performing pratfalls in the church parking lot and more a man-in-the-making, more the warrior-hunter he would’ve been if he’d been raised in the Africa whose music he’d learned to so fully invoke.

It was with this dual perception I would always regard him. Jason was part prankster, part math scholar; part hip-hop, part classical enthusiast. He was his mother’s joy and his sister’s protector. He was kind, even when teasing. No matter how goofily he’d guffaw at a joke, you just knew that quite soon he’d grow into the disciplined, responsible soul his mother already trusted to steady the pulse of entire performances.

He did. Jason grew up and became a husband and father to four daughters. He was a loyal and trustworthy friend. He was still in close touch with many members of our Power of Faith youth group.

And yesterday, he died.

I hadn’t seen Jason since I left Power of Faith over 15 years ago, and we didn’t talk much even when I knew him. I could probably count our conversations on a hand. But he, like everyone I encountered there, had remained tenderly preserved in a snow globe of memory. There, I can access them all—and the flurry of emotions I felt about them—instantly and when I do, I feel as close to them as if I’d just passed them a note during praise and worship yesterday.

So it is no small thing to have lost Jason Walker. And as I reflect on his passing, I want to send this transmission out into the ether.

To Nikia and Eugene and Dejelle, to Jacqui and Rashid and Jaye, to Tonya and Booker and Theodore, to Chris and Damont and Philip, to Tami and Kim and Markia, to Angel and Shawn and the Mathews siblings, to Lashawn and April and Raheem, to Paulette and Tia and Terrell, to Jason and Jessica and TJ, to Carlos and Emmanuel and Jonah, to Sherman and Katrice and Tasha, to Kenya and Ronald and Kenyetta, to everyone whose names I’ve forgotten, to all those who’ve faced death before the rest of us:

I love you all. You’re never far. I’ll see you soon.

From ages 8 to 15, I was a member of a church called The Power of Faith Evangelistic Ministries—at least that was what the white-lettered name typeset on the electric blue awning said, out front. All we ever called it was Power of Faith.

The address was 5242 Park Heights Avenue, and it was right across from the famed Pimlico racetrack. During Preakness season, you could see the thoroughbreds galloping when you stood on the sidewalk after service. A few years into my attendance, some Asians opened a greasy spoon called Pimlico Chicken & Fish. There was bullet-proof glass separating them from us.

 

They sold chicken boxes—five wings and fries, slathered in ketchup of questionable freshness from a gigantic unmarked bottle; “shrimp” as big as three fingers; soda rumored to have been chemically engineered by White folks to sterilize African American men.

 

We ate there at least once a week.

It was its own world, Power of Faith, all the more surreal right now, from the vantage of adult reflection. To adequately describe the experience of growing up there, you would have to have access to certain points of Christian reference. You would need to have some concept of the Chick tract—and what it feels like to be 12, trekking through the Park Heights community, handing them out to drunkards and addicts and shop-owners.

 

You would need to understand how Children’s Church or Youth Group can feel like a kind of orphanage, just by virtue of its isolation from our parents’ main service experience, and how in our temporarily parentless haven, we spent much of our time relying on and confiding in a group of kids we saw up to three times a week.

 

You’d have to know what a shut-in and a three-day fast are, how it might feel to show up at your church after dark, with a blanket, a pillow, a grumbling stomach, and an excitement to whisper conversations to your friends, while your parents paced the sanctuary floor in prayer.

 

You’d need to be able to wrap your mind around being one of two teenagers left in that darkened sanctuary on a Friday night, waiting for your respective parents and listening on in silence while they commanded demons to exit some woman’s body in the church basement.

 

This was no ordinary upbringing. These were no ordinary church services, of the type that last two hours, where you leave your worship experience and your Sunday morning relationships at the exit door till next time.

 

Power of Faith was in your blood. Being a member there was like marrying into a family; even if you got divorced (read: left and joined another church), you still considered all the people you’d inherited there your aunts and cousins and sisters.

 

Whenever a new family joined, we children immediately checked out their kids, hoping to graft them into our group and see what unique energy they’d bring to the collective. Fortunately, most members were super-involved and showed up for Wednesday, Friday and both Sunday services, so we spent loads of time bonding with new kids.

 

Everyone in Power of Faith’s youth group was known for something. Lashawn was a genius and a singer; she’d grow up to become a physician. The Brebnors were three siblings from Trinidad; they’d let you live in their home for whole summers if you wanted and for an only child like me, that was a singular experience, being part of home that was bustling with noise and laughter and drama, that was rife with rhythm and creativity. But it wasn’t until Nikia came to the church that I understood what it might be like to have a sister.

 

I’d been a member at Power of Faith longer than most of the kids in our group, but I’d always felt slightly isolated. I’ve always been retreating in large group settings and because of the infrequency of my smiling or laughter, I was often mistaken for sullen. Nikia wasn’t as socially withdrawn as I, perhaps because she had a number of brothers, but like me, her smile had to be earned, her humor was wry and she tended to stand off from a big crowd on occasion, to observe.

 

I had my first crush at Power of Faith. It began when I was ten and lasted till long after I left. Even now, I remember that boy with a kind of wonder. And when I think of what I’ll tell my daughter about love, it will begin with a description of the infatuation I felt for him.

 

Our entire youth group knew about that crush, but they were mostly polite and empathetic enough not to tease me mercilessly for it.

 

When the Walkers arrived from St. Louis—a single mother, her adolescent son and pre-adolescent daughter—the chemistry of our group was forever altered. The son, Jason, made fast friends with the guys in our gang; his easy grin and infectious laughter immediately put people at ease. His lanky, boyish good looks made him a hit with the ladies, too.

 

With the Walkers’ arrival, Power of Faith had its first encounter with liturgical dance. Jason’s mother, Laurene, had founded a troupe called Namyanka, which delicately blended African movement and worshipful music and gesturing. His preteen sister, Jessica, who had been dancing since she was two, was the troupe’s star performer. Jason played the djembe during a selection of numbers.

 

A few of the girls in our youth group joined and I was one of them. I’d soon learn I didn’t have the confidence for public dance performance. That was more the domain of Dejelle and Jacqui Brebnor, whose long, lithe limbs seemed made for graceful gesticulation.

 

But there was something truly thrilling about being a part of a Namyanka rehearsal. Even now, I look back on our performance of James Weldon Johnson’s The Creation with an awe I only reserve for the works of art that have made the deepest imprints in my heart. It was while rehearsing for this that I began to really understand how amazing the Walker family was. As Sister Laurene recited Johnson’s words like an incantation and Jessica flailed and whirled with urgency and elegance, Jason kept our rhythm with his drum.

 

With each strike of his palm or the heel of his hand, he seemed less the elastic-limbed boy we saw performing pratfalls in the church parking lot and more a man-in-the-making, more the warrior-hunter he would’ve been if he’d been raised in the Africa whose music he’d learned to so fully invoke.

 

It was with this dual perception I would always regard him. Jason was part prankster, part math scholar; part hip-hop, part classical enthusiast. He was his mother’s joy and his sister’s protector. He was kind, even when teasing. No matter how goofily he’d guffaw at a joke, you just knew that quite soon he’d grow into the disciplined, responsible soul his mother already trusted to steady the pulse of entire performances.

 

He did. Jason grew up and became a husband and father to four daughters. He was a loyal and trustworthy friend. He was still in close touch with many members of our Power of Faith youth group.

 

And yesterday, he died.

 

I hadn’t seen Jason since I left Power of Faith over 15 years ago, and we didn’t talk much even when I knew him. I could probably count our conversations on a hand. But he, like everyone I encountered there, had remained tenderly preserved in a snow globe of memory. There, I can access them all—and the flurry of emotions I felt about them—instantly and when I do, I feel as close to them as if I’d just passed them a note during praise and worship yesterday.

 

So it is no small thing to have lost Jason Walker. And as I reflect on his passing, I want to send this transmission out into the ether.

 

From ages 8 to 15, I was a member of a church called The Power of Faith Evangelistic Ministries—at least that was what the white-lettered name typeset on the electric blue awning said, out front. All we ever called it was Power of Faith.

The address was 5242 Park Heights Avenue, and it was right across from the famed Pimlico racetrack. During Preakness season, you could see the thoroughbreds galloping when you stood on the sidewalk after service. A few years into my attendance, some Asians opened a greasy spoon called Pimlico Chicken & Fish. There was bullet-proof glass separating them from us.

They sold chicken boxes—five wings and fries, slathered in ketchup of questionable freshness from a gigantic unmarked bottle; “shrimp” as big as three fingers; soda rumored to have been chemically engineered by White folks to sterilize African American men.

We ate there at least once a week.

It was its own world, Power of Faith, all the more surreal right now, from the vantage of adult reflection. To adequately describe the experience of growing up there, you would have to have access to certain points of Christian reference. You would need to have some concept of the Chick tract—and what it feels like to be 12, trekking through the Park Heights community, handing them out to drunkards and addicts and shop-owners.

You would need to understand how Children’s Church or Youth Group can feel like a kind of orphanage, just by virtue of its isolation from our parents’ main service experience, and how in our temporarily parentless haven, we spent much of our time relying on and confiding in a group of kids we saw up to three times a week.

You’d have to know what a shut-in and a three-day fast are, how it might feel to show up at your church after dark, with a blanket, a pillow, a grumbling stomach, and an excitement to whisper conversations to your friends, while your parents paced the sanctuary floor in prayer.

You’d need to be able to wrap your mind around being one of two teenagers left in that darkened sanctuary on a Friday night, waiting for your respective parents and listening on in silence while they commanded demons to exit some woman’s body in the church basement.

This was no ordinary upbringing. These were no ordinary church services, of the type that last two hours, where you leave your worship experience and your Sunday morning relationships at the exit door till next time.

Power of Faith was in your blood. Being a member there was like marrying into a family; even if you got divorced (read: left and joined another church), you still considered all the people you’d inherited there your aunts and cousins and sisters.

Whenever a new family joined, we children immediately checked out their kids, hoping to graft them into our group and see what unique energy they’d bring to the collective. Fortunately, most members were super-involved and showed up for Wednesday, Friday and both Sunday services, so we spent loads of time bonding with new kids.

Everyone in Power of Faith’s youth group was known for something. Lashawn was a genius and a singer; she’d grow up to become a physician. The Brebnors were three siblings from Trinidad; they’d let you live in their home for whole summers if you wanted and for an only child like me, that was a singular experience, being part of home that was bustling with noise and laughter and drama, that was rife with rhythm and creativity. But it wasn’t until Nikia came to the church that I understood what it might be like to have a sister.

I’d been a member at Power of Faith longer than most of the kids in our group, but I’d always felt slightly isolated. I’ve always been retreating in large group settings and because of the infrequency of my smiling or laughter, I was often mistaken for sullen. Nikia wasn’t as socially withdrawn as I, perhaps because she had a number of brothers, but like me, her smile had to be earned, her humor was wry and she tended to stand off from a big crowd on occasion, to observe.

I had my first crush at Power of Faith. It began when I was ten and lasted till long after I left. Even now, I remember that boy with a kind of wonder. And when I think of what I’ll tell my daughter about love, it will begin with a description of the infatuation I felt for him.

Our entire youth group knew about that crush, but they were mostly polite and empathetic enough not to tease me mercilessly for it.

When the Walkers arrived from St. Louis—a single mother, her adolescent son and pre-adolescent daughter—the chemistry of our group was forever altered. The son, Jason, made fast friends with the guys in our gang; his easy grin and infectious laughter immediately put people at ease. His lanky, boyish good looks made him a hit with the ladies, too.

With the Walkers’ arrival, Power of Faith had its first encounter with liturgical dance. Jason’s mother, Laurene, had founded a troupe called Namyanka, which delicately blended African movement and worshipful music and gesturing. His preteen sister, Jessica, who had been dancing since she was two, was the troupe’s star performer. Jason played the djembe during a selection of numbers.

A few of the girls in our youth group joined and I was one of them. I’d soon learn I didn’t have the confidence for public dance performance. That was more the domain of Dejelle and Jacqui Brebnor, whose long, lithe limbs seemed made for graceful gesticulation.

But there was something truly thrilling about being a part of a Namyanka rehearsal. Even now, I look back on our performance of James Weldon Johnson’s The Creation with an awe I only reserve for the works of art that have made the deepest imprints in my heart. It was while rehearsing for this that I began to really understand how amazing the Walker family was. As Sister Laurene recited Johnson’s words like an incantation and Jessica flailed and whirled with urgency and elegance, Jason kept our rhythm with his drum.

With each strike of his palm or the heel of his hand, he seemed less the elastic-limbed boy we saw performing pratfalls in the church parking lot and more a man-in-the-making, more the warrior-hunter he would’ve been if he’d been raised in the Africa whose music he’d learned to so fully invoke.

It was with this dual perception I would always regard him. Jason was part prankster, part math scholar; part hip-hop, part classical enthusiast. He was his mother’s joy and his sister’s protector. He was kind, even when teasing. No matter how goofily he’d guffaw at a joke, you just knew that quite soon he’d grow into the disciplined, responsible soul his mother already trusted to steady the pulse of entire performances.

He did. Jason grew up and became a husband and father to four daughters. He was a loyal and trustworthy friend. He was still in close touch with many members of our Power of Faith youth group.

And yesterday, he died.

I hadn’t seen Jason since I left Power of Faith over 15 years ago, and we didn’t talk much even when I knew him. I could probably count our conversations on a hand. But he, like everyone I encountered there, had remained tenderly preserved in a snow globe of memory. There, I can access them all—and the flurry of emotions I felt about them—instantly and when I do, I feel as close to them as if I’d just passed them a note during praise and worship yesterday.

So it is no small thing to have lost Jason Walker. And as I reflect on his passing, I want to send this transmission out into the ether.

To Nikia and Eugene and Dejelle, to Jacqui and Rashid and Jaye, to Tonya and Booker and Theodore, to Chris and Damont and Philip, to Tami and Kim and Markia, to Angel and Shawn and the Mathews siblings, to Lashawn and April and Raheem, to Paulette and Tia and Terrell, to Jason and Jessica and TJ, to Carlos and Emmanuel and Jonah, to Sherman and Katrice and Tasha, to Kenya and Ronald and Kenyetta, to everyone whose names I’ve forgotten, to all those who’ve faced death before the rest of us:

I love you all. You’re never far. I’ll see you soon.

To Nikia and Eugene and Dejelle, to Jacqui and Rashid and Jaye, to Tonya and Booker and Theodore, to Chris and Damont and Philip, to Tami and Kim and Markia, to Angel and Shawn and the Mathews siblings, to Lashawn and April and Raheem, to Paulette and Tia and Terrell, to Jason and Jessica and TJ, to Carlos and Emmanuel and Jonah, to Sherman and Katrice and Tasha, to Kenya and Ronald and Kenyetta, to everyone whose names I’ve forgotten, to all those who’ve faced death before the rest of us:

 

I love you all. You’re never far. I’ll see you soon.

Posted on by slb · 4 Comments

Be Grateful.

I get chills when I listen to this, and I wanted to share it with you today:

God has not promised me/sunshine.

That’s not the way it’s going to be.

But a little rain, mixed with God’s sunshine…

A little pain…

Makes me appreciate the good times.

If you’ve been following my work here, you’re well aware of how difficult my 2010 was. For the past year, the arteries of my blog have been clogged with musings about my tower of challenges. I value that writing; I’ll continue it. But today, I just want to be appreciative. Of my life. Of my child. Of my God. Of my abilities, my opportunities, my slowly increasing drive. Of my ideas, my future. Of my daughter’s health, of mine. Of my large, extended family. Of the fact that both my parents are still here–and better still, that they are so accessible. How beautiful it is to be able to build bridges of dreams with them and to cross the long-held reservoir of water underneath them.  And what of my daily increasing capacity to love, of this miraculous wonder whose tiny arms reach out, of their own accord, and search for mine, to provide a reanimating embrace at the end of a deeply exhausting day?

Can you imagine? Who could ever lament the obstacles of a life this full and this rich, without taking frequent reflective pauses to say, “Nevertheless…?”

I hope you’ve had a few moments today to take yours.

Posted on by slb · 2 Comments

Self-Portraiture.

i've been taking self-portraits since my 27th birthday, when i got my first digital camera.

they're confidence builders.
sometimes, i forget who all i am. photographs provide evidence that the you you suspect is buried within actually exists.

 

Story seems very conscious of the placement of cameras.

 

unlike me, she isn't a ham in front of them.

 

she doesn't rely on the camera to show her who she is.

 

she is already well aware.

 

 

Posted on by slb · 2 Comments

The Post-Partum Refugee.

The mirror is no longer an abusive lover. Now, I present myself to it with a chin lifted in defiance. I disrobe before it without coyness or fear. I hold its dissecting and critical gaze for as long as it dares hold mine. There is nothing furtive or insecure between us. It’s been a long war; we are battle-weary, shrapnel-bearing, bloodied.

We are equals.

I give the mirror the sandy routes that wind along my abdomen, drawn not during the nine months I carried my daughter, but in the 19 hours she twisted and shifted and bore herself down. I give it what’s left of my hair, shorn to three inches after weeks of foot-long strands trailing and slipping from my scalp like comet tails. I give it my yellowing eyes with their half-moons of weariness arced underneath.

These days, it rarely wagers an insult. There are no backhanded compliments, no “you’d be prettier if”s, no “it’ll grow back…”s, no “all you need is rest”s. I am no longer the withering girl, who daily averted her eyes at the prospect of confrontation, who brushed her teeth and applied makeup without so much as a glance in her mirror’s direction. I square my shoulders at wrinkles, set my jaw at the sight of cellulite, blankly regard the puff of flesh under my chin and I say to the self looking back at me, “I own you.”

My self, six months post-partum, is spectacularly feral, is a creature with a paw half-gnawed to freedom.