Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

  My mother told me that the Chin Chin Man joined her and Nana in America a few months after they moved to Alabama. It was his first time on an airplane. He’d taken a tro-tro to Accra, carrying only one suitcase and a baggie of my grandmother’s achomo. As he felt the bodies of the hundreds of other bus passengers press up against him, his legs tired and achy from standing for nearly three hours, he was thankful for his height, for the deep breaths of fresh air that floated above everyone else’s heads.

  At Kotoka, the gate agents had cheered him on and wished him well when they saw where he was headed. “Send for me next, chale,” they said. At JFK, Customs and Immigration took his baggie of chin chin away.

  At the time, my mother was making ten thousand dollars a year, working as a home health aide for a man called Mr. Thomas.

  “I can’t believe my shithead kids stuck me with a nigger,” he would often say. Mr. Thomas was an octogenarian with early-stage Parkinson’s disease whose tremors had not deterred his foul mouth. My mother wiped his ass, fed him, watched Jeopardy! with him, smirking as he got nearly every answer wrong. Mr. Thomas’s shithead kids had hired five other home health aides before my mother. They’d all quit.

  “DO. YOU. SPEAK. ENGLISH?” Mr. Thomas yelled every time my mother brought him the heart-healthy meals his children paid for instead of the bacon he’d asked for. The home health service had been the only place to hire my mother. She left Nana with her cousin, or brought him to work with her, until Mr. Thomas started calling him “the little monkey.” After that, more often than not, she left Nana alone while she worked her twelve-hour night shift, praying he’d sleep until morning.

  The Chin Chin Man had a harder time finding a job. The home health service had hired him, but too many people complained once they saw him walk in the door.

  “I think people were afraid of him,” my mother once told me, but she wouldn’t tell me why she’d come to that conclusion. She almost never admitted to racism. Even Mr. Thomas, who had never called my mother anything other than “that nigger,” was, to her, just a confused old man. But walking around with my father, she’d seen how America changed around big black men. She saw him try to shrink to size, his long, proud back hunched as he walked with my mother through the Walmart, where he was accused of stealing three times in four months. Each time, they took him to a little room off the exit of the store. They leaned him against the wall and patted him down, their hands drifting up one pant leg and down the other. Homesick, humiliated, he stopped leaving the house.

  This is when my mother found the First Assemblies of God Church on Bridge Avenue. Since her arrival in America, she had stopped going to church, opting instead to work every Sunday because Sunday was the day of the week most Alabamians wanted off for the two holy acts—going to church and watching football. American football meant nothing to my mother, but she missed having a place to worship. My father reminded her of all that she owed God, reminded her of the power held in her prayer. She wanted to summon him out of his funk, and to do so, she knew she needed to swim out of her own.

  The First Assemblies of God Church was a little brick building, no bigger than a three-bedroom house. It had a large marquee out front that displayed cutesy messages meant to lure people in. Sometimes the messages were questions. Have you met Him yet? or Got God? or Do you feel lost? Sometimes, they were answers. Jesus is the reason for the season! I don’t know if the marquee messages were what drew my mother in, but I do know that the church became her second home, her most intimate place of worship.

  The day she walked in, music played over the loudspeakers in the sanctuary. As the singer’s voice beckoned, my mother inched toward the altar. My mother obeyed. She knelt down before the Lord and prayed and prayed and prayed. When she lifted her head, her face wet with tears, she thought she might get used to living in America.

  8

  When I was a child I thought I would be a dancer or a worship leader at a Pentecostal church, a preacher’s wife or a glamorous actress. In high school my grades were so good that the world seemed to whittle this decision down for me: doctor. An immigrant cliché, except I lacked the overbearing parents. My mother didn’t care what I did and wouldn’t have forced me into anything. I suspect she would be prouder today if I’d ended up behind the pulpit of the First Assemblies of God, meekly singing number 162 out of the hymnal while the congregation stuttered along. Everyone at that church had a horrible voice. When I was old enough to go to “big church,” as the kids in the children’s service called it, I dreaded hearing the worship leader’s warbling soprano every Sunday morning. It scared me in a familiar way. Like when I was five and Nana was eleven, and we found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. Nana scooped it into his big palms, and the two of us ran home. The house was empty. The house was always empty, but we knew we needed to act fast, because if our mother came home to find the bird, she’d kill it outright or take it away and drop it in some small stretch of wilderness, leaving it to die. She’d tell us exactly what she’d done too. She was never the kind of parent who lied to make her children feel better. I’d spent my whole childhood slipping teeth under my pillow at night and finding teeth there in the morning. Nana left the bird with me while he poured a bowl of milk for it. When I held it in my hands, I felt its fear, the unending shiver of its little round body, and I started crying. Nana put its beak to the bowl and tried to urge it to drink, but it wouldn’t, and the shiver that was in the bird moved in me. That’s what the worship leader’s voice sounded like to me—the shaky body of a bird in distress, a child who’d grown suddenly afraid. I checked that career off my list right away.

  Preacher’s wife was next on my list. Pastor John’s wife didn’t do much, as far as I could tell, but I decided to practice for the position by praying for all of my friends’ pets. There was Katie’s goldfish, for whom we held a toilet-bowl funeral. I said my prayer while we watched the flash of orange swirl down and disappear. There was Ashley’s golden retriever, Buddy, a frantic, energetic dog. Buddy liked to knock over the trash bins the neighbors put out every Tuesday night. Come Wednesday morning our street would be littered with apple cores, beer bottles, cereal boxes. The trash collectors started to complain, but Buddy kept living out his truth, undeterred. Once, Mrs. Caldwell found a pair of panties near her bin that didn’t belong to her, confirming a suspicion she’d had. She moved out the next week. The Tuesday night after she left, Mr. Caldwell sat outside next to his trash bin in a lawn chair, a rifle slung across his lap.

  “Iffn that dog comes near my trash again, you’ll be needin’ a shovel.”

  Ashley, scared for Buddy’s life, asked if I would pray for him, as I had already made something of a name for myself on the pet funeral circuit.

  She brought the dog by while my mother was at work and Nana was at basketball practice. I’d asked her to come over when no one was home, because I knew that what we were doing was in a gray area, sacrament-wise. I cleared a space in the living room, which I referred to as the sanctuary. Buddy figured out something was up as soon as we started to sing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” and he wouldn’t stay still. Ashley held him down while I placed my hand on his head, asking God to make him a dog of peace instead of one of destruction. I counted that prayer successful every time I saw Buddy out and about, alive, but I still wasn’t sure if I was destined for the ministry.

  It was my high school biology teacher who urged me toward science. I was fifteen, the same age that Nana was when we discovered he had a habit. My mother had been cleaning Nana’s room when she noticed. She’d gotten a ladder from the garage so she could sweep out his light fixture, and when she put her hand in the glass bowl of the light, she found a few scattered pills. OxyContin. Gathered there, they’d looked like dead bugs, once drawn to the light. Years later, after all the funeral attendants had finally gone, leaving jollof and waakye and peanut butter soup in their wake, my mother would tell me that she blamed herself for not d
oing more the day she’d cleaned the light. I should have said something kind in return. I should have comforted her, told her it wasn’t her fault, but somewhere, just below the surface of me, I blamed her. I blamed myself too. Guilt and doubt and fear had already settled into my young body like ghosts haunting a house. I trembled, and in the one second it took for the tremble to move through my body, I stopped believing in God. It happened that quickly, a tremble-length reckoning. One minute there was a God with the whole world in his hands; the next minute the world was plummeting, ceaselessly, toward an ever-shifting bottom.

  Mrs. Pasternack, my biology teacher, was a Christian. Everyone I knew in Alabama was, but she said things like “I think we’re made out of stardust, and God made the stars.” Ridiculous to me then, weirdly comforting now. Then, my whole body felt raw, all of the time, like if you touched me the open wound of my flesh would throb. Now, I’m scabbed over, hardened. Mrs. Pasternack said something else that year that I never forgot. She said, “The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That’s science, but that’s also everything else, isn’t it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.”

  * * *

  —

  The first experiment I can remember performing was the Naked Egg experiment. It was for my middle school’s physical science class, and I remember it, in part, because I’d had to ask my mother to put corn syrup on the grocery list, and she’d grumbled about it endlessly all week long. “Why doesn’t your teacher buy you the corn syrup if she wants you to do this nonsense?” she said. I told my teacher that I didn’t think my mother would buy the corn syrup, and, with a little wink, my teacher gifted me a bottle from the back of her storage closet. I thought this would please my mother. After all, it’s what she had been asking for, but instead it only mortified her. “She’ll think we can’t afford corn syrup,” she said. Those were the hardest years, the beginnings of the just-the-two-of-us years. We couldn’t afford corn syrup. My teacher went to our church; she knew about Nana, about my father. She knew my mother worked twelve-hour shifts every day but Sunday.

  We started the Naked Egg experiment at the beginning of the week by putting our eggs in vinegar. The vinegar dissolved the shell, slowly, so that by Wednesday’s class we had a naked egg, urine-yellow and larger than a regular egg. We put the naked egg into a new glass and poured corn syrup over it. The egg we saw the next day was shriveled, flattened. We put the deflated egg in colored water and watched the blue expand, color pushing through the egg, making it larger and larger and larger.

  The experiment was a way to teach us the principles of osmosis, but I was too distracted to appreciate the science behind it. As I watched the egg absorb that blue water, all I could think about was my mother shaking the bottle of corn syrup at me, her face almost purple with rage. “Take it back, take it back, TAKE IT BACK,” she said, before flinging herself onto the ground and kicking her legs up and down in a tantrum.

  The two of us back then, mother and daughter, we were ourselves an experiment. The question was, and has remained: Are we going to be okay?

  * * *

  —

  Some days when I got home from the lab I would go into my room, my mother’s room, and tell her all the things I’d done that day, except I wouldn’t say them aloud, I’d just think them. Today, I watched a mouse brain flash green, I’d think, and if she stirred that meant she’d heard me. It made me feel like a silly child, but I did it all the same.

  Han invited me to a party at his place, I thought toward my mother one night. Move if you think I should go. When her hand lifted to scratch her nose, I grabbed my jacket and left.

  Han lived in one of those apartment complexes, uniform and labyrinthine, that feels like a prison or a military barracks in its sameness. I found myself going to 3H instead of 5H. Every turn led to another group of Spanish mission-style apartments with those signature clay tile roofs that were everywhere in the Southwest and California.

  When I finally got to 5H, the door was ajar. Han welcomed me with an uncharacteristic hug. “Giftyyyyy,” he said, lifting me up a little.

  He was drunk, another rarity for him, and though I’d never noticed it before, I noticed it then—the tips of his ears were red, just like the day he’d found me crying in the lab.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in shorts before, Han,” I said.

  “Check out my bare feet too,” he said, wiggling his toes. “Lab regulations have really deprived you from seeing me in all my natural beauty.”

  I laughed, and he flushed even deeper. “Make yourself at home,” he said, waving me in.

  I moved through the living room, chatting with my cohort. We ranged in age from twenty-two to forty-seven. Our backgrounds were similarly all over the place—robotics, molecular biology, music, psychology, literature. All roads had led to the brain.

  I was bad at most parties but good at these. It’s remarkable how cool you can seem when you are the only black person in a room, even when you’ve done nothing cool at all. I wasn’t close to anyone at the party, certainly not close enough to tell them about my mother, but by the end of the night, the alcohol had loosened my lips and I started to get comfortable, to talk around the subject I most wanted to talk about.

  “Do you think you’ll ever go back to practicing psychiatry?” I asked Katherine. She was one of the more senior members of my lab, a postdoc who’d done her undergraduate studies at Oxford and a medical degree at UCSF before starting her PhD here. We had a tentative friendship, predicated mostly on the fact that we had both been raised in immigrant families and that we were two of the only women in the department. I always got the sense that Katherine wanted to get to know me better. She was friendly and open, too open for my comfort. Once, in the lounge, Katherine had confided in me that she had snooped through her husband’s things and found little “o’s” written in his calendar on the days when she was ovulating, and she thought that maybe he was trying to trick her into having a baby sooner than the time frame they’d planned on. She’d been so free with that information, like she was telling me about a cough she couldn’t kick, but I was enraged, self-righteous. “Leave him,” I said, but she didn’t, and as I talked to her, Steve, her husband, was on the other side of Han’s living room, sipping sangria, his head tilted back just slightly so that I could see his Adam’s apple bob as the drink moved down. Knowing what I knew about Steve, I couldn’t look at him, his Adam’s apple, and not see a kind of menace, but there he was talking, drinking, ordinary.

  “I think about going back to my practice all the time,” Katherine said. “With medicine, I could see that I was helping people. A patient would come in, so wracked with anxiety that they were scratching their arms raw, and months later, no scratches. That’s gratifying. But with research? Who knows.”

  My mother had hated therapy. She went in arms raw, came out arms raw. She was distrustful of psychiatrists and she didn’t believe in mental illness. That’s how she put it. “I don’t believe in mental illness.” She claimed that it, along with everything else she disapproved of, was an invention of the West. I told her about Ama Ata Aidoo’s book Changes, in which the character Esi says, “you cannot go around claiming that an idea or an item was imported into a given society unless you could also conclude that to the best of your knowledge, there is not, and never was any word or phrase in that society’s indigenous language which describes that idea or item.”

  Abodamfo. Bodam nii. That was the word for “crazy person,” the word I’d heard my aunt use that day in Kejetia to describe the dreadlocked man. My mother refused this logic. After my brother died, she refused to name her illness depression. “Ameri
cans get depressed on TV and they cry,” she said. My mother rarely cried. She fought the feeling for a while, but then one day, not long after the Naked Egg experiment, she got into her bed, got under the covers, and wouldn’t get back up. I was eleven. I was shaking her arm as she lay there in bed, I was bringing her food before walking to school, I was cleaning the house so that when she finally woke up she wouldn’t be upset with me for letting the place turn to filth. I was doing okay, I thought, so when I found her, sinking in the bathtub, the faucet running, the floor flooded, the first thing I felt was betrayed. We were doing okay.

  I looked at Katherine’s stomach. Still flat, all of these months later. Was Steve still making little “o’s” in his calendar? Had she told him that she knew about his betrayal or did she keep it to herself, hold it in the clenched fist of her heart to open only when something between them was truly broken?

  I had never been to therapy myself, and when the time came for me to choose what to study, I didn’t choose psychology. I chose molecular biology. I think when people heard about my brother they assumed that I had gone into neuroscience out of a sense of duty to him, but the truth is I’d started this work not because I wanted to help people but because it seemed like the hardest thing you could do, and I wanted to do the hardest thing. I wanted to flay any mental weakness off my body like fascia from muscle. Throughout high school, I never touched a drop of alcohol because I lived in fear that addiction was like a man in a dark trench coat, stalking me, waiting for me to get off the well-lit sidewalk and step into an alley. I had seen the alley. I had watched Nana walk into the alley and I had watched my mother go in after him, and I was so angry at them for not being strong enough to stay in the light. And so I did the hard thing.