Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

  “Look, a crazy person,” my aunt said to me that day in Kumasi, as casually as if she were pointing out the weather. The sea of people in Kejetia didn’t part for him, didn’t back away in fear. If his presence was weather, it was a cloud on an otherwise clear day. It wasn’t a tornado; it wasn’t even a storm.

  * * *

  —

  My mom would often tell me and Nana about a ghost that used to haunt her cousin’s apartment in those early days of her living in the United States.

  “I would turn the light off and he would turn it back on. He would move the dishes around and shake the room. Sometimes I could feel him touching my back and his hand felt like a broom brushing my skin.”

  Nana and I laughed at her. “Ghosts aren’t real,” we said, and she chided us for becoming too American, by which she meant we didn’t believe in anything.

  “You don’t think ghosts are real, but just wait until you see one.”

  * * *

  —

  The ghost my mother saw came around only when her cousin was out of the apartment, which was fairly often, as she was a full-time student who also worked part-time at a Chick-fil-A. My mother had been struggling to find a job. She spent most of those days at home alone with baby Nana. She was bored. She missed the Chin Chin Man and ran up her cousin’s phone bill making calls to him, until her cousin threatened to kick her out. Her house rules: don’t cost me money and don’t have any more babies. My mother stopped phoning Ghana, leaving her sex life an ocean away. This was around the time she started seeing the ghost. Whenever she told the two of us stories about the ghost, she spoke about him fondly. Though he frustrated her with his little tricks, she liked that broom-brushed feeling on her back; she liked the company.

  * * *

  —

  I read the Luhrmann study the day it came out in the British Journal of Psychiatry, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What struck me was the relational quality between the Ghanaian and Indian participants and the voices they heard. In Chennai they were the voices of family; in Accra, the voice of God. Maybe the participants accepted the experiences as positive because they understood these voices as real—a real and living god, kith and kin.

  * * *

  —

  My mom had been staying with me for about a week and a half when it occurred to me that there was something more I could be doing. Before I left for work in the morning, when I brought her a bowl of soup and a glass of water, I would sit with her for a while and brush my hand along whatever portion of skin went uncovered by the blanket. If I was feeling bold, I’d pull the blanket down just slightly so that I could rub her back, I’d squeeze her hand, and sometimes, a few precious times, she would squeeze my hand back.

  “Look at you becoming soft like an American,” she said one day. Her back was turned to me and I had just finished pulling the covers up over her bare shoulders. Mockery was her preferred way of displaying affection, a sign of her old self surfacing. I felt like I was finding a single tooth of a titanosaur fossil, excited but overwhelmed by the bigger bones that were yet buried.

  “Me? Soft?” I said with a little laugh, but my voice mocked her back, said, “You, you’re the soft one.”

  My mother turned with great effort so that she was facing me. Her eyes narrowed for a second and I braced myself, but then her face softened; she even smiled a little. “You work too much.”

  “I learned that from you,” I said.

  “Well,” she said.

  “Do you want to come to the lab sometime? You could see what I do. It’s boring usually, but I’ll do a surgery the day you come so it’ll be interesting.”

  “Maybe,” she said, and that was enough for me. I reached out my hand to hers. I squeezed, but this was the last bone I would find today, maybe for weeks longer. She left her hand limp.

  25

  Before my mother came to stay with me, I realized that I no longer had a Bible. I knew she was in bad shape and probably wouldn’t notice, but it nagged at me to think of her reaching for one and not being able to find it. I went to the campus bookstore and purchased a New King James Version with the same amount of embarrassment and fear of being caught that one might have when purchasing a pregnancy test. No one batted an eye.

  At first, I kept the Bible on the nightstand, where my mother had always kept our Bibles, but, as far as I could tell, she never touched it. It rested on that nightstand in the same position, day in, day out, gathering dust. After a while, when I came in to sit with her, I would pick it up and start to flip through it, reading passages here and there, quizzing myself to see whether or not I could remember all of those hundreds of Bible verses I had committed to memory over the years. In college, whenever I struggled to remember all of the proteins and nucleic acids I needed to know intimately for my major, I would think about the surfeit of Bible verse knowledge taking up space in my brain and wish that I could empty it all out to make room for other things. People would pay a lot of money to someone who could turn the brain into a sieve, draining out all of that now-useless knowledge—the exact way your ex liked to be kissed, the street names of the places you no longer live—leaving only the essential, the immediate. There are so many things I wish I could forget, but maybe “forget” isn’t quite right. There are so many things I wish I never knew.

  The thing is, we don’t need to change our brains at all. Time does so much of the emptying for us. Live long enough and you’ll forget almost everything you thought you’d always remember. I read the Bible as if for the first time. I read at random, the rich and grandiose storytelling of the Old Testament, the intimate love letters of the Gospels, and I enjoyed it in a way that I hadn’t when I was a child, when I had such a hawkish approach to memorizing Scripture that I almost never took the time to think about what I was reading, let alone savor the words. While reading from 1 Corinthians, I found myself moved by the language. “This is actually quite beautiful,” I said to myself, to my mother, to no one.

  * * *

  —

  Here’s a verse from the book of John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. I wrote about this verse in my childhood journal. I wrote about how writing itself made me feel closer to God and how my journal keeping was a particularly holy act, given that it was the Word that was with God, that was God. In those days my journal was my most prized possession and I took my writing very seriously. I took words seriously; I felt like those opening words of John’s were written just for me. I thought of myself as a lost apostle, my journal as a new book of the Bible. I was young when I wrote that entry, maybe seven or eight, and I was so very smug about it. Proud of how well it was written. I was almost tempted to show it to my family or to Pastor John.

  So it was a bit of a shock, years later, when P.T. delivered a sermon, one of his few memorable ones, in which he told us all that the word “Word” was translated from the Greek word Logos, which didn’t really mean “word” at all, but rather something closer to “plea” or even “premise.” It was a small betrayal for my little apostle’s heart to find out that I had gotten my journal entry wrong. Worse still, I felt then, was the betrayal of language in translation. Why didn’t English have a better word than “Word” if “Word” was not precise enough? I started to approach my Bible with suspicion. What else had I missed?

  Even though I felt ambushed, I did like the ambiguity that the revelation introduced into that verse. In the beginning there was an idea, a premise; there was a question.

  * * *

  —

  My junior year of college, I went to a church service by myself. I wore a simple black dress and a big floppy hat with which I could easily hide my face, though a woman in a hat at a university church service was a strange enough sight that I probably drew more attention to myself, not less. I went to the very last pew, and I hadn’t but bent my knees to sit down before I felt s
weat start to bead on my brow. The prodigal daughter returns.

  The reverend that day was a woman, a professor in the Harvard Divinity School whose name I’ve forgotten now. She preached on literalism in the church and she began the sermon by asking the congregation to ponder this question: “If the Bible is the infallible word of God, must we approach it literally?”

  When I was a child, I would have said yes, emphatically and without a moment’s thought. What I loved best about the Bible, particularly the outlandish moments in the Old Testament, was that thinking about it literally made me feel the strangeness and dynamism of the world. I can’t tell you how much sleep I lost over Jonah and that whale. I used to pull my covers up all the way over my head and shimmy down into the dark, breath-damp cavern it created, and I would think of Jonah on that ship to Tarshish and I would think of the punitive, awful God who ordered him thrown overboard to be swallowed whole by a giant fish. And I would feel my breath shorten in that confined space and I would be amazed, truly amazed by God, by Jonah, by the whale. The fact that these sorts of things didn’t ever seem to happen in the present did nothing to keep me from believing that they happened in the age of the Bible, when everything was weighted with import. When you’re that young, time already seems to crawl. The distance between ages four and five is forever. The distance between the present and the biblical past is unfathomable. If time was real, then anything at all could be real too.

  The reverend’s sermon that day was beautiful. She approached the Bible with extraordinary acuity, and her interpretation of it was so humane, so thoughtful, that I became ashamed of the fact that I very rarely associated those two things with religion. My entire life would have been different if I’d grown up in this woman’s church instead of in a church that seemed to shun intellectualism as a trap of the secular world, designed to undermine one’s faith. Even Nana’s hypothetical question about villagers in Africa had been treated as a threat instead of as an opportunity. The P.T. who had revealed that in the beginning was the Logos, the idea, the question, was the same P.T. who had refused to think about whether or not those hypothetical villagers could be saved and in so doing refused the premise, the question itself.

  When Pastor John preached against the ways of the world, he was talking about drugs and alcohol and sex, yes, but he was also asking our church to protect itself against a kind of progressivism that for years now had been encroaching. I don’t mean progressive in a political sense, though that was certainly a part of it. I mean progress in the sense of the natural way in which learning something new requires getting rid of something old, like how discovering that the world is round means that you can no longer hang on to the idea that you might one day fall off the edge of the Earth. And now that you have learned that something you thought was true was never true at all, every idea that you hold firm comes into question. If the Earth is round, then is God real? Literalism is helpful in the fight against change.

  But while it was easy to be literal about some teachings of the Bible, it was much harder to be literal about others. How, for instance, could Pastor John preach literally about the sins of the flesh when his own daughter got pregnant at seventeen? It’s almost too cliché to be believable, but it happened. Mary, as she was ironically named, tried to hide her condition for months with baggy sweatshirts and fake colds, but it wasn’t long before the entire congregation caught on. And soon Pastor John’s sermons about the sins of the flesh took on a different weight. Instead of a punitive God, we were told of a forgiving God. Instead of a judgmental church, we were encouraged to be an open one. The Bible did not change, but the passages he chose did; the way that he preached did as well. By the time Mary’s due date rolled around, she and the baby’s father were married and all was forgiven, but I never forgot. We read the Bible how we want to read it. It doesn’t change, but we do.

  * * *

  —

  I became deeply interested in the idea of Logos after P.T.’s sermon. I started writing in my journal more often, but the nature of my entries changed. Whereas before, they were simply recordings of my day and the things I wanted God to do, after, they became lists of all the questions that I had, all the things that didn’t quite make sense to me.

  I also started paying more attention to my mother. When she spoke Fante on the phone with her friends, she became like a girl again, giggling and gossiping. When she spoke Twi to me, she was her mother-self, stern and scary, warm. In English, she was meek. She stumbled and was embarrassed, and so to hide it she demurred. Here’s a journal entry from around that time:

  Dear God,

  The Black Mamba took me and Buzz out to eat today. The waitress came over and asked what we wanted to drink and TBM said water, but the waitress couldn’t hear her and asked her to repeat herself but she didn’t and so Buzz answered for her. Maybe she thought the waitress didn’t understand her? But she was talking so quietly it was like she was talking to herself.

  There were other moments like this, where the woman whom I thought of in my head as fearsome shrank down to someone I could hardly recognize. And I don’t think she did this because she wanted to. I think, rather, that she just never figured out how to translate who she really was into this new language.

  26

  Mary, the pastor’s pregnant daughter, was the subject of gossip around our small evangelical community for nine months and beyond. As her belly swelled, so did the rumors. That she had conceived the baby in the First Assemblies’ baptismal one Sunday evening after hours. That the baby was fathered by a NASCAR driver whose mother was a member of our congregation. When Pastor John pulled Mary out of school to be homeschooled by her mother, we all assumed that the school had something to do with the pregnancy. Maybe it had happened there. Throughout all of this conjecture, Mary didn’t say a word. When the father, a sweet, shy boy from a neighboring church, finally revealed himself, the two of them, child bride and bridegroom, were married before her third trimester. The whisperings slowed but they didn’t stop.

  The problem was that it wasn’t just Mary who had gotten pregnant. That year, four other fourteen- to sixteen-year-old girls from our church made revelations of their own. Not to mention the girls from churches around town. I was twelve. The most sex ed I had gotten was earlier that year in middle school when a woman from a Baptist church in Madison had visited our science class two days in a row to tell us that our bodies were temples that shouldn’t allow just anyone in. Then she assigned homework, an essay with the prompt “Write about why patience is a virtue.” All of the language was vague and metaphorical. Our holy temples; our silver boxes; our special gifts. I don’t think she said the words “penis” or “vagina” once. I left with no idea what sex actually was. But sin I was familiar with, and as I watched all the older girls carry their sins on their bellies for the entire world to see, I understood that for these girls to be young, unmarried, pregnant, meant that a particular kind of shame had descended on my congregation.

  Soon after Melissa, the last of the five girls, announced her pregnancy, my church had an intervention of sorts. I wasn’t told where we were going, but I and all the other preteen girls climbed into the church van and were driven downtown to an old warehouse building that looked like it was ready to be torn down.

  There were several other girls already there. Most of them were older than us; one was visibly pregnant. The room was set up as though for a board meeting, and at the head of the table sat a woman with dishwater-blond hair. She looked like someone who had probably been pretty and popular only a couple of decades before but then had left high school, where admiration had come easily and plentifully, and had suffered in the real world.

  “Come on in, girls, grab a seat,” she said.

  I and my fellow church girls took seats at the end of the table. “Do you know what’s going on?” we whispered to each other. The girls who were already there glared at us, mean in their boredom.

 
“How many of you have already had sex?” the woman asked once we had settled in.

  Everyone looked around but no one raised their hand, not even the pregnant girl.

  “Come on, now. Don’t be shy,” she said.

  Slowly hands started to go up all around me. I made my silent judgments.

  “This here building used to be a place where women came to kill their babies, but God saw fit to turn it around. He laid it on my pastor’s heart to use this place for good instead of for evil, and so now we bring girls like you in here to teach y’all about how God wants you to wait. I’m telling you girls, even if you’ve already had sex before, you can ask God to forgive. You can leave here better than when you came in. Amen?”

  For the next eight hours, Miss Cindy, as she asked to be called, took us through her course on abstinence. She showed us slideshows of the spotted, oozing, stop-sign-red genitalia afflicted by STDs. She spoke about her own teen pregnancy. (“I love my daughter and I believe everything happens for a reason, but if I could go back and tell my younger self to keep her legs closed, I would.”) The only good part about all of this was when we got Steak-Out for lunch.

  At one point, six hours in, Miss Cindy said, “If you and I were neighbors and we went into a covenant agreement so that our lambs could graze freely on each other’s land, we would have to seal that covenant by slaughtering one of our lambs. A covenant is not a promise. It’s so much more than that. A covenant requires bloodshed. Remember that the Bible says that marriage is a covenant and when you sleep with your husband on your wedding night and your hymen breaks, that blood is what is sealing your covenant. If you’ve already had sex with other men, you’ve already made promises you can’t keep.”