This Will Be My Undoing

by Morgan Jerkins

  By the time I was applying for college, she’d had a child and was starting to frequent my Pentecostal church, initially sitting in the farthest pew and only socializing with a very few people. But her eyes were friendlier, with a more consistent smile balanced between them. She was glad to see me and I her. She wanted to know if I had talked to Ruby lately, and I wanted to know how she was able to squeeze a healthy baby out of her petite body. We exchanged numbers and began to talk regularly.

  Despite being a student at one of the worst high schools in South Jersey, I was confident about my college chances. I was in the top 5 percent of my class, I had taken several advanced placement courses, and I had received a competitive score on the SATs. I was extremely private about where I was applying, even with my parents. I had it all planned out. On April 1, I would get my acceptance to an Ivy League school—or to a couple—and drive down to my father’s house with a cake in the passenger seat, iced with the names of the schools where I had been accepted. I wouldn’t even call him. I’d just surprise him, and then afterwards he, my mother, and I would all get dinner and then stroll along the Atlantic City boardwalk in a celebration of my new life’s trajectory. But it did not happen that way. Emerson College: Accepted. Duh, of course. That was my backup school. University of Miami: Accepted, with an academic scholarship. Duh, of course. That was my other backup school. New York University: Rejected. Wait, what? It wasn’t exactly a backup, but then not necessarily a reach. It’s okay. I didn’t want to be in a place with no campus, anyway. Yale: Rejected. Okay, I guess. I loved the campus, but there are still more. Columbia: Rejected. Columbia, too? I . . . Okay. Okay, I guess. Harvard: Waitlist. No. If you are just going to reject me, reject me. By the time Princeton let me know I was on the waitlist, I was completely gutted and in a catatonic state. Tears fell from my eyes, but I could not feel them rolling down my cheeks. My sadness paralyzed me. My mother tried encouraging me, and then she pulled out the phone cord from the jack so I wouldn’t get calls that I didn’t want to answer. She had all sorts of suggestions about how I could run away from the disappointment of this day. My father eventually called her cell phone, wondering why he could not reach the house, and my mother told him what was going on. He wanted to speak to me, but I refused. I could hardly speak to anyone. It’s not that Emerson and Miami weren’t good schools—they were great schools. I could’ve studied writing with the best teachers at Emerson. The University of Miami gave me a merit scholarship, which was going to alleviate the financial burden since my then-sick stepfather, our family’s breadwinner, had stopped working and my mother was his caretaker. But I just thought for sure that I’d get into at least one Ivy League school.

  The following week, I discovered that a fellow classmate and friend had been accepted to Harvard, his dream school. Our beloved English teacher, Mrs. C, threw him a party after school at which I mostly remained silent while picking at my pretzels and cheese puffs. My friends understood how sad I was. One of them told me to be patient, that it wasn’t technically over, but that year Harvard had over 700 names on the waitlist; Princeton, 1,400. I had been sending letters with updates of my accomplishments to the Harvard admissions team; Princeton did not even encourage this kind of follow-up, so I painfully stayed silent. There was no way that I would get into either of them unless a miracle happened.

  Once Irie heard the news, we began to speak every night, and she would listen to me talking (or, more accurately, blubbering through my tears). Her concluding prayers were always long and intricate, and as she prayed I could feel my chest expanding, my breathing becoming less labored. She prayed for peace, discernment, strength, and, above all, God’s will to be done. I hated the last part. What if God didn’t want what I wanted? But towards the end of a month of consistent prayer and communion, while deep under my covers one night, I prayed for strength, and for God’s will to be done. The words poured out of me like water. I surrendered because I discovered that I had no other choice. That was when He met me where I was.

  Soon afterwards, Irie called me up and said, “You are going to hear something on Wednesday at noon. Do you receive it?”

  In disbelief, I answered, “What do you mean?”

  She repeated her question again, this time with more urgency. I agreed, and then she hung up.

  I grew up recognizing the power of women in my church. Pentecostalism is a “charismatic renewal” movement within Christianity that emphasizes a direct and personal relationship with God, and although men might have occupied more positions as preachers and reverends, women’s spiritual talents were more evident. For years, I had watched women prophesy to other women, men, the homeless, and drug addicts after peering down at them from the pulpit. I had seen women place their hands on people’s heads and watched those people, who were sometimes two or three times the size of those women, fall on the ground, speaking in tongues—a sacred language that is believed to be only comprehended by God—and waving their hands around before an usher covered them with a white cloth. Men, women, children, and infants would clamor to reach the front of the church, many crying, many shaking, a few falling over, all with their eyes closed. Speakers would also move in and out of the crowd, pinpoint someone, move towards that person, and prophesy to him or her. We called these women who had the gift of healing and prophesy, whether through touch, prayer, or anointing olive oil before giving it to someone in need, “prayer warriors.” Sometimes prayer warriors would form circles with other women whenever they needed God to make a move in a given situation. Other times, they would claim vivid dreams that foretold the future.

  My grandmother Sylvana was a prayer warrior. Every morning, she would seclude herself in her closet and pray for all her loved ones. Plenty of times she would dream about fortune or misfortune portrayed through symbols, such as vines and birds. I wasn’t quite sure that Irie was a prophetess. She seemed too young, and she wasn’t trained in biblical doctrine. But her unwavering voice forced me to believe with all my might that something was coming to me on Wednesday at noon.

  A few days passed, during which I was starting to warm up to the idea of attending the University of Miami. I liked Miami, loved it actually. I loved the palm trees and the beaches, and the carefree attitude that Miamians all seemed to have. I thought I could get used to an ibis as my school’s mascot. I even imagined myself holding up my hands like wings out of pride for my alma mater. And then I received a voice mail. I assumed that it was from my mother, telling me to take out the trash before I did anything else—she always left me messages like this—but I listened to it anyway. It wasn’t from her. It was from a woman at Princeton, who indicated that she had called me at noon. It was Wednesday.

  Once I got home to my bedroom, I took a deep breath and called her back. I thought that I would have to go through an interview of some sort, some final fiery hoop to prove that I could do the work there, but when she answered the phone, she didn’t waste any time in telling me that I was accepted and that she would send an acceptance letter in a few days. I hung up the phone and started crying. When I called my mother, she screamed. Immediately, my house was infused with a fresh burst of happiness.

  That same night, my mother drove me down to the church to give my testimony. I gave the testimony again at the following Sunday service, and Irie sat in the back, silently crying with her hands clasped near her face. I don’t know whether the congregation was captivated more by my story, or by the realization that the quiet single mother in the last pew was a prophetess. In retrospect, I realized that I needed that month in a holding pattern to really wait and see what God could do. Getting off Princeton’s waitlist demonstrated more of His glory because it seemed the most impossible outcome. Fourteen hundred names. Fourteen hundred names. There is no amount of math or science that can rationalize what had transpired. Irie had predicted the exact date and time that something great would happen to me, and it did. And this would not be the only time that Irie’s prophesies came true. During my commencement weekend, Irie texted
me the words “bidding war” in relation to my writing dreams. She knew no publishing lingo, and only asked that I receive her message. Two years later, I did get into the midst of a bidding war; my proposal sold at auction, which is how this book came to be.

  Enchantment, magic, and faith-based power have always been a pervasive force in African-American life. For slaves, accessing the supernatural was a way in which to undermine white domination and possess power in day-to-day conflicts. In his memoir, Frederick Douglass writes of a conjure man named Sandy Jenkins, a fellow slave who provides him with a root that will protect him if and when he finds himself in a confrontation with a “negro-breaker,” or slave disciplinarian. The black abolitionist and writer Henry Clay Bruce, who had been enslaved in Virginia, discovered a community of slaves who sought the help of a conjurer in order to thwart deportation and removal to a plantation in the Deep South, where conditions were presumably more brutal. At the last minute, their relocation was cancelled.4 Slaves moved from conjure to Christianity with little to no concern about the supposed incompatibility of these two belief systems.5 Slaves’ encounters with Christianity were deeply fraught—some had it foisted upon them, and others were actively barred from it. Indeed, white supremacy has been inextricably linked to Christianity in America. Some slave masters took up the task of converting their slaves so that they would remain obedient at all times. Many believed it was God’s will for Africans to be enslaved so that they would be brought closer to Christ. But masters tended to hate it when slaves actually made Christianity their own. Slaves were forbidden to have prayer meetings, so they met secretly in wood and ravines, among other places. Some masters forbid their slaves to go to church because they believed that they didn’t have souls. Despite all these adversities, including not being able to read the Bible for themselves, slaves crafted sermons, songs, and dances blended with ancestral African traditions and their present-day experiences.

  The rise of Pentecostalism in the 1800s saw ritual healing and protection, as well as the notion of supernatural help, become more closely aligned with traditional Christian practice. Because black people in the United States lacked sufficient medical care, even after emancipation—if they were treated, it was often with contempt by white physicians—they turned to herbalists and conjurers for healing. Both Pentecostal prayer warriors and conjure specialists believed that the spiritual and natural worlds collided in their practice; they each relied on supernatural, invisible powers to restore the wholeness of an afflicted client, even today. For the former, God is the vehicle through which these miracles spring forth, whereas for the latter the source is more ambiguous. Some conjure specialists believe that their talents are divine, and others say that their powers derive from objects and charms that they have created.

  Danielle Ayoka is a former prayer warrior who now describes herself as a clairvoyant, astrologer, and magic maker. I found her on Twitter because so many religious and spiritual black women who I follow regularly retweeted her advice and admonitions. She says that when she prayed at night as a child for negative thoughts to leave her mind so that she wouldn’t have nightmares, they would go out of her bedroom window and she would watch them slide away like a movie reel. She became a prayer warrior while at Norfolk State University, through her participation in a campus youth ministry. Like the women in my church, she would lay her hands on people, mostly black children, and they would cry, fall on the ground, or both. To strengthen her spiritual gifts, Ayoka would fast for five to seven days with only water for sustenance. She would read and study different religious texts for hours, abstain from sex and alcohol, and shy away from parties. In college, she began to study quantum physics and energy, which made her feel as if her needs were not being met by the kind of Christianity in which she was raised. She met a woman named Mya, who became her spiritual adviser. On All Saints’ Day, an important pagan holiday, Mya dreamed that a crow was pecking at Danielle’s forehead; she explained that crows represent consciousness in Native American religions. During Ayoka’s first healing session, when Mya instructed her to lie down, she all of a sudden felt her lymph nodes close up. When she told Mya she couldn’t breathe, Mya snapped and wiggled her fingers, and told Ayoka that she’d had a terminal illness in her past life that needed to be cleared up. Once Ayoka left the session, she felt lighter and happier and subsequently invested in energy sessions monthly. Not too long afterwards, she learned from her father that she comes from a lineage of Native American shamans. Now, she practices quantum healing, which involves manipulating energy in her clients’ bodies in order to shift it.

  Ayoka rejects the idea that black women are particularly vulnerable to shouldering more than our fair share of burdens in our society. In an interview, she says to me that we do have “a strength and endurance, and [that] is unmatched.

  “It has been passed down from generations,” she adds. “It is what we’ve seen from our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers. The way in which we go through life—we are able to be a support for everyone. When is the last time that you’ve seen a black woman break after everything she’s been through and she wasn’t able to get through that? You don’t know another black woman who has been through some things? We have been there for others. We have been strong. We have raised each other’s children. We have helped each other to survive. No one can take your power unless you give it.”

  When I spoke to another black woman, a witch named Haylin Belay, about why she practices, her thoughts were eerily similar.

  “The deepest forms of magic in the United States come from Native Americans and black people,” she said. “I get a lot of empowerment out of my witchcraft. I wouldn’t feel that empowerment anyplace else . . . There has been multiple times that I’ve shouted in 2016, black women have a lot of problems. We are being gaslit every day, and we have to deal with trauma, abuse, and harassment. I have to go through this world questioning if people see me as a full human being. Despite how others may treat me, I have this core, this form of resilience. My magic is where no one outside of me can touch that . . .”

  I have difficulty accepting these women’s ideologies because they seem to be validating the Strong Black Woman stereotype. But then I wonder if spiritual strength can override any obligation black women feel they have to fulfill on earth. Perhaps if our strength resides outside the physical world, a world that is largely influenced by a white supremacist system, then our being Strong Black Women is not a stereotype, but rather an honor to uphold.

  As my sophomore year progresses, my stepfather deteriorates and so do I, but I still can’t bring myself to go back to the campus psychologist. Growing up in my black Pentecostal church in South Jersey, I was told that Jesus was the answer for everything. God is supposed to be my solid rock and fortress whenever I face trials and tribulations. My faith in God is absolute; I trust He has the answers for everything. Suffering is a huge component of Christianity. In fact, we are told that suffering is okay, for like gold, our souls are refined in fire and inevitably we will come out purer, stronger, and better than we were before. When I lie in bed at night and believe that I’m going to start hallucinating, I rebuke the Devil instead, and it does provide momentary relief. I ask for extra prayers in my weekly Bible study class. The Bible study leader takes me to a bishop on a Thursday afternoon, and he prophesizes that he sees me standing in front of a mirror as my skin peels off my bones and falls to the ground like feathers. He tells me that I’m going “through it,” and I need to do something—anything—or else I’m going to find myself in a ravine out of which I cannot climb.

  But this is good, I think. I need to suffer. I’m being refined. I’m going to come out good as new sooner or later. Maybe this whole process is lasting longer than I thought because I’m not learning some sort of lesson that God is trying to teach me. When I pray about it, I do feel a peace overwhelm me and settle my anxiety. But my moods still fluctuate, drifting from one extreme to the other. As soon as I rise to my feet again after kneeling down i
n prayer, I feel as if I could easily plummet right back to the ground in anguish. I train myself to think that this sensation means that my dependence on God is getting stronger and that this is a good thing. After all, if I don’t have a relationship with God, then I can’t call myself a true Pentecostal. I am powerless because I believe I need to be. I expect to wake up one morning and find the grieving over. Then, I’ll testify to my community about how no one could have delivered me but God.

  And then my prayers start to grow stagnant, and I don’t know what to do.

  About a week before the premiere of the play I cowrote, my mother calls me and, in a calm voice, says that my stepfather does not have much time left. I have to come to the hospital to see him. He has been refusing to eat and drink for a few weeks, but he is not afraid. When my grandmother sits in a chair by his bed, she exuberantly sings hymns and he claps his hands or moves his head from side to side. When my grandfather preaches to him about rededicating his life to Christ before his mind and body go, my stepfather looks up to the ceiling and lifts his hands, an action that we all believe means he is ready to be taken home.

  When I visit him in his hospital bed, I am not afraid. My mother tells me that although his eyes are closed and his mouth is open, he can hear anything I want to say. I tell him that I love him, and that I thank him for being such a blessing in my life and my mother’s. The corners of his mouth curve upward and I interpret this as a smile. He hears me. He loves me. He can understand. I am reminded of when I visited him by his bedside to tell him about getting into Princeton and that I would have to pay close to nothing. His dementia was already advancing by then, but he had smiled and said, in a clear tone, “I’m not surprised.” It was like he remembered everything. He had always believed in my intellect and beauty, and always encouraged me. I felt as if I had a stepfather again. He was still present. I reconceived of his mind as one that goes in and out. When it returns, it sends a message that has me believing in magic—or God’s grace—and the beauty of life all over again.