Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

by Cami Ostman

  As my racial identity and pride as a young black teenager developed in the inner cities and poor ghettos of New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, I wrestled with these questions, but I never asked my mother how she reconciled her love for God with the realities of race and class that we lived. Given her mental health, I questioned the God she clung to, an almighty presence who inspired unquestioning loyalty even in the absence of assistance with our struggles. She believed God spoke directly to her, even in loss. I didn’t know what to believe.

  While Maggie pursued Catholicism as relentlessly as she pursued everything else—at the cost of alienating herself from her Baptist aunts and sisters—I secretly sided with my aunts. It felt unhealthy to me for black women to worship white saints, especially since the spheres we traveled in were replete with brown waves of people, in Harlem, in Manhattan, in Queens, in Brooklyn.

  The faith of my aunts was derived from their personal relationship with the resurrected Jesus Christ who died for our sins, not the mysterious Trinity and its pale emissaries that my mother worshipped. In the Black Baptist Church my aunts attended, sweaty, well-dressed bodies praised the Lord with their raucous, joyous hymns for hours. This made more sense to me than Maggie’s brand of Catholicism, but though the music and ceremony was rapturous, it still didn’t feel right for me.

  I badly needed a belief system that built me up, not one that reinforced my sense of unworthiness.

  THE NATION OF ISLAM had long been on my radar. In Philly, where I was born and raised for the first part of my childhood, I spent hours playing on the steps outside my grandmother’s house, which faced a number of white, wooden storefronts that opened to reveal streams of black men in clean, pressed suits with copies of The Final Call newspaper tucked under their arms. Of course, I didn’t know that those newspapers beckoned their readers to follow Elijah Muhammad or forgo eating pork and other foods that the Nation connected to slavery. But I could sense that, behind those white doors, community was happening in a way that didn’t happen for me in my family.

  My mother and I moved to New York when I was six. There I saw men who looked like those I’d noticed in Philadelphia, but there were many more of them, especially in Harlem. On the boulevard named for Malcolm X, men walked in the charismatic leader’s spiritual footsteps. I noticed them gathering on street corners, selling newspapers for $1. Sometimes one of them would pull a boy my age dressed in baggy jeans or a long T-shirt out of foot traffic as he headed toward McDonald’s or the Apollo Theater and ask him if he knew he was a king, descended from the Original Man: a black god whose history had been erased by America’s racism.

  I had no idea what these bits of conversation meant, but I noticed the intent way each black boy listened to his elder, his posture straightening during the lecture. The promise of renewal and leadership, I realized later, must have edified black boys and men, since it was directed toward helping them survive a world that disproportionately incarcerated them, arrested them, castrated them, and brutalized their bodies and self-esteems.

  When I was twelve I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X as Told to Alex Haley. The story of Malcolm Little, the hustler who became El-Hajj Malik El-Shabbazz, or Malcolm X, fascinated me. Both reading this inspiring text and then seeing Spike Lee’s striking biopic Malcolm X, which came out soon after, initially gave me a sense of solidarity with another nomad, one who had survived childhood trauma to go on to become influential and powerful. In the montage at the end of Lee’s film, the children who repeated “I am Malcolm X” gave voice to something brewing inside me—a sense that, even a generation removed from his, I too could be like Malcolm X. In young Malcolm Little, whose mother, Louise, had struggled with depression as mine had, I saw myself.

  I was growing up in a cult of two—me and my bipolar, unmedicated, and very Catholic single mother. Our universe was one of violent manic episodes, when she would curse and punch me randomly and without provocation, punctuated by peaceful moments, when she would let me rub her feet after a long day. Malcolm X had also been bullied—by racism, madness, and poverty, both where he grew up and before he went to prison. Instead of allowing the pain of his past to destroy him, he found faith to persevere. It was a faith I craved.

  My world was shaped by the trauma of homelessness and the idea that any door we closed behind us might never again open; we’d been evicted so often that, by the time I was a teenager, I’d lost most of my childhood possessions. This continuous loss had been too much for me to process as a child, but when I read how Malcolm Little had watched his childhood home set ablaze by the Ku Klux Klan, I had an intimate understanding of what it felt like to see everything one once considered safe consumed by real or proverbial flames. That kind of loss is confusing and isolating for children, but in this shared experience, I felt closer to the young Malcolm. If he were alive, I was sure we could share battle stories.

  But what Malcolm X and I had most in common was a firm belief in God. Through his conversion from Christianity to the Nation of Islam, Malcolm was transformed from a hustler bent on survival by any means necessary into a powerful, charismatic leader. His conversion was embedded with deep racial and class pride, as evidenced by his teachings promoting black men as gods on earth. In him, I saw a template for how to climb out of what seemed like insurmountable circumstances, and to do so almost entirely by faith alone. Because my understanding of God had been shaped by the Nation’s theological polar opposite, the Catholic Church, I wondered if I could find more conviction converting to the Nation of Islam once I was no longer living with my mother.

  The connection I felt to Malcolm X and his conversion story launched me into a quest to find a secure, sacred place for myself, some sort of structure with boundaries, strict boundaries even—since my childhood had almost none. It was a journey that would continue for several years until I learned for myself what being a part of the Nation of Islam really meant. After I finished reading the Malcolm X autobiography, I mustered the courage to tell my mother I didn’t want to go to mass with her anymore. I was not brave enough to venture to a mosque in Harlem by myself, but I started reading The Final Call when it was offered to me on my solitary treks around New York City.

  LIFE IN NEW YORK was chaotic. Over the course of six years we lived in four of the city’s five boroughs, in a series of halfway houses, shelters and welfare-subsidized apartments. My mother’s mental health never seemed to get better, despite her faith and prayers. During her most terrifying manic episode, she became furious at me in the middle of the night after a phone call to my boyfriend lasted too long. She hurled herself on top of me and put her hands around my throat after striking my back and shoulders with her thick fists. “I wish I’d never had you,” she yelled. “I’ll kill you.”

  The same hands that she used to caress the rosary, each bead delicately, lovingly held while she said her prayers, were clasped around my throat, trying to squeeze the breath from my body. “I’ll kill you,” she repeated, as tears fell from the corners of my eyes onto the bed.

  Like all her other outbursts, after a matter of minutes—or was it an hour?—Mom eased off of me, worn out from the demon that possessed her. She wept, contrite, rocking back and forth, mascara running down her face from sweat and tears. “I’m sorry. I love you so much. I’m so sorry.”

  I ran away, only to return soon after, determined that I would strike back if she ever hit me again. I was fourteen, and on the brink of suicidal depression; the only thing that kept me from succumbing was that I earned an academic scholarship to an all-girls’ boarding school and left to attend.

  At the Emma Willard School, a four-hour bus ride from home, God was evident to me in the bucolic beauty of my new surroundings. When I wasn’t studying, I stole away from my dorm to walk near a creek on the edge of campus, or to feel the crisp breeze of upstate New York on my face while I jogged on a tucked-away path. I felt God, but in an undefined and unreachable way.

  By the time I finished high school, I had not stepped foot ins
ide a church in four years. I feared I’d lost the possibility of knowing a God who could understand me and guide me. I thought I’d try to live without Him.

  IN MY OWN WILDERNESS of lost faith, I found a glimpse of order. I started college at Vassar, studying political science, Africana studies, and English literature. My second year, I dated and fell in love with a popular basketball player and dreamed of marrying him. I felt my life was coming together, until I realized that he’d slept with some of my friends. Then I began to fall apart.

  By this time, my mother had moved just across the street from campus, which only added to my anxiety. I had been striving to find something or someone safe to belong to, but for all my efforts I still had no waiting container ready to hold me. I took to accosting my liver with vodka and cranberry juice that I drank from half-liter plastic cups. And though I’d learned to cling to books and studying in times of distress, as the months passed I grew more and more tired of trying to keep myself motivated to rise above the abuse and trauma of my childhood. I had reached my spiritual nadir. The only club I was a part of was the invisible network of other lost souls. I wanted to either end my life completely or totally change it, and I didn’t know where to look for help. I knew I needed God, but nothing in my religious history directed me in trying to find Him.

  EVENTUALLY, DURING SPRING BREAK, I took a trip to Columbus, Ohio, and coincidently reconnected with Charlie, an old DJ friend who upon our reacquaintance presented himself as a practicing member of the Nation of Islam. Charlie was over six feet tall, with skin the color of banana pudding and brown-amber eyes as wide as spoons. I was so smitten with him that I wrote him love poetry, comparing us to the actors Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. We were both music fans, and sang and rapped along with our favorite Jay-Z songs. We could talk for hours about life and music.

  Almost every black man I’d ever known or known of—famous or not—had been touched or shaped in some way by the Nation of Islam, and its primary edifying principles that black men are actually gods and that they could break free of the oppression and the disrespect of racism through submission to Allah. Charlie was no exception.

  He had the most peaceful face I’d ever seen. He had a precision about him that I envied: His Timberland boots were free of scuffs or dirt, as if he placed them back in the shoebox they came in each night; the half-moons of his perfectly manicured nails were dirt-free. And in accordance with Muslim law, he did not eat pork or drink alcohol.

  “Your diet sounds really difficult,” I said to him one night. We were sitting in his truck in a parking lot outside the studio where he produced music. The windows were open halfway and the night air reached our faces like its own seductive song.

  “It depends on who you’re doing things for,” he said back. “When we do things for men, they’re hard. When we do things for God, that’s the ultimate honor.”

  There was God again, I thought, butting into my life without really saving me from anything. I felt I had honored God just by surviving my life so far. How could a hard life become easy just because one leaned on God? My mother had lived in poverty for years, all the while praising God’s name. I nodded at Charlie’s perspective, though. How could I argue with what he believed, and with what seemed to have transformed him so thoroughly? Perhaps the difference was that the God Charlie worshiped was more like us: black, flawed, trying to be better.

  The peace Charlie had found was the serenity my life was missing. More than that—he had a spiritual context, an anchor in a community of other black people that seemed to ground his faith.

  Once spring break was over I had to leave Charlie and return to Poughkeepsie. We were physically separated, but we stayed in touch through phone calls that became increasingly infrequent. I could not get him off my mind, though. I couldn’t shake the feeling that, like Malcolm X—despite growing up in an environment overshadowed by police and in a society ready to cast black men as violent, aggressive pariahs—Charlie had found a moral compass through faith that offered a path not predestined to dead-end in prison.

  A COUPLE OF YEARS later, it was, in fact, prisoners who solidified the void in my life I was beginning to think only Allah could fill. As part of an independent study during my junior year, I met with a group of men in a prerelease program at Green Haven prison. A group of about six of us—mostly black women—went weekly through the dull, cool corridors of the prison, passing wives and girlfriends and children who had been waiting for who-knows-how-long to get inside. On the other side of metal detectors and unfriendly guards—who warned us not to touch the prisoners in any way, not even to shake their hands—we were led to community rooms to advise these men on transitioning to life outside.

  Each week as we endured this procedure I felt my own sense of fear, grief, and constraint. The confined prison space felt as cramped as my impoverished childhood had been. I was supposedly better off than they were, because I had been lucky enough and determined enough to study my way into elite schools. But was I really?

  One thing I knew for certain: Whichever God had granted me grace, whatever He looked like, whatever religious path I might need to take to find Him, I knew that He had been present for me, because I was not in a prison like the barred bricks and mortar I visited weekly. I looked forward to those trips because they were a reminder of the other possibilities that existed for me as a young black person in New York’s poor neighborhoods. Growing up I had dated drug dealers and once even offered myself up as an unlikely volunteer to help sell illegal guns. The desire to escape poverty often made me forget ethics or the law. Though I was now in a position to help these men, still, in my soul, I felt more connected to the prisoners than to many of my privileged white classmates.

  A couple of the men we met with wore kufis, caps that look like crocheted hats, which are common Nation attire in prisons. Once, after a session, one of these men told me I was beautiful. “You would be even more beautiful as a sister in the Nation,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “One day, you’ll find out,” he answered. Somehow I believed he knew something I didn’t.

  And perhaps he did. Not long after his prediction, I spiraled downward again in my own prison. Mine was not physical but emotional, the walls made up of childhood pain, the pain of my breakup, and my subsequent self-abuse, which leaked from my pores in morning classes where I sat, hungover, unresponsive to questions after only two hours of sleep—that is if I went at all.

  Unable to free myself from depression, and terrified that Maggie’s mental illnesses were manias that I’d inherited, I tortured myself thinking that maybe if I had been a more submissive, proper woman, I would have spared myself God’s wrath. Slowly, I started thinking that it was possible that Charlie, the Malcolm X I admired, and even the men at Green Haven prison, were indications that their same discipline and salvation was accessible to me too.

  Maybe, just like the man at Green Haven had insinuated, if I were a “sister,” covered by Allah’s protection, my life could be different. I imagined I would be able to sleep well at night, that I would be able to enter true intimacy and love with ease. The presence of a god like Malcolm X’s God, one that I could feel and understand, that made more sense to my world, might liberate me—both from the cult of two I’d experienced with my mother and still carried with me and from the tortures of the too-much freedom that led me to such hard living. I wanted a container for my many emotions, a boundary that would make me feel safe no matter what chaos came my way.

  With this hope and my continued longing for community and a true black religious life driving me, I bought a Qur’an—and a headscarf. I reread Malcolm X. I stopped hanging out with my drunken friends. I wanted the black man’s God that Charlie knew, that the men from the Green Haven prison knew, and that the suited men in Philadelphia and New York, and Malcolm X knew. I would pursue their God. I would seduce him with my faithfulness.

  Show Me the Way

  Elise Brianne Curtin

  I met Ambe
r last year, just hours into our freshman year at Wagner College, a small school in Staten Island, New York. We clicked instantly, and as the twilight of our first evening together faded into darkness, we stumbled down a moonlit path that ran along the edges of the tennis courts behind our dormitory, clumsily making our way to the kegger in the woods hosted by a bunch of thirsty frat boys. It didn’t take much for the two of us to start slurring our words and showing skin, dancing in the moonlight to the beat of a boom box blasting through the darkness. She reminded me of my friends back home. One wild night led to a slew of them, and we became inseparable.

  But that was last year. Now, it’s the beginning of sophomore year. Amber and I have been away from each other for over three months. Summer is shifting into fall, and I’m changing, too.

  “YOU LOOK LIKE AN old lady,” Amber had scowled at me earlier as she scrunched her unruly ringlets, her painted lips pouting. She was dolling herself up for a party; I was sitting in a chair in our room with a journal on my lap, a cup of tea in my hands, and a serene smile on my face. Later, she called me, drunk and laughing, and tried to get me to come out and join her. “Come on, Elise, please! You’re seriously going to hole up in there all night and pray?” A guy’s voice interrupted and sneered, “What? Are you reading your Bible?” I hung up the phone and at first bit back the tears, but then let them fall, my head in my hands.

  Hours have passed, and the tears are still streaming down my cheeks. I’m lying in bed, burrowed into the top bunk of our dorm room, pulling my ice-blue penguin sheets and well-worn comforter up to my chin. My mind is racing, chest is heaving, fists are clenching, body is shivering. Words are escaping my lips in a fervent whisper, over and over again—Show me the way, the truth, and the life.