What God rescued my mother? Was it the God who said women deserved to suffer and were evil anyway, or was it the God of nonjudgmental Nature, calming and soothing her with the green coolness of the tree she slept under and the warm earth she lay upon? I try to imagine my mother and the other women calling on God as they gave birth, and I shudder at the image of Him they must have conjured. He was someone, after all, they had been taught, who said black people were cursed to be drawers of water and hewers of wood. That some people enslaved and abused others was taken for granted by Him. He ordered the killing of women and children, by the hundreds of thousands, if they were not of his chosen tribe. The women would have had to know how little they and their newborns really mattered, because they were female, poor, and black, like the accursed children of Hagar and of Ham, and they would have had to promise to be extra good, obedient, trusting, and so forth, to make up for it.
Life was so hard for my parents’ generation that the subject of heaven was never distant from their thoughts. The preacher would gleefully, or so it seemed to me, run down all the trials and tribulations of an existence that ground us into dust, only to pull heaven out of the biblical hat at the last minute. I was intrigued. Where is heaven? I asked my parents. Who is going to be there? What about accommodations, and food? I was told what they sincerely believed: that heaven was in the sky, in space, as we would later describe it; that only the best people on earth would go there when they died. We’d all have couches to lounge on, great food to eat. Wonderful music, because all the angels played harp. It would be grand. Would there be any white people? Probably. Oh.
There was not one white person in the county that any black person felt comfortable with. And though there was a rumor that a good white woman, or man, had been observed sometime, somewhere, no one seemed to know this for a fact.
Now that there’s been so much space travel and men have been on the moon, I wonder if preachers still preach about going to heaven, and whether it’s the same place.
The truth was, we already lived in paradise but were worked too hard by the land-grabbers to enjoy it. This is what my mother, and perhaps the other women, knew, and this was one reason why they were not permitted to speak. They might have demanded that the men of the church notice Earth. Which always leads to revolution. In fact, everyone has known this for a very long time. For the other, more immediate and basic, reason my mother and the other women were not permitted to speak in church was that the Bible forbade it. And it is forbidden in the Bible because, in the Bible, men alone are sanctioned to own property, in this case, Earth itself. And woman herself is property, along with the asses, the oxen, and the sheep.
I can imagine some latter-day Jezebel in our community (Jezebel apparently practiced a Goddess-centered pagan religion, one of those the God of the Old Testament is always trying to wipe out) having the nerve to speak up about being silenced. And the smugness with which our uninspiring and indifferently trained minister, Reverend Whisby, might have directed her to a passage from the New Testament that is attributed to Saint Paul: “Let women keep silence in the churches.” He would run his pudgy finger underneath the sentence, and she would read it and feel thoroughly put down. For God wrote the Bible, she would have been persuaded; and every word, even every word about murdering the suckling babies of your enemies and stealing all their worldly goods, was Truth.
I remember going with my mother to get water from the spring. What is a spring? many will ask, just as I did. It is a place in the earth where water just bubbles up, pure and sweet. You don’t ask for it, you don’t put it there. It simply appears. There was one down the hill from our house, in a quiet grove of trees. Someone years before had put a piece of a terra-cotta culvert around it, with a notch in the lip for overflow. We’d dip our battered aluminum buckets into the shallow well, always careful to spot where the crawfish might be hiding, and perhaps sit for a minute before trudging back up the hill. How on earth did the crawfish get in there? I’d ask. They are always in healthy springs, was the answer. Yes, but why? I don’t know, that’s just the way it is.
But why is that the way it is? Where did they come from? There were no other crawfish for miles around. I never saw them in the creek, for instance, where my brothers and I waded. This was a mystery that was not explained by my mother’s final exasperated “God brought them.”
I was happier with my father’s explanation: “Well, you see, these crawfishes used to live over ’round Buckhead, but it just got too goldarn hot on account of all them fires the lumber company makes cleaning up the slag … so they held a crawfish convention, kinda like our revivals, and they resolved to move east. So they traveled and they traveled and one day they came to this place where there was this pretty little girl sitting looking down in the water. And you know crawfish love to be looked at, so …” In fact, neither of my parents knew how the crawfish got into the spring.
On the one hand, I could strain to imagine a large white man in a white robe—unfortunately, real-life white men in robes belonged to the Ku Klux Klan—lovingly carrying two tiny crawfish down the hill to place them in our spring, or I could fantasize about the stouthearted crawfish pioneers leaving Buckhead with their Sears Roebuck catalog suitcases, crawfish-size.
The water we collected had many uses. We drank it; we washed dishes, clothes, and ourselves with it. We watered our livestock and my mother’s vegetable and flower gardens.
Because of the criminal exploitation inherent in the sharecropping system—in which the landowner controlled land, seeds, and tools, as well as records of account—sharecroppers were often worse off than slaves, which was the point. Sharecropping was the former slaveowners’ revenge against black people for having attained their freedom. It is no wonder that under such complete subjugation and outright terrorism, which included rape, beatings, burnings, and being thrown off the land, along with the entrenched Southern custom of lynching, people like my parents sought succor from any God they were forced to have. The idea that as descendants of Africans and Native Americans and Europeans—Scottish and Irish—on both my mother’s and my father’s side, they might have had their own ancient Gods, or that as free human beings they might choose a God uniquely perceived by themselves, never entered their minds, except negatively. The “heathen” from whom they were descended knew nothing of salvation, they were warned in church, and any God except the one in the Bible was just another illusion produced by Satan, designed to keep them out of heaven. Satan: always described as evil; in color, black or red. African or Native American? Never admitted to be also a son of God, made also in the image of his creator, just the shadow side of him. And yet everyone in our family and in our church understood instinctively who Satan was. He was the other side of “the son of God” we always saw in the white people around us. Never did we see “Jesus” among those who insisted we worship him. Only Judas, and every day.
“Pagan” means “of the land, country dweller, peasant,” all of which my family was. It also means a person whose primary spiritual relationship is with Nature and the Earth. And this, I could see, day to day, was true not only of me but of my parents; but there was no way to ritually express the magical intimacy we felt with Creation without being accused of, and ridiculed for, indulging in “heathenism,” that other word for paganism. And Christianity, we were informed, had fought long and hard to deliver us from that. In fact, millions of people were broken, physically and spiritually, literally destroyed, for nearly two millennia, as the orthodox Christian Church “saved” them from their traditional worship of the Great Mystery they perceived in Nature.
In the Sixties many of us scared our parents profoundly when we showed up dressed in our “African” or “Native American” or “Celtic” clothes. We shocked them by wearing our hair in its ancient naturalness. They saw us turning back to something that they’d been taught to despise and that, by now, they actively feared. Many of our parents had been taught that the world was only two or three thousand years old, and tha
t spiritually civilized life began with the birth of Jesus Christ. Their only hope of enjoying a better existence, after a lifetime of crushing toil and persistent abuse, was to be as much like the long-haired rabbi from a small Jewish sect in a far-off desert as possible; then, by the Grace of His father, who owned heaven, they might be admitted there, after death. It would be segregated, of course, who could imagine anything different? But perhaps Jesus Christ himself would be present, and would speak up on their behalf. After all, these were black people who were raised never to look a white person directly in the face.
I think now, and it hurts me to think it, of how tormented the true believers in our church must have been, wondering if, in heaven, Jesus Christ, a white man, the only good one besides Santa Claus and Abraham Lincoln they’d ever heard of, would deign to sit near them.
On Saturday night everyone in my family bathed from head to toe, even though this meant half a day spent carrying pails of water up a steep hill. The water was heated in the big black washpot in the yard. On Sunday morning we rose, washed our faces, had a hearty breakfast, and went off to church. As the smallest, I was bathed by my mother, dressed by my mother, fed by my mother, and wedged into the front seat of our secondhand blue-and-cream Packard between my mother and my father. They had worked hard all week, for the landowner’s benefit; this was their only time of pleasure, of rest, other than an occasional Saturday-night film at the local picture show. We spent most of the day in church, listening to the minister, who stood on the carpeting my mother had laid and read from the Bible I had dusted. Sometimes there were wonderful stories: Daniel in the Lion’s Den. The Three Wise Men. David and Goliath. The Life of Christ. (Everybody loved Jesus Christ. We recognized him as one of us, but a rebel and revolutionary, consistently speaking up for the poor, the sick, and the discriminated-against, and going up against the bossmen: the orthodox Jewish religious leaders and rich men of his day. We knew that people who were really like Jesus were often lynched. I liked his gift for storytelling. I also loved that, after Moses and Joshua, he is the greatest magician in the Bible. He was also, I realized later, a fabulous masseur, healing by the power of touch and the laying-on of hands. Much later still I learned he could dance! This quote from the Acts of John, from the Gnostic Gospels, is worth remembering: “To the Universe belongs the dancer. He who does not dance does not know what happens. Now if you follow my dance, see yourself in me.”) But basically, according to the Scriptures: We had sinned. (I did not know then that the root of the word “sin” means “to be.”) Woman was the cause. All our life we must suffer just because we existed. Worthless, worthless us. Luckily enough, we would die, but only a very small number of us would get into heaven. There was hell, a pit of eternally burning fire, for the vast majority.
Where was hell? I wanted to know. Under the ground, I was informed. It was assumed most of the white people would be there, and therefore it would be more or less like here. Only fiery hot, hotter than the sun in the cotton field at midday. Nobody wanted to go there.
I had a problem with this doctrine at a very early age: I could not see how my parents had sinned. Each month my mother had what I would later recognize, because I unfortunately inherited it, as bad PMS. At those times her temper was terrible; the only safe thing was to stay out of her way. My father, slower to anger, was nonetheless a victim of sexist ideology learned from his father, the society, and the church, which meant I battled with him throughout childhood, until I left home for good at seventeen. But I did not see that they were evil, that they should be cursed because they were black, because my mother was a woman. They were as innocent as trees, I felt. And, at heart, generous and sweet. I resented the minister and the book he read from that implied they could be “saved” only by confessing their sin and accepting suffering and degradation as their due, just because a very long time ago, a snake had given a white woman an apple and she had eaten it and generously given a bite to her craven-hearted husband. This was insulting to the most drowsy intelligence, I thought. Noting that my exhausted father often napped while in church. But what could I do? I was three years old.
When I was in my thirties, I wrote this poem:
SUNDAY SCHOOL, CIRCA 1950
“Who made you?” was always
The question
The answer was always
“God.”
Well, there we stood
Three feet high
Heads bowed
Leaning into
Bosoms.
Now
I no longer recall
The Catechism
Or brood on the Genesis
Of life
No.
I ponder the exchange
Itself
And salvage mostly
The leaning.
It is ironic, to say the least, that the very woman out of whose body I came, whose pillowy arms still held me, willingly indoctrinated me away from herself and the earth from which both of us received sustenance, and toward a frightful, jealous, cruel, murderous “God” of another race and tribe of people, and expected me to forget the very breasts that had fed me and that I still leaned against. But such is the power of centuries-old indoctrination.
We know now with what absolute heartlessness the male leaders of the orthodox Christian Church—not unlike those of orthodox Judaism and Islam—stamped out, generally after robbing them of their land and enslaving them, pagans and heathens, our ancestors and theirs, around the globe: a campaign of such unspeakable cruelty, which has lasted for so long, and which still continues, that few have had the heart to encounter it in art, politics, literature, or consciousness until the present era. If our awareness is beginning to change, it is thanks in large part to feminism and feminist scholarship, and to a resurgent belief in the sacredness of the feminine, which was deliberately erased, demonized, and disparaged in all major religions. But thanks also to indigenous peoples who, though a mere remnant of their former selves, before the invasions of conquerors professing Christianity, have risen up to speak in defense of the ancient Goddess/God of all pagans and heathens, Mother Earth.
In this connection, Haille Gerima’s extraordinary film Sankofa has much to teach us. While being photographed, dancing and carefree, inside the walls of a “slave castle” in contemporary Africa, a black fashion model for a white, Western magazine finds herself trapped inside the castle’s dungeon, from whose loading tunnels millions of enslaved Africans, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, began their soul-shattering journey to the New World. The woman is horrified to discover she has somehow slipped back into the past and is, in fact, one of her own enslaved ancestors. We follow her spiritual development as her own beliefs are denied her and the imprint of Christianity is literally beaten and branded into her flesh. People of color have been so successfully brainwashed to believe that white orthodox Christianity has given us something we didn’t already have that we rarely think of what it has taken away. Sankofa speaks to this. It also, perhaps for the first time in cinema, graphically depicts the process by which sadists who purport to be Christians have forced their religious ideology on the cultures they destroyed.
In the black church we have loved and leaned on Moses, because he brought the enslaved Israelites out of Egypt. As enslaved and oppressed people, we have identified with him so completely that we have adopted his God. But here is another look at Moses, when God commanded him to make war against the Midianites, although his wife, Zipporah, was a Midianite, two of his children were Midianites, and his kindly father-in-law, Jethro, was also a Midianite.
From the Book of Numbers, Chapter 31:
9 And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods.
10 And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles with fire.…
12 And they brought the captives, and the prey, and the spoil, unto Moses, and Eleazar the priest
, and unto the congregation of the children of Israel, unto the camp at the plains of Moab, which are by Jordan near Jericho.…
14 And Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle.
15 And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive?…
17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.…
25 And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,
26 Take the sum of the prey that was taken, both of man and of beast, thou, and Eleazar the priest, and the chief fathers of the congregation: …
31 And Moses and Eleazar the priest did as the Lord commanded Moses.
32 And the booty, being the rest of the prey which the men of war had caught, was six hundred thousand and seventy thousand and five thousand sheep,
33 And threescore and twelve thousand beeves,
34 And threescore and one thousand asses,
35 And thirty and two thousand persons in all, of women that had not known man by lying with him.