Authors: Cami Ostman
Beyond Belief (11 page)
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 inside 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.
I
N 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.
E
VENTUALLY, 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.
I
met Amber 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.
“Y
OU 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.
Just moments ago, Amber staggered in and collapsed on the bottom bunk. I want to climb down and nudge her awake so we can cry together, like we did in the final throes of freshman year, when she was reeling from a recent fling and I was doubled over and sobbing in her lap because a Brooklyn boy broke my heart.
Doesn’t she realize I’m still here? I’m still me, just . . . different?
But whatever that closeness was that we shared, it’s gone now.
I close my eyes and struggle to conjure the soul-searching me who created this mess, hoping to unearth a satisfying explanation for why I’m losing my best friend. In my mind’s eye, I wander away from here, to the golden fields and wooded trails of my hometown. To memories of the trees towering over me and the crunch of twigs and dirt beneath my feet. To my dog, Spy, running freely by my side. Sleeping on a blanket in my parents’ backyard, watching
the silhouettes of the trees sway in the moonlight, listening to the leaves rustling and the choir of crickets chirping their rhythmic rhapsodies. Staring into the stars as they shimmered in the blackened sky, my shoulders pressed against the cool, hard ground, I had pondered and wondered about all sorts of things.
Who am I? What am I? How am I? Why am I?
I voiced my ruminations aloud, in what felt like prayers, and waited for someone to answer me. And in those sweet stargazing spells, I communed with what I came to know as God.