It was during this summer I realized Bowie was no longer acting like a three-year-old; he was lethargic and sad. He didn’t want to go outside and play. He would lean on my sister and me, as if he couldn’t hold up his own weight, and wanted to be comforted. I was watching Bowie and my sister while John and Linda worked, and one afternoon I watched as he vomited blood, with clot-like masses. I had no idea what was wrong with him, but one day I lifted his shirt and there was a distinct hand print across his abdomen. I attempted to place my fingers in the fingerprint places but my hand was way too small. I believed John was hurting him, but I never witnessed it. Over the years I had been beaten with switches, slippers, race car tracks, extension cords, and a cubed-stick. John had only ever used a belt on me, so there was no consistent precedent for him to be a violent man, except for when he damn near beat my mother to death, but other than that I had never seen him physically abuse anyone in our household. I mean by today’s standards our whoopin’s were abuse, but not back then and not in my community.
On one beautiful August day, August 1st, to be exact, my little sister begged me to take her to the park, but I didn’t want to go. I really didn’t want to leave Bowie alone with John. I recall that Bowie was sitting on the kitchen counter and John was standing beside him, feeding him a sandwich. I said to Bowie, “I love you.” He softly replied, “love you too.” I remember looking at John; he just looked mad for no perceivable reason. I did not fully understand why I feared leaving Bowie alone; something just wasn’t right. John broke my gaze on Bowie when he yelled, “What are you standing there for? Take your sister to the park!” Slowly I left the kitchen, looking directly at John and then a final glance at Bowie; it would be the last time I saw my little brother alive.
When I returned from the park on that beautiful summer day, the neighborhood children ran up to Nadia and me screaming “Bowie’s dead! Bowie’s dead! His eyes were up in his head too.” I told my sister to stay outside while I went in. I looked all over the apartment and nothing was out of place; the only strange thing I saw was a piece of chewed up sandwich lying in the wet bathtub. We sat and anxiously waited for family members to return. It was true, Bowie was dead. Dead. How could it be?
He died of internal hemorrhaging due to blunt force trauma. John said that Bowie had fallen down the steps, but I did not believe him. We had bounced down those padded, carpeted steps countless times; how could his kidneys and liver be lacerated from accidently falling down half-dozen carpeted steps? I knew that John had killed him.
The day of Bowie’s funeral came. I was standing by his coffin, looking at his flat appearance; his checks were sunk in, his lips dry and wrinkled. I could see the make-up they used to make him appear asleep, but the mask of death on a three-year-old can’t be enlivened. I felt compelled to kiss his forehead, and when I did, I received a message in my heart. A burning message. I had to tell someone about the bruises, the vomiting and the handprint I had found on Bowie’s abdomen or else Bowie’s death would be on my head. Other than being high on acid, this was my first spiritual experience. I didn’t perceive it as such at the time, but as I have tried to track the progress of my spirituality, I understand that this was indeed a milestone. At the time I gave no thought to religion, or God, but here was a moment in which something, someone spoke to me and I responded. Initially I was struck with fear. First, because I had received this message while kissing my deceased baby brother, and second, because I believed John was capable of killing me. However, the message was so clear and intense that I couldn’t deny it; it drove me. One day, after getting off the school bus, I went to the police department. After telling the police that I suspected John was responsible, I shared with Linda as well, and that was a mistake. One day, at Linda’s family home, I was standing at the top of the steps when John came in the front door and barreled up the steps toward me, all 225 lbs., screaming, “You think I killed him?! Huh? You think I killed him?!” I was terrified and unable to move. He continued to scream at me, his spit landing on my face. Linda came and led him away.
My sister and I were removed from John’s custody, and within a few months I found myself sitting in the courthouse. I was a witness against John for murder. I was an emotional wreck, and physically sick. I remember it was the day of the preliminary hearing, I was sitting in a small room, waiting to take the stand. The bailiffs bought John in and, when he saw me, he snatched his arms upward, out of their grasp, and began charging toward the room I was in. I turned my body and lifted my arms to cover my face. I was sad and afraid; I had loved John. It had been so good at the beginning, and I knew that at one time he had loved me too. I was alone, huddled up in a tiny room, in a situation beyond my years. My mom was already in prison. I had no family to cover me; I sat facing a courtroom of people I didn’t know, and the ones I did know sympathized with John, even Linda.
Sometime later, when the actual trial was set to begin, I was in the prosecutor’s office and I told him I couldn’t do it. Time had caused me to develop a sense of fear for my safety. As I sat there terrified, the prosecutor pulled out two life-size photos of Bowie, naked, lying on a metal gurney; in one photo he was face up and the other he was face down. It was surreal; here was this beautiful baby boy, lying there dead. Murdered 3 days before his fourth birthday.
It was June of 2016, and I was preparing to move to Westcliffe, Colorado to take my first appointment as a pastor. I wasn’t ready, but I took the appointment anyway. Addiction had been a part of my ongoing narrative since I was 9, and in 2016 I was struggling with alcohol and Ambien abuse. I was in an unhealthy relationship, and as it was my pattern, I used those vices to run away while standing still. I drank to comfort my sadness, quiet my hateful self-talk, and numb the rage of my discontentment. These tactics never worked. I couldn’t escape any of it, and I was spiraling–Spiraling. It wasn’t long before I was being hospitalized for bouts of pancreatitis. One evening I was lying in the emergency room, behind a soft gray curtain, tears falling away from my eyes and getting caught in the folds of my ears while the nurse tried to draw blood from my dehydrated body, for the seventh time. Despondent, and in pain, I turned to my partner, and he was looking at his phone, smiling. I looked back up at the ceiling, and wondered if I would ever be free—whole.
Exhausted, I closed my eyes. Physically and spiritually, I kept regurgitating my own trauma, and then bottle-feeding it whiskey. I had been conditioned—as a child addict—to hold my breath when experiencing trauma, to get faded and hope it would all go away, but it never did. The shadows only grew, and I found myself running from hard place to hard place with nowhere to rest. My trauma and addiction had grown up together, deviant twins, one feeding the insanity of the other. Like “Pig-Pen,” I was perpetually kicking up dust, obstructing my own vision, making my existence more problematic than it had to be. I had been holding my breath for years, always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It was December of 2017, and somehow I was thriving as a pastor. And then, while a provisional elder in the United Methodist ordination process, I got a DUI. I was devastated. I was afraid, and ashamed, but within days I was no longer spiraling. Hard times have a unique way of centering us, if we let them. That DUI forced my recovery, but it would be my community that saved my life. Within the year I walked away from that toxic relationship, and the monochromatic world of despair I lived in started to flood with a vibrancy of colors I never could’ve imagined. The lives of the people around me, the ones I had been appointed to serve, came rushing in with a clarity that both startled and delighted me. I was alive, standing in the middle of a community of third-agers: accomplished, wise, parents, grandparents, educators, authors, librarians, veterans, scholars, thespians, married, single and cheeky, nurses, and widows, widowers, and volunteers. In the soft dimming of their eyes, I saw a thousand lifetimes, and through their wisdom I held a thousand books. I witnessed the joyful intensity of truly living life, and the complexity of aging, grief, and death. Walking with them as they lived, and grieved, taught me that there is no use in ignoring the hard parts.
My community of third-agers taught me that I couldn’t truly live, and commit myself to the slow death of addiction. I learned that I couldn’t hike the Sangre de Cristo mountains with a hangover, and expect to reach their summits. I watched them as their parents passed away, their siblings, and life-long friends. I walked with them as they buried children and spouses, amazed by their resilience. I remember a Saturday dinner date with the Bishops. While we were waiting for the pot roast to rest, Phyllis, our church pianist, was looking at an obituary. She looked up at me, “Pastor Vette, I’ve lost three childhood friends in the last two months. One I just talked to a week ago.” As she looked away, I asked her, “Phyllis, how do you do it? How do you continue to live with so much pain, and grief?” Nodding her head, she said, “You just do it. I’ve buried both my parents, and a brother. It wasn’t easy. None of it’s easy. But ya know, death is a reality and life is hard sometimes. You just keep getting up, remembering the wonder of it all, and you face what you have to face. I cry, and my heart aches sometimes. But I can’t stay there, none of us can, that’s not what life’s about. You feel what you feel and then you get up and live. That’s it.” Yeah, I thought. “That’s it.” It sounded so simple.
In that beautiful, small mountain town I was learning that you should never live waiting for the other shoe to drop. You just find the courage to put the damn shoe on, walk around in it and prepare, as much as you can, for the hard times that inevitability come to us all. You live, love, dance, and sing with all the range you can muster, knowing that each song could be the beginning of some lamentation. It’s a painfully beautiful cycle. We cannot know love and escape grief, and we cannot know fullness if we’ve not heard the reverberating echo of emptiness. I became intentional about sitting in the places I feared with a sober mind and an open heart. I talked to my trauma, and rather than being cruel, it whispered to me of my own strength. I had pillow talk with my loneliness, and found I was my own best lover. I had tea with death, and learned that it is a natural conclusion, and beautiful transition into other sacred dimensions. I visited the graveyard and found that there is peace in the mystery of it all, if I intentionally sought it. In 2020 I left that beautiful mountain town, and I walked away with both shoes on.
Rev. Yevette Christy, pastor of Community United Methodist Church, addressed the Black Lives Matter marchers last Saturday at the conclusion of the march, in the west parking lot of Custer County Schools. Pastor Vette’s remarks follow:
Good Morning, I’m so grateful that you showed up today, each of you. I want you to know that in showing up to march, to protest, we have taken the first step towards acknowledging the sins of our nation, the abuse and misuse of brown bodies, the cultural trauma and residual impact that we are continually witnessing, whether it’s a white woman in the park or a white officer with his knee on a black man’s neck. It is time to stop saying “there is no problem.”
We are here today to declare that we are committed to undoing our national, historical narrative of dissonance, hatred and violence. We are here to ask, to consider, “How can we heal? How can you, my white brothers, and sisters, acknowledge that being white in America has advantages and being black in America has its disadvantages, and begin doing the work of justice and advocacy?”
My friends we have been in a civil war for over 400 years and today we are crying out, “No more. No more violence, no more death, no more fear, no more hate. We will do the work of dismantling the lies. We will do the work of tearing down antiquated systems that serve only to divide us, to keep us squabbling among ourselves while the powers that be continually map out battle fields that never truly existed. Stop fighting for a minute and look up, you’ll see we are battling within an illusion of hate, of superiority and inferiority that doesn’t belong to us. This is a difficult work, a complex work, but today we have been called, today is the day of reckoning.
Today, we stand here, prepared to acknowledge that black people are dying violent deaths at the hand of law enforcement officers gone rogue. Today, we stand here, prepared to acknowledge that black people endure a level of psychological warfare, racism that you in your whiteness cannot understand. But, that doesn’t excuse you from trying.
Today, it is time for this nation to stop criminalizing Black bodies, like Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Sandra Bland. It is time to set a national agenda around addressing the state sanctioned violence against Black life, vitality, and culture. “Black Lives Matter!” The citizens of this nation cannot be more outraged about the “lawlessness” of property damage than the black men and women who have been struck down, unarmed, by fatal force. This cannot be tolerated in 2020! This nation, the media and governing bodies, seems to support this idea of patriotism that excludes and minimizes the sacrifices of brown and black bodies, while idealizing an anthem, and a flag over and against the real pursuit of liberty and justice for all!
So, do the symbols mean anything if we aren’t living into what they represent? Does this nation not value the virtue of integrity? Does this nation not value being whole and undivided? Are we okay with just spouting iconic messages with no desire to live into them?
I don’t ask these hard questions in order to be divisive, to be mean; I ask them because until we call it, until we admit it, until we say it out loud, then there can be no recovery, no healing. When we are honest, then we can do the work of addressing who we are, individually, communally, and nationally. If we are sincere, if we are deliberate, the veils that cover our hearts and the scales that dim our sight can be systematically deconstructed. This is why we are here today, to begin the work of confession, repentance, and healing.
To be an ally you must know the story, you must study the history, you must know the cases, and then you can discern the lies and actively engage your black and brown brothers and sisters with understanding, and empathy. So, let’s stop being immature, and being offended by someone else saying that their life matters when we see, with out own eyes, Black people being killed without justification, and ultimately without justice.
We must stop ignoring racism in American, we must stop being selfish, only looking at current events from our side of the fence. Come over here, where I am.
Let’s do the work, stop being lazy, seeing the world, and each other, from lenses we did not craft, nor have the courage to challenge. We have accepted a narrative of fear, distrust, and hate. It’s time to reject it and rebuild, rebuild with love, a love that goes beyond sweet sentiments and calls us into radical change. Let us rebuild with honesty, moral and ethical accountability, and advocacy. Not an emotional advocacy that comes and goes with the most recent tragedy, but advocacy that keeps the conversation going, and the unifying work of equity as a constant priority.
We are not enemies.
We are allies.
Come over here, where I am; let’s do the work of understanding our collective trauma and aggressively pursue a way that leads to peace and justice for all.
This morning, after grieving through a five-year journey with androgenic alopecia, I’m going to get my little afro cut off, well, what’s left of it. Two weeks ago, I completed my second round of follicle transplants, in which the surgeon shaves off all the hair on the back of the head to harvest follicles to place where I’m balding in the front. Ugh. Although my stomach is churning with anxiety, I’m excited because the surgical process is over, and I know from here my hair will come into its own. Within myself I’m okay with my journey, but there’s this nagging that keeps poking at my “okay-ness” it’s this thing within me that dreads my hair process being witnessed, ridiculed, and judged. Here’s an example. Several weeks ago, I was with some people I care about. I don’t love them. I don’t hate them, but I care about the quality of their existence. It was my fifty-first birthday, and I was speaking to a room of women who are in the same recovery home where I had worked on my own addiction many years ago. It was a full-circle moment. I was in my element, encouraging women just like me that change is possible, always possible.
I had just finished speaking when one of the people who I care about was sitting behind me, laughing, and showing their phone to other people standing in our proximity, but refused to show me. After everyone’s laughter trailed off this person turned their phone towards me and it was a picture of Gary Coleman, the deceased actor known for “What you talkin’ bout Willis,” from the 70’s show “Diff’rent Strokes,” and his little afro. I grinned, tried to laugh it off, but deep down I was hurt, and I was angry at myself for being hurt. I thought I had matured enough to know that words and actions generated out of ignorance should never penetrate my heart. I guess I hadn’t matured enough. I stood there, looking at them. Why do people, adults, think it’s okay to say anything unkind about another person’s appearance or personhood? Do people ever reflect on all the ways they feel inadequate, ugly, or awkward and allow those feelings to control their impulse to ridicule others? In this case, I suppose not. Looking at everyone I wondered if they knew what laughing at my little afro really meant. As it is for so many people, a part of my identity is rooted in my body, my brown skin, and my hair, which has constantly been in a wrestling match with the general consensus of what beauty is.
I realize what has been poking at my “okay-ness,” is the disparity I’m feeling between the ideal construct of beauty, and my little afro. Not only do I have nappy hair, but after this appointment with the barber, I will have no hair. It seems, in this moment, that the construct of beauty is winning this match. But it won’t be for long. The only way to move forward is to deconstruct that standard of beauty I have internalized and reconstruct my own, using my body, my skin, and my hair, and this haircut is part of that work.
A few hours later….
I did it! Even after being made fun of with my little afro, I valiantly faced my insecurities. I sat in that barber’s chair and watched what little hair I had fall to the ground. I dared to place myself in even more danger of ridicule for the sake of personal growth. My goal is to evolve past trying to fit in the boxes we human’s create, and squeeze my unsqeeuzable identity into spaces where I don’t fit. I suppose the only way to deconstruct the general consensus of beauty is to develop my own sense of beauty with what I’ve been given. There is no other way that I can experience this life, tactically, outside of the body, the skin, and the hair I’ve been given, and so I declare them beautiful. Nappy hair, or no hair I am my own standard of beauty and that is more than enough.
As it was for so many of us on inauguration day I was sitting in front of a screen, with silent tears, watching history unfold, change becoming more than a promise but a moment I could witness, feel, and testify to in my spirit and through my Black flesh. I was intentional about releasing the constant tension I live with as a Black woman and mother because I needed each diplomatic exchange to recharge my despairing sensibilities. There I was, off balance as a Black citizen of this nation, and still spinning from the last four years while trying to find my equilibrium in a moment that has meant so little for Black folk since its inception. But I did it. I relaxed and took in each powerful moment that treaded on and stood over every lie our nation has ever taught us, every lie we’ve consumed. A moment that allowed us to exhale, to celebrate and to release the communal anxiety over the mess we had gotten ourselves into. Yes, Donald Trump was our mess, but dear white friends, he was your son. A White, heterosexual, hypersexual male whose God was his privilege, power, and property. We, as a nation, gave birth to Trumpism. He was not some anomaly. He didn’t generate a new fear, he amplified our fears through the position of power we elected him to. He didn’t conjure up ignorance, hatred, and exceptionalism, he merely assembled what was already in us. He was the master’s successor, but he was your son. And yet, as Vice President Kamala Harris was sworn into office with the Bible of Thurgood Marshall, I saw another America, and for once, in that sacred transfer of power the dream of equality felt real, especially for women of color. Her victory felt like our victory, my victory. But then, and not so subtly, a dreadful knowing arose in me, deep, in my belly.
I settled away from the light of the screen, and an all too familiar shade covered my internal space. As our souls were taking in the beautiful and poignant moments of the inauguration I was reminded not to stay too long or to take in too many delicacies. Indeed, a new day was dawning, there had been a changing of the guard, but there was still civil unrest as evidenced so clearly by everything we’d seen in the last four years culminating on January 6, 2021 when domestic terrorists stormed our nation’s capitol, and we watched. The moment passed, President Joe Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris had been sworn in, and then, as I sat in the afterglow of having bedded down with hope, my seventeen-year-old son said, “Mom, I’m gonna go for a run,” I looked out the window, the sun was going down and we live in an area where Black men shouldn’t be running, at all. and I immediately took off my party dress, threw down my Kleenex, and returned to my post as a Black woman, a Black mother, because although those moments were beautiful and inspiring, we had just acquitted the officers who killed Breonna Taylor. As I held the door for my son to go for his run, I took a deep breath and remembered the words of Ms. Amanda Gorman…
Intelligent. Articulate. Beautiful, and poised in her Sunny Prada, with a caged bird ring on her right middle finger,[1]Ms. Gorman made my weary heart sing. As is the case those that are oppressed often sing with the greatest range, and speak with an unwavering clarity and power. “The Hill We Climb,” was a chalice of grace offered to a nation of brutes. I wanted to capture her words, steal them from the wind so that those who would not value her hope or the painful awareness it took to breath them could not find them to mock their inspiration. I didn’t want to share her. I didn’t want to share my strong Black sister. Why should she be pressed to create a fire from their dung, and then use it to inspire this nation, this White nation who capitalizes on our varying identities, but will not recognize or honor any of them? How is it that Black women, just like Ms. Gorman, can be murdered without any court rendering justice, but on today White people could stand so gleefully in Ms. Gorman’s hope, praise her eloquence, while complicit in the bloody realities that gave rise to her soul-stirring power? I envisioned the barrier between her, and the 15,000 members of the United States National Guard being cast down and how quickly she could become another tragic statistic on a timeline of Black people killed for no fuckin’ reason. I wanted, just for a moment, to keep her, all of her, from making this nation shine. I wanted to knock the chalice from her hand and fill myself, my people with the grace we would need to run on after this moment passed and the shadows returned.
Of course, she is her own person. I shouldn’t talk of holding her words or wanting to protect her personhood. She is not property, but for me, in those moments she was a child of my kin, a thread in the fabric of my Black family, and for a moment I didn’t want anyone else to feel the power of her grace, they didn’t deserve it. They didn’t deserve her.
I thought, for a moment, that maybe she was, “signifying,” you know, using appropriate language for a global message, inclusive language so the massa’ wouldn’t understand she was only talking to Black people. But I knew she wasn’t, not entirely. Because she couldn’t. Because hope is not hope if its fractured, hope cannot be handed out in bits and pieces, it must be whole to be reciprocated. Yes, Ms. Gorman was recognizing injustice, the ongoing struggle to lift the shade but she was declaring the truth, a hopeful truth, a beautiful truth, an inclusive truth that was for anyone who wanted to draw near in peace to climb the hill together. Even after all we’ve endured this young woman said, “We wish harm to none, but harmony for all.” Even after all the blood that has filled the soil of this land, this young woman courageously smiled at the nation that has betrayed her kin. Even after systems of justice continue to render un-just verdicts, she still offered a unifying voice of reconciliation and possibility.
In 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said he saw the mountain top, and in this hour Ms. Amanda Gorman is seeing the hills we climb. It would seem we’ve taken several steps back, and yet, in the face of American elitism, White supremacy, and exceptionalism, with a tragic legacy of so many who’ve been held in silence, it was Amanda Gorman, a young Black woman, who didn’t mind starting the climb, again, and yes, as always the invitation is open to all…and all means all…
[1]https://fashionista.com/2021/01/amanda-gorman-inauguration-day-outfit