Beyond Belief (10 page)
Authors: Cami Ostman
I welcomed her, and once I closed the door, we had our voices again. Janice’s singing was clear and fine. We sat and sang in three-part harmony, all of us cross-legged on an open bedroll. Ana led on guitar with me leaning toward her, our eyes locking in the tune.
T
HE NEXT MORNING
I woke early but skipped the morning services. Ana was still sleeping. Near the coffee urn I met Seema, the Hassidic woman with the blonde wig I’d noticed at the prayer services. “What’s your name?” she asked. She sounded like an official greeter.
“Lisa,” I said.
“And what’s your Hebrew name?”
I had recently asked my mother that question, because it was a blank to be filled out on the registration form for this weekend program. My mother had rolled her eyes. “We’re Americans,” she said, with all the vehemence of a first-generation American. It seemed Hebrew names from the Old Country didn’t fit that view. But I managed to get the story out of her: how for social reasons she had wanted my name announced from the pulpit at the temple after I was born, how she’d been told by the temple secretary that, in order to do that, I had to have a Hebrew name. “So the rabbi just gave you one,” she said. “We were never going to use it, anyway, so it didn’t matter what it was.”
“And?”
“It’s Leah.” She said the name with obvious distaste.
“Lay-ah?” I said.
“That’s how the rabbi pronounced it.”
“It’s Leah,” I told Seema, proud that I knew the pronunciation. “Why?”
“That,” Seema said, “is the name of your Jewish soul.” She turned then to the table next to the coffee urn, put a blueberry Danish on a paper plate, and offered it to me, touching my shoulder with the other hand, an intimate gesture, as if she’d known me for years. “Have something to eat?” she said.
I accepted the plate as if it were an invitation into an elite society, an exclusive club. How could I not step in? I had a moment of guilt about my non-Jewish friends, how they would be excluded here without a Hebrew name and Jewish pedigree to give them entry, but still I nibbled the sweet dough, and before we parted I had accepted Seema’s offer to teach me more. She would call, and I could come to her home to spend a Sabbath.
It was like this: Seema smiled at me, touched my shoulder. Said I belonged. In that moment, with the touch of her warm hand, my few conscious objections seemed to fade into irrelevance, as if her warmth, her smile, her touch dream-launched me into weightless flight that would float me right into Hassidic arms.
M
y mother’s devotion to her faith had taught me to chase after God—from the small Catholic churches in Philadelphia, where I was born, to the cathedrals of New York City. We lived in many places when I was a kid: shelters for homeless families and battered women and the homes of distant relatives or friends, not landing in our own apartment until I was thirteen. But no matter where we lived, Mom made sure we were always within walking distance of a Catholic church.
Maggie, the mother of five children (of which I was the last), was a black and Cherokee Indian woman with high cheekbones and reddish-brown skin. She had been raised in a traditional Southern family as an orphan, since her own single mother had died when she was young. In 1976, her youngest boy, Jose, had been struck and killed by a bus when he was twelve years old. I was born in January 1978.
I was his namesake. “A miracle,” she said often. “A gift from God.”
Her God, though, was white, like the majority of congregants in the churches we attended. At home, she collected pictures of a pale-skinned Jesus—his Sacred Heart beaming red and gold—and his mother, the Virgin Mary. Her collection of religious artifacts from items she’d purchased in the St. Patrick’s Cathedral gift shop included calendars bearing smudges of her maroon lipstick where she kissed Jesus’s likeness.
Maggie wore a safety pin of about a dozen small medals bearing the figures of saints that she affixed to her bra each morning. For years we woke early to attend 7:30
AM
mass. Witnessing her fervency, coupled with the realities of our challenging life, complicated my own relationship with God.
I loved God the way I loved Maggie—deeply, but with skepticism.
Her distant God had given us to each other, I reasoned. And our complex mother-daughter relationship—shaped by her borderline personality and bipolar disorder—mirrored my relationship with Him.
I tried to make sense of Maggie singing His praises from the front row of cathedrals from state to state as we went hungry and usually asked priests or rectors for subway tokens or dinner money. I was acutely aware that we were poor black women in a world that favored a white male God and white skin.
How could we possibly be made in a white God’s image?
I wondered. Were we really like the cursed children of Cain, destined to be slaves because God made it so? And if He really loved us, how were we, His children, allowed to suffer so much?
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.
T
HE
N
ATION OF
I
SLAM
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.
L
IFE IN
N
EW
Y
ORK
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.”