Kneeling, I unroll a sheet of brown wrapping paper on the floor and weight the corners down with a couple of Bibles. With a pencil, I sketch out the words “Black Lives Matter” across the top in big block letters. Then I start googling.
Two weeks ago Michael Brown was shot by the police on a hot August day in Ferguson, Missouri. I watched an interview with his mother and couldn’t bear it. That Sunday after Dinner Church, our little congregation filed out onto the sidewalk in front of 304 Bond Street holding lit candles and signs for Michael Brown. Singing, we walked in procession up to Smith Street, met by the stares of diners at sidewalk cafés, forks suspended mid-bite. Then we curled around the corner past the Gowanus Houses. One resident lifted his fist in solidarity as he crossed the street. Others ignored us.
Our small act of remembrance didn’t feel like much in the face of an overwhelming problem. A dozen of us, walking along, singing. But I needed to do something. I needed to say no with my body, and I guessed that my congregants needed it too. For four weeks, after Sunday night Dinner Church, we sang and walked, knowing that more work was coming.
I want to connect young Michael’s death to our own city’s legacy of police violence—to show that this is a systemic problem, not an isolated incident. So, my computer in my lap, I research Black and brown people in New York City killed by the police. It’s a harrowing exercise. Some names I recognize. I write down “Amadou Diallo,” and his age, twenty-three, shot in 1999, on my length of brown paper. I was in college that year and only vaguely aware of his story. I read about the forty-one shots fired and the nineteen that hit. About the square wallet Diallo took from his pocket the police assumed (or later claimed they thought) was a gun. One of the officers involved, Kenneth Boss, had shot and killed an unarmed Black man two years earlier. But thirteen years after Diallo died, the same officer earned his firearms rights back. In 2015, he was granted a promotion.
I inscribe “Ramarley Graham” on the brown paper; he was the eighteen-year-old whom police sighted leaving a bodega in the Bronx in 2012, adjusting the waistband of his pants. Later, after they followed him home (they said he ran, but video footage shows him walking), Graham’s grandmother let the cops right into the apartment when they knocked on the door. They tore through the place and found Graham in the bathroom. There, Officer Richard Haste shot him once in the chest and killed him. They later said he was trying to flush a bag of marijuana down the toilet.
I write down the name of Kimani Gray, who was only sixteen. I write down the name of Sean Bell, killed with fifty shots fired at him and his friends at his bachelor party. He was supposed to get married the next day.
I write down every name in pencil on my sheet of brown paper, the corners fighting to curl up. One of the names is Nicholas. A boy who was only thirteen when he was shot by police in 1994, I read. And then I frown. Nicholas Naquan Heyward, Jr., was killed in the Gowanus Houses, just yards away from where I sit in my apartment.
I remember a mural I’ve seen on a wall, somewhere in the neighborhood. A smiling young boy beams out at the viewer, wearing a graduation cap. Doves hover on either side of him, and he holds a scroll: In Loving Memory.
When I type Nicholas’s name into the search field, the site for a memorial foundation pops up. There in the center of the front page is Nicholas, smiling brightly in a red graduation gown and tie, proudly holding his certificate of graduation from junior high, this look in his eyes that says, “I did it.”
Nicholas, I read, was playing with a friend in the stairwell of the Gowanus Houses. The two were playing cops and robbers with an orange-capped toy gun when a cop came across him there and lifted his gun—a real one. Nicholas’s friends reported that the child raised his hands. “We were only playing,” they heard him call out. The police officer, Brian George, shot him in the stomach. Taken to a Manhattan hospital rather than a closer one in Brooklyn, Nicholas died eight hours later.
I write Nicholas’s name on my sign. His age, thirteen. The year, 1994. I am careful to space the letters evenly. The sign begins to feel like a prayer, every name inscribed in pencil and then carefully traced again in black marker. I finish tracing the last date and then sit down in an armchair and start to cry.
The next day, Julia and I hang the sign on the inside of St. Lydia’s storefront window.
“I hope no one throws a brick at it,” I tell her.
It feels presumptuous to place these names in our window. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” feels uncomfortable on my lips, not because I don’t believe it to be true, but because I know how terribly far I am from my life not mattering. My life has always mattered: to my teachers, my principal, to the cop who smiled at me as I jaywalked across the street with friends. I could have been holding a real gun, and he would have coaxed it out of my hands.
Sitting at a desk at St. Lydia’s, I watch passersby slow down to read the sign. Some of them pause their conversations mid-stride, while others stop to read carefully. One afternoon, a family hovers there for more than the usual few moments. I pop my head outside, and they say, “Nicholas Naquan. We knew him. We remember him.”
I don’t remember Nicholas. But the people who do—who read his name at the window—seem to walk away just a tiny bit lighter. Maybe it feels good to know that someone else is trying to remember too. His community made a mural to remember him, and someone who’s not part of his community, but who cares, took a permanent marker and wrote down his name, and hung it in the window.
The first time I preach about race at St. Lydia’s, I tell a story from third grade, when my father came to visit my classroom. My teacher, a plump, smiling white woman who favored lacy blouses and calf-length floral skirts, stood with her back to us, writing up multiplication tables on the blackboard. She led us through them one by one, calling on students for the answers.
Some, like me, sat with our hands raised high, confident that two times two equaled four. Others slumped at their desks with their heads propped up on a fist. She called on them too. But my dad noticed that she never called on the Black students, who made up a third of our class. With each equation, kids’ hands would shoot up in the air, but my teacher would point to only me or Shawn or one of the Jennifers. It wasn’t that the Black students received no attention at all—she’d chastise them to sit up straighter and stop fidgeting. I don’t remember at what point in the year they stopped raising their hands, but I’m sure it didn’t take long.
By the time I reached sixth grade, I looked around my honors English class and wondered why, when so many Black kids attended our school, there were only two in my honors classes. One of them was Lamar Franklin. With round reading glasses, a bright smile, and an endearing gap between his front teeth, he was a charming kid, well liked by everyone. Lamar persevered through teachers who wouldn’t call on him and principals who spoke to him only to tell him to pull up his pants. But many others didn’t. My public school was enacting the school-to-prison pipeline. I saw it play out right in front of me, but never knew it had a name.
I tell the congregation this story.
“What kinds of lessons do you think I learned?” I ask them. What assumptions did I inherit about who was smart and who wasn’t, who was good and who wasn’t, who was of value and who wasn’t?
All those lessons, never explicitly taught but implicitly enforced, were engraved in my subconscious. Sitting at my desk with my pencil box and blue-lined paper in front of me, I learned an unspoken curriculum. I memorized the order of the planets and the life cycle of the butterfly that year, and soaked up the quotidian qualities of ordinary, small-town, run-of-the-mill racism.
I am shaking as I speak.
The Lydians sit, nodding and wide eyed. Perhaps they are sifting through stories of their own—remembering the advantages or disadvantages they received.
After church, I go home and basically curl into a ball, feeling vulnerable and exposed. Words and I have never exactly gotten along. When I was a kid, talking to grown-ups or teachers, my words always seemed to get tangled up. I felt as if I was fighting a battle against chaos, trying to get them to line up the same way, always ending up tripping over them and blushing in class.
When I reached divinity school, words had me convinced I could never be a pastor. I showed no promise in public speaking; my professor remarked in my evaluation that I seemed “constantly surprised to find myself preaching.” Things did not improve as St. Lydia’s was getting started. Each Sunday night those first few years I would offer my sermon, rigidly reading from the pages I had written, never improvising.
Standing up to preach has meant acquainting myself with a certain feeling of dread. Now, wading into preaching about racial injustice means acquainting myself with the suffering of the world and allowing it to do its work on me. My words aren’t always graceful or eloquent. They lack the practiced flourishes of my divinity school colleagues. Instead, I figure the best thing I can do is just point to what I see, and hope others see it too. Just uncover the truth we’ve all been avoiding.
I have learned to wrestle with words. Some things are too important not to name.
A month later, I attend a community meeting about rezoning in our neighborhood. I notice that while the public housing residents, almost all of darker skin, are given a chance to speak at the microphone, their comments never seem to catch hold. The conversation just slides back to the concerns of the wealthier, whiter neighbors, armed with Ivy League vocabularies and a sheen of entitlement. I watch what amounts to a small uprising of housing residents who live in the flood zone of the canal, complaining that after a storm their tap water turns brown. Their council member thanks them for their comments and moves on.
“How do you think this process is going?” I ask him after the meeting. I’m wearing my clergy collar, and it lends me a kind of moral authority.
“I’m very pleased,” he says. “There’s always a diversity of opinion, but we’re moving forward together.”
“These people don’t feel heard,” I tell him.
That same summer, I watch grainy cellphone footage of a two-hundred-pound cop throwing a fifteen-year-old Black girl to the ground and kneeling on top of her. Her name is Dajerria Becton, and this video of her assault at a Texas pool party has gone viral. The officer, Eric Casebolt, is twice her size and armed with a nightstick and a gun. Her body, lanky and insubstantial, clothed only in a bikini, seems so slight and exposed under his weight. He sits down hard on her back and shoves her face into the ground with his hand, shouting, “On your face, on your face.”
It is difficult to imagine that this slip of a girl could possibly be a threat. All she can say is “Call my mama,” over and over again.
The video of Dajerria Becton is not the only grainy cellphone footage we see in that season. I listen to the cries of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, placed in the back of a van requesting medical aid he never receives. Then he dies. In June, Dylann Roof walks into a church in Charleston and sits with the Rev. Clementa Pinckney as he leads Wednesday night Bible study.
Roof waits for them to begin praying before opening fire. In my third-grade classroom, the little girl next to me holds her hand as high as mine, smiles, and waits to hear her name. I have the answer, she’s thinking, but no one calls on her. “I can’t breathe,” he’s saying, but no one listens. “Don’t shoot,” he tells them, and holds up his hands: they are empty.
Church folk often say that God “uses your weakness, not your strength.” I never really understood that idea. It doesn’t seem like an effective strategy.
But I learn the hard way that those church folk are on the mark. Each time I stand up to preach on race, I am flooded with a spectrum of unpleasant emotions, from low-grade dread to full-fledged terror, a tangled disaster of raw nerves and vulnerability. My biggest fear is that I will fail to get this right, and let down the few Black folks who are part of our congregation.
“Well, she tried,” I imagine them saying to themselves after service, “but she really doesn’t get it.” Shame and humiliation are high on the list of how this can all pan out. Addressing racism in my preaching asks me to lay down the notion that I am some kind of an expert.
“Learning in public,” Jake says to me over glasses of iced tea in a corner café in Brooklyn. Ever the big brother to me, Jake has been a conversation partner as the church has embarked on racial justice work. “You’re not going to get it all right. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. The congregation’s going to watch you learn. And they’ll learn too.”
Walking home, I turn over his words. If the biggest thing I have to risk is being embarrassed, I need to get over it, because at risk for Black folks are their lives. I really don’t want to get this wrong. Not because I need to be perfect, but because I’m a liability.1 White folks trying to do justice work tend to be filled with need—to be one of the “good ones,” to be praised by the people we say we’re showing up for, to take the lead when we should be following. It’s not just annoying, it’s damaging. And I don’t want to do damage.
There is this uneasy feeling that I can so easily drift away: recede into the soft cavern of safety that is available to me at any time. I can step into the fight for justice, but just as easily step out, while the people across the street have no such option. I will never experience their particular set of harsh realities.
My granddad didn’t graduate from high school, but he worked his way to the engineering department at Memphis Light, Gas and Water—a position unavailable to his Black compatriots. The red lines drawn on city maps kept him in, not out,2 so with his higher earnings, he was able to buy a house that gained value. When my father was born, my granddad could count on him attending decent (fully segregated) public schools. Their family was poor, but my father was able to excel and earn a full-ride scholarship to Yale. Only a hint of a southern accent and the lack of cash in his pocket kept him from camouflaging himself alongside the kids from Park Avenue and the legacy students.
The forces that lined up to bring my family from subsistence farming in rural Mississippi to the middle class were myriad. In two generations we accrued education, property, and wealth, never available to the Black kids who grew up in Memphis. And now here I am, always with an exit.
But I want to “dismantle the legacy of my forefathers,” as my friend Lenny, an author and activist, once told me.3 I want to know the stories of my past and our neighborhood. I want to know our neighbors, to see St. Lydia’s become a part of these blocks. After the hurricane, I can’t just stay on my side of the street. It hurts to think of how alone we were.
A flyer changes everything. Just one sheet of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper stapled to a telephone pole.
For years I’ve been steadily trying to build relationships in our neighborhood, but they seem to slip through my fingers like sand. I’ve attended community meetings, asked for one-on-ones with leaders of local organizations. There are emails back and forth, cancellations and rescheduling. One organization is going through a change in executive directors; another’s leaders are all chronically overworked. Some don’t work with religious groups.
The Gowanus Houses seem like an impenetrable fortress. I know there have to be community leaders who live there, but I’m flummoxed when it comes to connecting. I’ve made sheepish phone calls to the Gowanus Houses Residents’ Council and left messages, but never heard back. Phone calls themselves are bad enough—waiting with anxiety for someone to pick up, breathing a sigh of relief when no one does, and then fumbling my way through a message. But I also feel the pressure of being misread: another white girl who thinks she can “make a difference,” dripping with privilege, deigning to stoop for a moment toward a neighborhood she’ll abandon when things got too hard. I’m different from that girl, I think. But then I wonder how.
Then: the flyer. Walking home from St. Lydia’s to eat dinner between meetings, I notice a colorful sheet on a telephone pole. “Gowanus Houses Arts Collective,” it says. Kids can come this summer to learn about photography, make films, mix music. There’s no website, but there is a Facebook page. At home I study the page like a scholar examining ancient runes. Excavating my way through the links, I dig up a video posted on YouTube by a kid who lives in the houses. He’s walking around the neighborhood, talking about growing up there and all the ways it’s changing. I type out a message and hit return. This time, I hear back—from Tracey.
A week later, I’m sitting across from Ms. Tracey Pinkard in the residents’ council meeting room in the basement of the houses. We’re in wheeled chairs situated around a board table. At the back of the room there’s a metal desk scattered with papers. A phone blinks with messages, its spiral cord curled up in knots.
Tracey has a demurring manner and a kind smile, but a sharp, discerning eye. Steady and gracious, she tells me about the arts collective she and Chris (the filmmaker behind the lens of the video I saw) are starting up. I can see she’s assessing my intentions. If people are coming in, she tells me years later, are they saying we need to be fixed or saved?
Tracey leads me down the hall to a room she and Chris have transformed into an art and music studio. Kids’ paintings are pinned up on clotheslines to dry, with their splotches and swipes of primary colors. Yogurt containers are packed with paintbrushes, bristles pointed to the ceiling.
“You may remember in last year’s participatory budget process, the Gowanus Houses won money to reopen our community center,” she tells me. I nod. I had followed the residents’ efforts. The community center had been closed for years—residents made unsanctioned use of it during the hurricane.
“The money still hasn’t been released,” Tracey tells me. “But I want the kids to have a space. So we’re down here for now.” She casts her gaze across the room. Coils of hair falling around her face, she has a broad, smooth forehead and soft eyes. “I don’t want them to lose their faith,” she says.
I invite Tracey to speak at St. Lydia’s. I ask her to tell us stories of the neighborhood she grew up in, and where she sees God at work. She stands under the gaze of attentive Lydians and holds up a picture of her grandmother Ms. Hazel Tyre.
Tracey’s grandmother (or Mrs. Thelma, as many of her neighbors called her) moved into the Gowanus Houses in 1947 and lived there for twenty-one years. She always kept her door open. She knew every kid’s name. She grabbed them by the elbow and asked them how school was going, kept an eye on them.
“I just try to wake up and do God’s will,” Tracey says. “I’m in a unique position because of the way my grandmother raised us.”
Tracey grew up in the houses and moved out, never planning on coming back. But when her grandmother died, the apartment in the Gowanus Houses was open to her. She had her own children now, and a job working with high schoolers at Brooklyn Collaborative school. When she moved back, she felt her grandmother’s presence inviting her to step into her role.
“My neighbors are proud, skillful, and talented people,” she tells us at Dinner Church. “And we are all exposed to repeated trauma. Poor housing conditions, police brutality, gentrification. Because of this, our resiliency coexists with apathy. But take Hurricane Sandy. Our community comes together to make things happen for one another.”
Tracey serves as vice president of the residents’ council and cofounded the Gowanus Houses Arts Collective. She’s always working to connect the houses to resources and bring residents together. She shows up at meetings. All while raising her own children and working at a local school. I see Tracey as an educator and activist, a fighter and a matriarch. I see her as a spiritual guide: someone who sees the truth and lives life from a deep well of down-to-earth integrity. But when I ask Tracey to describe who she is, she says she’s not any of those things. She says, “I’m just…being a vessel. Just someone who really cares.”
Over at the arts collective, a group of Lydian congregants join the residents who volunteer, helping the kids make potato stamps or batik fabric. Charlotte goofs off with the kids, joking around as they dip their stamps in paint, letting them draw a blue stripe down her nose.
Every fall there’s an Open Studios weekend in Gowanus, when working art studios across the neighborhood open their doors to the public. The event draws visitors from all around the city, and Tracey and Chris and I start thinking it would be incredible for the kids from the arts collective to show their work. We ask if we can host a community exhibit—photographs of the neighborhood by the kids who live here, taken as part of a class Chris ran in the spring. We call it Perspectives: Youth Reflections of Gowanus.
Chris picks out the best photographs, and I bike to IKEA and return with fourteen white frames stuffed in my saddlebags. A congregant who’s a curator gets everything hung on the walls in our narrow storefront. Each photographer writes a short statement about their work.
On the day of the show, a cadre of grandmas arrive, pulling grocery carts packed with big tin trays of rice and beans and chicken wings and jugs of juice. They sit at our tables fanning themselves as visitors start to trickle through the doors. Tracey, I find out later, called just about everyone she knows in the houses.
“You have to come and see the kids’ work,” she told them. “It’s just down Bond Street.”
Parents from the houses poke their heads in tentatively.
“This is the right place!” I tell them, ushering them inside. They look around the room to find their kid’s name, and beam at the photograph on the wall.
“Our Jerome, he took this!” a father says proudly.
Weaving around the grown-ups are the artists themselves. Eight or nine or twelve years old, they’re busy handing out flyers and tying balloons outside to show where the exhibit is.
One of the younger girls, Sydney, took a photograph of her friend on a swing in motion. “I started by trying to capture my friend on the swing,” she wrote in her artist statement, “but she was swinging too high and fast and that’s when I noticed the girl waiting in the middle of all this movement. I know that feeling of having to be still when you don’t want to be.”
Sydney stands in front of her piece, chest puffed out and beaming, talking to an art student about her photograph. He asks her some questions about the lens she used and smiles at her answer. I meet a batch of new people: a sculptor with red-framed glasses whose studio is a few blocks over, a family who just moved into a brownstone down the block, a pair of community organizers, and a filmmaker. Some of them have lived here for years and didn’t know the Gowanus Houses existed.
One photograph, by fourteen-year-old Ethan, gives me a pang to look at. It shows barbed wire in the foreground, brick towers out of focus in the background.
“I live on the thirteenth floor in the middle of the Gowanus Houses,” he writes. “When I’m there I’m always surrounded by larger buildings and don’t think of it as part of a larger neighborhood. The barbed wire feels to me like how Gowanus is separated from Carroll Gardens. It’s sharp, almost cut off, despite the fact that it’s just a short walk from here.”
Outside the windows, Ula’s Access-A-Ride is just pulling up. I smile to myself. In the early years, Ula drove me to distraction with her sharp jabs and sarcastic comments. But we’ve settled into a begrudging regard for one another. She often gives me a hard time, asking me obscure academic questions she must know I won’t be able to answer.
“I thought you’d know your Christian history better after all that education,” she gibes.
I roll my eyes at her. “Ula, I didn’t do a PhD on the Reformation, okay? Let me research it and get back to you.”
Over at the tables, the grandmothers offer a heaping plate of chicken wings to the sculptor from the other side of the canal. She sits down next to them to trade stories about the neighborhood back in the seventies. “Nope, you didn’t cross Court Street,” I hear one of them saying. “Not if you didn’t want to pay for it,” and they all crow with laughter. A couple Lydians are learning the names of the young photographer’s family who just arrived, smiling and showing them the way over to their child’s photo. Across the room, Sydney gives a balloon to a toddler in a stroller who moments ago was wailing. “Do you like orange, or white?” she asks. The toddler points mutely to orange and reaches out to clutch the curled ribbon with her chubby hand, letting loose a delighted laugh.
I feel sure my heart is going to brim over. Neighbors are meeting neighbors they might never have thought to talk to. We’re all around one table, scooping up rice and beans and sipping Capri Suns. The kingdom of heaven, I keep thinking. At least, for just this moment, we’re all around one table.
Tracey tells me that Mr. Heyward holds a Day of Remembrance for his son every August. She says I should go. And so, on a broiling summer Saturday, I don a clergy collar and a sleeveless shirt and walk half a block to the park that bears Nicholas’s name. The older kids are on the basketball court, the younger kids shouting from the sidelines or chasing each other across the park, faces sticky, smeared with red Popsicle. I’m not sure what to do with myself. I don’t see Tracey or anyone else I’ve met at community meetings. I settle on an awkward white-lady-lurking posture, trying to smile in a friendly but not invasive way.
Mr. Heyward is talking to the press over near Wyckoff Street. Soon he moves toward a podium and a press conference begins. He recounts the story of what happened to his son, holding up a plastic toy gun with an orange cap. A tall, slight man in a bright polo shirt and a baseball cap, he’s been retelling this story since the nineties, seeking justice for the child he lost.
Halfway through the speech, his voice cracks and he places a hand over his eyes. His wife rests a hand on his shoulder and we all stand quietly, shifting our weight from foot to foot and fanning ourselves with our programs as he gathers the resolve to continue.
“Take your time,” someone calls out.
Clustered around Mr. Heyward are several other families whose children or relatives were killed by police. The sister of Akai Gurley, shot in the Pink Houses in East New York, is there to speak. The father of a little girl named Briana Ojeda says a few words as well. She died in the car as her mother tried to race her to the hospital during an asthma attack, when a cop pulled her over and started writing her a ticket. “She needs CPR,” her mother was screaming. “Do you know CPR?” The officer refused to call an ambulance as he wrote her a summons.
I realize that I’ve seen Briana’s face before, and a chill passes through me. On my walk to the subway, there’s a house I’ve always wondered about. Candles in glass holders are perennially lit in the front garden; there’s a tree decorated with ornaments that say “angel”; the front door is adorned with a picture of a little girl. Now I know why. Her parents have been keeping vigil since 2010. Our neighborhood is dense with stories like these.
After the press conference I introduce myself to Mr. Heyward.
“I’m a pastor of a church just down on Bond Street,” I tell him.
“Oh, that’s nice, that’s nice,” he says to me vaguely, shaking my hand, before being pulled away by a reporter who wants a quote. I sense a pall of exhaustion hanging around him. His skin is drawn, his eyes weary. He’s been doing this work for two decades.
At Dinner Church the next day, I preach about young Nicholas and his activist father. I tell the Lydians the story of how Nicholas died, and the room grows quiet. Wendy, her offering of home-baked dark chocolate–macadamia nut bars sitting on the counter, is here with Peter. As she listens to the story about Nicholas, she pulls him closer, wrapping her arms around him protectively, and setting her chin on top of his red hair. I tell the congregation about the work Mr. Heyward is doing to try to get his son’s case reopened. Nicholas would have been our neighbor, were he still alive. His father is our neighbor. He lives just four blocks away, but it’s like we’re in different cities. Our kids are safe. His aren’t.
At least now, we know his story.
These relationships with our neighbors took years to form. Even before we arrived at Bond Street, I taught congregants how to do one-on-ones with community leaders. We held a Season of Listening each spring and invited longtime residents to come and preach. We heard from Raymond, who came of age in the Gowanus Houses in the seventies, and fell in love with a Puerto Rican woman from the other side of the neighborhood. And we heard from Neil, whose parents and grandparents had all been baptized, married, and buried in St. Agnes Church on the corner. He painted a picture of life in the close-knit Irish Catholic community he grew up in.
These connections were good. We were meeting people and listening to the stories they shared with us, learning the history of the blocks where our church was situated, and coming to understand the unique pressures our neighbors faced. Every new connection was like a seed planted. Some of them sprouted and grew, but a lot of them just lay in the ground, dormant. Maybe the season wasn’t right. Maybe they’d come up later, when the conditions had changed.
But then we met Tracey, and overnight, a mess of vines sprouted and then flowered. A few seasons later, we harvested a bumper crop. Our friendship with Tracey was the right seed, planted in the right soil, at the right time. Something growing that wasn’t there before.
Through all of it, I had no idea what I was doing. I was just casting out seeds and hoping something might happen. I felt lost and awkward a lot of the time. It would have been easier to stay in the walls of our little church, risking nothing. But I needed to catch hold of the ropes, pull our small wooden boats together. I needed us to be at one table. And maybe all those Sunday nights of practice—sitting at tables with people we barely knew and trying to make conversation—prepared us in some way. We cultivated a new spiritual practice: a tolerance for discomfort and ambiguity. We learned how to reach for one another, even when the gulf seemed wide.
You know that I was lonely through all of it. Searching for someone whose eyes would light up when they saw me, who would take my hand. I was hungry for love. But buried deep at the bottom of that aching hunger was a different kind of desire. A longing that was rooted not in the absence of a partner, but in the devastation of the world. My salvation came through rice and beans served up from foil trays and passed from hand to hand.
A year later, and it’s time to celebrate Nicholas’s birthday again. I head across the street on another hot August day, but this time I’m not all by myself. I announced the celebration at St. Lydia’s and asked the congregants to come with me. Mr. Heyward has invited us to set up a table, and it’s there that I meet Wendy and Peter. Phil is there too, carrying the St. Lydia’s banner and our welcome book. Earlier this summer at the St. Lydia’s retreat, he and Wendy confessed that they were a couple, to the hoots and hollers and cheers of the entire congregation. Now they’re engaged, and Phil is slowly becoming a dad to Peter. We get the table all set up together, struggling to tape everything down so it won’t fly away in the hot wind.
Peter is twelve. His hair is just as blazing red as it was last year, and his pale face is scattered with freckles. He watches the other kids on the basketball court, none of them white like him, and sticks shyly to our table before making friends with some girls who grab his hand and run to line up for ice cream. They are just about the age Nicholas was when he died.
This year the program is different. As we all sit cross-legged on the asphalt, Mr. Heyward tells us he wants to let Nicholas speak this year, in his own voice. He reads from an essay Nicholas wrote when he was eleven.
“The reason why I picked my nature name to be Nicholas Newt,” Mr. Heyward reads, “is because a newt and I both have similarities. For example, I am rarely seen by people, mainly because I tend to spend my school days and weekends home…I am also a good swimmer because of my quick legs just like newts are quick swimmers because of their flattened tails.”
We all smile the way you do when a kid is sweet and smart and funny, except this kid isn’t around anymore. Then Mr. Heyward reads from a letter Nicholas wrote when he was ten:
Dear Malcolm X,
My name is Nicholas Heyward. I am 10 years old and I live in Brooklyn New York. I admire you a great deal because you taught Black people to be more politically aware and to stand up for their civil rights. And to choose their own destiny. You also stressed that education and political power is necessary to accomplish these goals. I also admire the organization you called the Black Coalition which went to Black communities, teaching them equality and justice for all people and the importance of sticking together with words of nonviolence.
Mr. X, I believe that I have good qualities such as a standing up for my rights when I am wronged. And I also like to read. I think reading enhances the intelligence.
Yours truly, Nicholas Heyward
Those were summers of death. We watched name after name become a hashtag on the national stage, while across the block, our congregation learned the story of Nicholas.
They were also summers of beauty: of astonishing things revealed when those who refused to be voiceless waged their revolutions. I was made breathless by the images of Bree Newsome scaling the flagpole in front of the South Carolina capitol building, suspended high in the air, the Confederate flag stripped of its power in her victorious hands. The following year Corey Menafee, a dishwasher at Yale’s Calhoun College, reached up with a broomstick and smashed a stained-glass window depicting two slaves weighed down with loads of cotton. “That thing’s coming down today,” he recalled thinking. “I’m tired of it.” He tapped it twice and out it popped, falling from its frame and shattering to pieces on the sidewalk. He was later led out of the dining hall in handcuffs and stripped of his job.
Their acts were hard-won and came with immense risk. Imprisonment and legal fees. Loss of job and income.
Perhaps we all reach a moment in life when we’re given the chance to shatter the death-dealing constraints clamped on ourselves or others. When, despite the relentless grind of dehumanizing limitations, we rise, breaking windows and scaling flagpoles, showing everyone who witnesses our ascent that there’s a different way. The photographs capture only the climax: a window shattered, a flag in a woman’s fist. But they do not reveal the fear, trepidation, and uncertainty that qualify the time before and after. The tedium of planning, the infighting among allies, the terror of yielding yourself and your body to handcuffs and prison and the mercy of a network of judges and lawyers for whom you are only a name on a list.
These moments are racked with the daily hopes and fears that every life is burdened with, made up of seconds ticking by and small decisions made, premeditated or on impulse. Anyone who’s ever done anything extraordinary is ordinary. But when the moment comes, they say yes, and God’s realm comes beaming through.
You only get there by acknowledging the truth. I grieved through those summers. I always imagined that I earned everything I had in life, through smarts or hard work or perseverance. Turns out I’d just had a lighter workload all along.
Christians have a season for truth telling. It’s called Lent, and it’s a time for repentance, which sounds scary, but really just means “turn around.” Rooted in the story of Jesus’ forty days in the desert, fasting and praying, Christians sometimes give up chocolate or meat in Lent—some small thing that might seem inconsequential in comparison to the ills of the world. The minute practices, though, point to something bigger—the ways we use sweets or alcohol or overeating or undereating or Netflix bingeing to help us avoid the truth.
Turn around: away from whatever you’re drawn to that’s trying to kill you. From the distractions that keep you from feeling the grief of the loss you’ve endured. Turn around and see the truth: that the Confederate flag must come down. That the stained-glass window must be broken. That even though you believed you loved all your third graders equally, and treated them equally, you were wrong.
Each week after the sermon at St. Lydia’s, I hand out slips of gray paper and each person writes down a truth they want to confess. We spend some time doing this. Then we sing a song about the grace God offers—here is forgiveness, full and free—and hang the slips of paper from bare winter branches we’ve installed on the ceiling.
At the end of Lent we arrive at Good Friday, the day that Jesus was hung on the cross. For our worship service, I create stations around the room. At each one, there’s a large photograph in a frame, and candles to light. Congregants make their way from station to station, kneeling or writing, sitting silently with eyes closed, praying.
The photographs are historical and contemporary. They point not to our individual sins—the lie we shouldn’t have told, or that we drank too much and raised our voice at our spouse the other night—but to what Christians are really talking about when we talk about sin: collective sin. The tragedy of how, simply by living in this world, we take part in a system that is inherently broken—racked with social ills like racism and poverty that we participate in every day.
We stand in front of The Soiling of Old Glory, a photograph of a white man in a rage holding an American flag, moving to strike an African American man with it. Beneath the photo, there’s a caption: “They shouted, ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ ” And then, “Pray for communities that turn into crowds.”
There’s the image of David Kirby, dying from AIDS with his partner at his side. This was the shot that finally awakened the nation when it appeared in Life magazine in 1990, rousing us from the Reagan-induced denial of an epidemic that had already taken thousands of lives. “They kept coming up to him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews’ and striking him on the face,” the caption reads. And then a confession: “We have allowed those who are suffering to be ignored, mocked, and brutalized.”
There is an image of a young woman in Baltimore. Seen from behind, her hands are held up—a mirror of Michael Brown’s “Don’t shoot”—strong and brave, as she is faced down by a phalanx of police in identical riot gear. She is unarmed, unarmored, and alone. “Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged” the caption reads. “Pray for those who are victims of violence at the hands of the powerful.”
With the irony that is indicative of the Gospel, redemption starts not with self-improvement, but by looking straight at the most broken, twisted part of ourselves and simply saying, “I’m a mess.” What a relief, to remember that we can’t fix ourselves on our own. That, in fact, we’re not even fixable—but, impossibly, we are loved.
There are tears, clasped hands. Time slides by, and I wonder how we can persevere, this tattered human family of love and cruelty and despair. Then we begin to sing. We lift the portraits from their places and bring them outside to our pocket-size garden, unfinished and pockmarked, a little like us. The aluminum fence posts make the figure of a cross, and we lay the photographs at its base, along with the candle we light every week to represent Christ, nestled in a wooden bowl. We pile our prayers in front of the cross. Then I invite us to make our confession.
There is silence. And then there is truth.
“I confess that I keep myself walled off from my family because I’m afraid they might see me for who I am,” someone says.
“I confess that I use work as a convenient excuse to avoid intimacy.”
“I confess that I don’t want to feel the pain of the world, and so I try to ignore it.”
“I confess that I treat some people like they’re worth less than others, even though that’s not who I want to be.”
“I confess that I’m afraid that I’m too small.”
It goes on for a long time.
“I confess that I think I can do everything on my own,” I say without lifting my head. Something unclasps around my heart. It feels good to stop struggling, and just tell the truth. A soft place opens in me. I can see where I’ve fucked up without feeling like I’m going to die. I’ve inherited elitism, passed on to me through education. I pass certain people over, without even realizing it. It’s not pretty to look at. But if everything doesn’t depend on me being perfect, I’m free to be opened, and to learn. Confession won’t solve all the ills of the world, but I wonder if it’s the only place to start.
Then I tell the story of how they hung Jesus on the tree to die and how the land was dark and the curtain in the temple tore in two. Hannah and I kneel on the ground and blow out each candle, one by one. She’s so gentle, you’d think she’s blowing an eyelash from the face of a baby.
Down the block, Nicholas’s father grieves.
Across the country, Michael’s mother grieves.
Sandra.
Eric.
Freddie.
Who is my neighbor?
We were only playing, he called out before the cop pulled the trigger.
I blow out the Christ Candle.
Nicholas.
Another life gone.