Chapter 18  

Back Home

Back in Houston over the next several years I developed a new kind of nervous tic. Whenever I felt anxious, my hand crept up to my cheek and found a scar on my cheekbone, no bigger than a fingernail, in the shape of a cross-stitch. When I brushed my fingers over it I could feel the grit that lay just under the surface—a minuscule shard of glass or fleck of gravel. When I first came back to Houston, a doctor had suggested surgery to cover it up, but I could barely afford the doctor’s co-pay on my graduate-student salary. I guess I also thought the scar would fade with time, but I was wrong. That scar stayed with me as the years passed and my life took on a different shape. I graduated and took a job at a nonprofit, trading my faded corduroys and sneakers for button-down shirts and heels. I spent most of my days in a windowless room, patiently thumping meaning onto a pixelated screen with a set of plastic keys and springs, shuffling text around for hours at a time.

I stopped smoking cigarettes. I still filched them from friends out at bars and occasionally begged one from a stranger. But I gave up the daily habit, though the desire stayed with me. Any given evening after dinner I wanted nothing more than to get up from my couch, walk through my backdoor to the bodega on the corner of Richmond and Dunlavy, and ask the crotchety old man behind the counter for a pack of Camel Lights. I knew just how it would go. I’d walk back home with a spring in my step, a kind of adolescent impatience. I’d tear the plastic off the pack on my back stoop and then nab the lighter that my neighbor kept on top of the fuse box, just under the awning. I’d take one of those perfect cylinders from the box and put it to my lips, then light it and breathe in all that smoke and fire. I’d exhale and stare dreamily at the back fence, and then my ears would start to open up to all the noise of the world, engines firing and wind blowing through the live oaks, the footfalls on the sidewalk of a waiter with a clean white button-down on a hanger in his hand, on his way to work. I’d sink into all that noise and patter and then I’d come up clean. The thorny problems that had been tormenting me would recede as if they were called back to the sea, and I’d be left with a clear answer to some previously intractable problem. The rest of the cigarette would be smoked by a different kind of woman, a woman with a plan.

And yet I stayed home. I knew that the clarity provided by the nicotine would be short-lived, and after the first drag or two the cigarette would taste like ashes. Whenever that urge came upon me, I just drank another glass of water and reminded myself I’d finally built the life I wanted for myself, a life that felt like home. Instead of smoking I took up running. In the late afternoon at work, I’d shut my laptop, arch my back into a stretch, then slip into the bathroom to change into my running clothes. I’d drive a few miles to the trails in Memorial Park, the one wild place I’d found in Houston, full of towering pines and live oaks. The forest was still broken from a long-ago hurricane, so it was a jungle of tree limbs and stumps, the leaves glimmering with humidity and vibrating with mosquitos. I lost myself in those trails for an hour or more, until the world of grammar and deadlines fell away and my brain finally stopped thinking in English and started turning to colors and shapes instead.

In the months after I left Nigeria, I sent Yemi a stack of GRE books he’d requested and wrote a long email to the sociology department at the University of Houston on his behalf, but nothing came of it. When the Afolabis visited their children an hour away from my home in Houston I drove up to see them. We sat for a while at the dining room table in their daughter’s dark house, trading news back and forth. When they celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary a few years later, I sent a card at their daughter’s request. Sam Itauma came to Houston once and we met in a chain restaurant and shared a blooming onion. I wrote a bit about my trip to the Niger Delta, but eventually the stacks of notebooks from my time in Nigeria ended up deep in the garage, buried under boxes of camping equipment and winter clothes.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world, everything kept on going as before. At Redemption Camp, Pastor Adeboye preached and thousands were saved, in Akwa Ibom the pump jacks kept tipping up and down, day and night, and oil kept on trickling between the roots of the mangroves. The pastors held court in the deliverance houses, Nkoyo shared a single bunk with three small girls, and Sam wrote pleas to funders in hopes of keeping the bags of rice coming. The policemen stopped okadas, demanding bribes of twenty naira to pass and threatening to shoot if the drivers tried to overrun them. Back in Ibadan Yemi taught philosophy to undergraduates. Meanwhile Helen Ukpabio preached another sermon in an open-air sanctuary in Cross River State. She claimed that she delivered a thousand witches without touching a single one.

Some people will argue that the farthest reaches of the world are closer than ever before, now that the continents are connected by an invisible web of satellites. But I don’t find that to be true. Distance still erases everything. Over time you find yourself focusing on what’s in front of you, despite your best intentions. The people you left behind move through the world without you. They may as well be gone. I thought of Jesus’s disciples, who loved more deeply and more faithfully than I ever could. They had walked away from everything they had known to follow the man they believed to be the Messiah, and when the Romans arrested Jesus and nailed him to the cross, the disciples were devastated. They had lost their story, lost their reason for living. One scholar called them “a shattered group of defeated fugitives.” But then they grieved so hard in that upper room that they brought the Spirit back with the force of their belief. Flickering orange flames appeared just above their heads, and suddenly they had the ability to pray in strange tongues. They bounded out of the house like men on fire, and when the crowds came, drawn by the noise and the spectacle, they were astonished to hear the miracles of God being spoken in their own language. Some in the crowd mocked them, saying they were drunk.

But then Peter stepped forward, reminding them of the prophecy that Joel had given centuries before. God had promised that in the last days, he would pour his Spirit out into the world. Sons and daughters would prophesy, young men would see visions, and old men would dream dreams. There would be wonders in heaven and signs on earth. The sun would turn to darkness and the moon to blood. On that day, whosoever called on the name of the Lord would be saved. Peter’s words moved the crowd, and they begged him to tell them how they too could be saved. He told them to repent and be baptized, and then they would receive the gift as well.

Three thousand obeyed Peter’s command and repented of their sins, and with that a new church was born. The disciples traveled two by two to far-off cities, telling of the good news and urging people to repent and be saved before it was too late. From the grief and despair of the twelve people who loved Jesus the most, a new faith was born. They were the ones who truly created Christianity, not Jesus himself. In his absence, their faith hardened and congealed like scar tissue. They weren’t willing to let him go, to have the great promise of their belief in him vanish into nothing. So they kept telling the story that Jesus had seeded within them. A story with good news at the heart of it—that death is not the end, that there is something greater than death, greater than absence. That there is no such thing as the abyss, that the idea of losing each other is just a fever dream. When we die, we’ll reunite in heaven with those we love, unless we stop following that book of rules and move outside of the circle.

On a visit home three years later, I sat at the end of my mother’s threadbare couch. My brother Joshua had stretched himself out on the other end of the couch, his socked feet nestled against my knee despite my protestations. He was eating vanilla ice cream with a grapefruit spoon. It had a serrated edge that he ran against his teeth after every bite.

Joshua was almost twenty-one now. He wore his hair longer than Obere and Sam ever had, and he was tall enough to duck when he climbed the stairs in my parents’ house that led to his tiny upstairs bedroom. He was in college now at the University of Maryland, and when I asked him questions about his classes, he answered somewhat wearily. School was going fine. He was studying marketing and sometimes it was interesting, though most of the time the professors seemed to dial it in. He and his girlfriend were still dating, but his pastor didn’t like them spending too much time together away from church. Yes, he was still going to the same church that my mother had told me about, the one with the Nigerian pastor. Abiding Word Family Christian Center.

I could hear him struggling to describe how he felt about the church. He must have known that I didn’t believe anymore. But he couldn’t quite help himself as he gushed about the community he’d found. As he talked I began to see how much it had overtaken his life. On Sundays he arrived at six in the morning to open up the church. After the morning service they hosted a potluck lunch, and then there was no point driving all the way home since the evening service started a few hours later. Wednesday was Bible study night and on Friday the night vigil started at 10 p.m. and sometimes lasted until one or two in the morning. Every other Saturday, Pastor Peter taught a special class for people who wanted to go into leadership, as my brother did, and on the intervening nights and weekends there was plenty to be done at the church. They had just moved into a new space—a former crab house—and Joshua was leading the renovation effort. As he talked I had to admit that he was glowing. He seemed deeply, almost disturbingly content when he talked about the church.

“I don’t know how to put it,” he said. “I just feel such a sense of peace. All of those things that I wanted at some point—buy a car, travel, get some important job—I don’t want them anymore. I just want to help people and do God’s work.”

He stopped when he saw the look on my face. “I know it sounds crazy,” he said. “I feel like I could get a job, I could finish college, but part of me says, why bother? I feel so peaceful, like those things have happened to me already.”

I made a face and he smiled. “It must be hard to understand,” he said. “Maybe you have to see it for yourself.”

By that point I had attended hundreds of church services. What was one more? So the next morning I shook the wrinkles out of a sundress and borrowed a cardigan from my mother. She agreed to join me and the two of us made the long drive north to Accokeek. When we arrived at the church, there was a Hummer in the parking lot. My mother rolled her eyes and said it belonged to the pastor.

Joshua met us in the foyer wearing a sleek, well-tailored suit and ushered us into the sanctuary, a low-ceilinged room crowded with people. We were the only white attendees, but that didn’t surprise me. Joshua’s girlfriend had saved seats for us, and as we settled in, the pastor waved to us from the stage. He was a middle-aged Nigerian man with a widow’s peak and a small, tight smile.

In the bulletin was a list of upcoming events. The dial-in number and conference line for a morning prayer call, every morning from 5 to 6 a.m. Announcements about marriage classes for newly engaged couples, A New Year’s Eve celebration service, an all-night vigil on the first Friday of every month, an all-day “Word Service” on the third Saturday of each month. The profession of faith that was printed in the bulletin declared that this was a place where lives were changed, yokes were destroyed, and burdens were removed, and then prophesied that the church would become “the wealthiest, most anointed, and fastest growing ministry in the world.” But once the worship service started, it didn’t seem that different from any of the others I’d attended in the US or Nigeria. There were some hymns, newer ones that I didn’t quite recognize, and then at the appropriate time people started lifting their hands to the Lord. I bowed my head politely and thought of other things until that part of the service was over.

When Pastor Peter began preaching, though, it was harder to distract myself. The sermon revolved around the idea of perfection. Pastor Peter argued that perfect physical health was within our reach. Christians had the blessing of God upon them, and that meant they could triumph over sickness and death, if only they believed. And of course, the way to demonstrate their faith was to give to the Lord. Pastor Peter promised the congregation that every cent they pledged to the Lord would come back to them tenfold in the coming months.

During the service Joshua stayed at the back of the sanctuary, whispering to the audio-visual guy about the sound. But when Pastor Peter wrapped up the sermon and served communion, Joshua stood next to him holding a silver tray of bread. When the rest of the congregation filed up to receive the body of Christ and drink his blood, I stayed in my seat.

I was sneaking a look at my phone when Pastor Peter called all the visitors up to the altar for prayer and healing. Two or three others stepped up to the front, and then Pastor Peter called the rest of the congregation up to pray for them. After a moment it became clear that my mother and I were the only ones still sitting in our chairs. Pastor Peter began praising the Lord for meeting all our needs, making us whole, giving us the power to overcome the enemy.

I was still sitting in my seat next to my mother, playing through my day in my mind. By the time we got back to my parents’ house, Sam would probably be there. My mother was going to make lasagna, and I’d drink a beer in the kitchen and help her chop onions. If my nephew took a nap and my father was in a good mood, then maybe we’d all play canasta.

That was when the pastor opened his eyes and interrupted his prayer. I heard my name and my spine went cold. I looked up and Pastor Peter was beckoning me to the front of the sanctuary. The people gathered there turned around to see who he was calling out to.

I smiled in a ridiculous way and shook my head slowly, and then the pastor’s tone changed.

“Come here!” he said.

I shook my head again and my smile faded. My brother and his girlfriend were up there at the altar, and I wouldn’t let myself look at them. I could tell that the pastor wasn’t used to being disobeyed, and suddenly I was afraid. I stuttered out the word no, but it was too quiet.

Pastor Peter beckoned me again, his voice stern. He demanded some additional response, but my mind had gone soft. I couldn’t think of what to say. Then the pastor rushed down the aisle in long strides, carrying his microphone with him.

“What do you believe?” he thundered. “Do you believe Jesus is the son of God?”

Tears welled up in my eyes and my neck turned beet red. I tried to talk but could only stammer. In that moment I became a child again, struck dumb in the face of a powerful man of God.

“I don’t want—I don’t believe . . .”

“It’s a simple question,” he snapped, looming over me.

In a quivering voice, I said, “I don’t believe the same way that you do.”

Suddenly my mother was standing up, putting herself between me and the pastor. She shouted at him, telling him to leave me alone. I’d never seen her so angry, had never heard her raise her voice like that in a public place. Meanwhile I remained in my seat, totally silent, tears running down my face.

The pastor shrank back, as surprised as I was by my mother’s sudden outburst. He mumbled something about wanting to see me in his office after the sermon and then launched into one last prayer. My mother rummaged in her purse and pulled out a pack of tissues, and I tried to collect myself. As soon as the final prayer came to a close, I walked out of the sanctuary and stood in the foyer, shaking and catching my breath. The pastor’s wife and daughter came over to me and held their hands out for a greeting. Joshua’s girlfriend came over to me, and I could tell that she was embarrassed by what had happened. She said that when she first came to the church, she was surprised by the pastor’s style. It didn’t seem normal.

“It didn’t seem normal because it’s a cult,” I snapped. My fear had evaporated and now I was furious, at the pastor for pressing me the way he did and at myself for not walking out right away. Joshua’s girlfriend wouldn’t meet my eyes.

On the long ride home, my mother bristled about how rude the pastor had been. She didn’t mention my confession of doubt, or the fact that when we left the church, Joshua stayed behind. I didn’t say much of anything. I was still humiliated, embarrassed that I had been so afraid of the pastor. What had kept me from slipping out of the sanctuary at the first sign that things were going wrong? Why had I not been able to defend myself? Why did I become a sniveling child when asked what I believed in? Why was I still so affected by the idea of renouncing the church, renouncing the Lord?

When we arrived home, my mother brushed aside the events of the morning and went to work in the kitchen. As she cooked, I stewed on the couch for hours, watching my nephew play with blocks and plotting how I would set Joshua straight. When he finally walked in, I attacked him immediately, telling him the pastor was a bully, and he was being brainwashed. But he just looked at me and then turned around and walked upstairs to his bedroom. I rushed outside and slammed the door, and then headed down the muddy hill that led to the beach.

I’d been taking that same walk for ten years, every time I flew to Maryland to visit my family. More often than not, Joshua would be beside me, picking wineberries from the bushes on the edge of the path, holding my arm when my sneakers slipped on the muddy clay, pointing out the trail that led to our neighbor’s secret garden deep in the trees. He was five years old when my family first moved to the farm, and this landscape was the only one that he remembered. The beach that lay just beyond the stand of cattails was the same one where I’d first showed him how to find fossilized sharks’ teeth, teaching him how to cement the blue-grey shape of a triangle in his mind and then let go of looking, raking his eyes across the pebbled beach until he saw that shape in the sand. Now he could find ten sharks’ teeth for every one that I found.

Joshua was born when I was twelve. When I lived in Washington, after college, he’d come to visit for the weekend and we’d walk down the long hill of Sixteenth Street toward the museums, laughing at some of the paintings and standing quiet in front of others. Even then he was slightly suspicious about my choices, turning up his nose when I swore or ordered a beer. Even the group house I lived in went slightly against the grain. He couldn’t get over the fact that none of us was in charge. I knew why this upset him. From an early age we had been drilled on a strict hierarchy: God was at the helm, and then the pastor, and then the head of the household, and then the mother, and then the children. He couldn’t understand how my friends and I functioned without that kind of authority.

The landscape did its work on me and after an hour or so I climbed the steep hill up to the house, shivering from the cold. With every step I felt my anger coming back as I pictured the scene earlier that morning in church. But then I pried the squeaky screen door open and spotted my brother slumped onto the living room couch. His thick leather-bound Bible was open in his lap and he was taking notes in his block handwriting. From the kitchen, I could hear that my mother and father had started bickering. I found myself itching to get out of that cramped house and fly back to Houston, to turn the key in the lock and breathe in a house that smelled like me alone.

Joshua was almost twenty-one, but I realized that he had never felt that kind of freedom. He’d never lived away from home. Unlike me, he hadn’t wanted to leave Maryland after high school. Instead, he’d taken classes at the local community college, so he could continue to live with my parents and work construction with my brother Sam, and then he’d transferred to the state university. To my knowledge he’d never sipped a beer or smoked a cigarette. Instead he devoted himself to purity, to living up to the vision that he felt God had for him. His faith was more important to him than anything else. I didn’t like his pastor, but it wasn’t right for me to judge my brother for what gave him comfort, blame him for what his pastor had done, or reject him simply because I rejected his faith. He deserved better, as I had at his age. So instead I just sat down next to him. When he looked up at me, I put my arm around him and rubbed his shoulders, the way I used to do back when we were kids.

The years went on and time kept knocking against us, coarsening our skin and greying my parents’ hair, turning us each into more of ourselves. Joshua graduated wearing a black gown with a red sash and a yellow scarf. My brothers followed in my father’s entrepreneurial footsteps, starting their own businesses around the same time that my father stopped laying brick. My mother went back to school for social work and opened her own counseling practice. Jake and I decided to get married, and soon we were back in Maryland on Christmas Eve with an infant son of our own.

After we all ate dinner, my mother turned to me and asked if I’d join her for the Christmas Eve service. An old instinct had me about to say no, but then for some reason I shrugged and agreed to go with her. We tucked a fleece blanket around Silas and buckled him into his harness, and my mother drove slowly down that long dirt road in my father’s rusted-out Ford. When Silas woke up and started squawking, my mother sang a fragment of a song over and over again, high and sweet. It was the same one she sang at my wedding. As I went down to the river to pray, studying about that good old way, and who shall wear the robe and crown, good Lord show me the way. My low voice joined hers. My mother always had perfect pitch, and next to hers my voice sounded better than it was. Our voices put the baby to sleep again and then the only sound left was the deep rumble of the diesel engine.

A few years earlier my mother had started going back to the same church that we grew up in, the one on the corner of Ball Road and Route 4. It wasn’t called Rock Church anymore. It was Crossroads Church now, and Jim Cucuzza had been out of the pulpit for years. One of the girls I grew up with married one of those scrawny, pockmarked boys from our youth group and he was in the pulpit now. His sermons were long on love and compassion and light on deliverance, and under his leadership the church had become quieter, less demonstrative, more like those mainstream churches we once derided. The old sanctuary was a gymnasium now, and the stones my father laid behind the altar were gone, pried out maybe, or painted over. But some things hadn’t changed. There on the corner of Ball Road and Route 4 was the same old nativity structure they’d been using for years, lopsided with fresh pine boughs on the roof. Some other family was dressed up in robes and costume jewelry, waving furiously at the cars below.

Most of the Christmas Eve service was made up of songs. The projector reminded us of the lyrics, but these were songs that all of us knew: “Away in a Manger,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “Silent Night.” The children put on a Christmas play and a trio of small angels with pipe-cleaner halos danced around a plastic baby doll. One of the angels wore her mother’s lipstick and was as confident as a child actress, while the other two moved stiffly and awkwardly, following her lead. At some point, an African American woman with short hair and a dark-red velvet dress sang a beautiful song with low orchestral accompaniment.

I found myself relaxing at some point in the service. Everything was quieter and dimmer than I remembered it being, and I didn’t see anyone I recognized. Fifteen years had passed since we were regular members of that church, and now we were surrounded by strangers. Even so, I felt a strange sense of camaraderie with them. Each of the families that lined the pews had dressed up, tweezed and shaved and pulled on something scratchy, stuffed their children into coats and made their way out into the dark night, to come together for a greater purpose—to celebrate the birth of the God they worshipped.

At no point did the orchestra usher the congregation away from the hymns and toward a mystical world, and only a few people raised their hands when they sang. At no point did I hear someone or something condemned, or hear judgment in the pastor’s voice. With my son sleeping next to me in his car seat, and my mother next to me in the chair, I felt safe. No one was going to call me to the stage or examine my credentials. But even if they did, I knew how I would answer.

Just before the service ended the ushers passed out the candles with little cardboard circles around their base, to protect our fingers from being burned. The pastor lit the flame from a large white pillar candle that sat on a stand near the altar, and then the ushers dipped their candles into that flame. The fire spread from person to person.

Silas began whimpering. I bent down and took him from the stroller and held him on my shoulder, cupping his head in my hand so he could take in the scene. He furrowed his wrinkled brow at all those wavering flames, wearing an overly serious look that he got from my husband. The sanctuary was a foreign world to him. He had never seen candles before, or preschool-aged angels with lopsided ponytails. He would never fall asleep during a long Sunday evening service, his head resting on his father’s lap, a suit jacket covering him like a blanket. He’d probably never lie awake in his bed at night, mulling over the mystery of the Holy Trinity or puzzling over New Testament parables. He wouldn’t know the heady power you gained from cleaving close to God and keeping his commandments. He’d probably never live his life in a state of siege, convinced that every earthly action has a heavenly consequence. Instead Silas would grow up as his father had, deeply involved in the things of this world, seeing compassion and kindness as values in their own right, rather than keys to the kingdom.

It would probably go the same way for me. My days of seeking were over. I’d never again lose myself in a worship service, my head bowed and hands lifted. I’d never summon up the courage to share the good news with a stranger. I’d never lay hands on my son and demand that the demons of sickness flee from his body, and I’d never again leave my earthly language behind and speak in the tongues of angels. If a prayer rose up in my throat in some moment of happiness or fear, I’d push it back down. But I would never stop missing the old days.

Back in my mother’s kitchen, a splotched photograph dangled off the refrigerator from a greasy magnet. It was a black-and-white family portrait, taken by my father on the self-timer of his ancient Mamiya. In it he was looming to the rear of the family, glaring into the camera while my mother wore a tight, closed-lip smile. Obere and Sam were just kids, and Joshua wasn’t born yet. Judging from my braces and tortoise-shell glasses, I was probably eleven or twelve. In the photograph we were all smooshed together, so close you can hardly see whose arms are whose. I had never been able to look at that picture without feeling the weight of everything I had lost. I knew there was no path back to the time when I believed in God with the innocence of a child. We weren’t the same family anymore, and I wasn’t the same girl who plunged herself into the blue-tinged chlorinated water of that baptismal font, pinching her nose and holding her breath, praying to be touched by the Spirit.

In the years to come Jake and Silas and I would keep making the long trek to Maryland, and new family pictures would start to crowd out that old snapshot. Silas’s hair would come in blond and straight, just like that of his uncles, and my father would take his small hand in his and show him how to scatter grain for the guinea hens in their backyard coop. Maybe in a few years my brothers would take Silas down to the beach and teach him how to spot sharks’ teeth in the litter of shells and stones on the shoreline. Perhaps my mother and I would get into the habit of going to Christmas Eve services together.

From his perch on my shoulder Silas mewed. He was getting hungry. I laid my hand on his back, watching as the family in the row in front of us carefully passed a flickering flame from one candle to another. Finally it was our turn. The white-haired woman to my mother’s left caught the fire, and then walked a few slow steps toward my mother, protecting her flame with a wrinkled hand. My mother lit her candle, and then she passed the fire to me. I held the candle a safe distance from Silas, and he squinted at it, trying to figure out what that strange substance was. By the time I looked up and out over the sanctuary, every single person held a candle with the same orange and wavering flame. For a moment my vision blurred, and it looked as if we were all on fire.