Ain’t the Devil Happy?

A week before Good Friday, I dart through grocery aisles in desperate search for star anise. I know I’ve seen it here before. The brand I look for has all kinds of spices, but no sign of star anise. As a self-proclaimed foodie, this is the kind of hunt I typically enjoy. I secretly yearn for. But today, I know I’m behind the gun. My procrastination has potentially got the best of me, and the pressure is on to deliver what I did last year. As my eyes, laser-like, scan the final rows of the spice section, I can hear my sister’s voice veiled in a loving threat the way only a family member can. “You’re making Bun again right?” “Ah…yeah sure” I reply as if it's no big deal. But little did she or the rest of my family know what a miraculous feat it was the last time I made it. I felt more like an alchemist than a baker. Success! I see the last of two bottles of star anise. $8.99. I properly kiss my teeth at the price, toss it in my basket and head to the register. Back home in the lab, aka the kitchen, I begin to assemble all the ingredients I meticulously measured out to make three loaves. Like last year, this recipe is cobbled together from numerous recipes found online, but the main binding ingredient is undoubtedly love. Love of family. Love of culture. Curiously missing though, while making this treasured cultural dish, is the faith that is associated with this auspicious season. While I wouldn't say my faith in God has lapsed, it would be fair to say the concept I was given about who or what God is has shattered into a thousand pieces. I have next to no doubt that many of these conceptions needed to face destruction, but as I laboured for the second straight year to make this Easter dish, I began to reflect on those shattered pieces. Has the time come to cease seeking their perpetual destruction? And if so what could be gained, or discovered instead by their [de]construction? I popped open a bottle of red wine and proceeded to soak the Sultana raisins, and mixed chopped cherries. But not before pouring myself a glass, and ruminated, slash reminisced, on the believer who once was. 

I was first born on October 10, 1980, at the long-since demolished Doctors Hospital in Toronto, Ontario. I joined an already fully formed clan, consisting of my mother and three sisters. My second, and distinctly acute birth occurred in church. But not just church. Thee Church. Pentecostal-Baptized in the name of Jesus for the remission of your sins-Foot Stomping-Tambourine Knocking-Drum Thumping-Speaking in Tongues-Holy Ghost Filled-Church. Was there any other kind? Not to the knowledge of the proud Jamaicans who taught me how to worship. My narrow path was laid so clear before me, that my cross seemed tailor-made for my young shoulders to bear. Nine years old, I put up my little hand and made the same life-altering walk down the aisle to the altar I’d seen all my sisters make before me. In some now-forgotten room I discarded my clothes for those more suitable for the immersing of oneself into baptismal water. Still not having mastered the art of swimming, my mind rattled with what I could or would do if my pastor dropped me. But his construction-rough hands plunged me in and out of the water with the ease of Poseidon. Forever changed, I gladly took my place among the fold. My faith was genuine. My heart, wide open. Saturday mornings were designated cleaning days in my household, and to my mom's ears, nothing inspired cleanliness more than gospel music. My mom a former partier in her own right, but now a devoted daughter of Christ made sure to blast gospel music all day long as we collectively cleaned our rooms, swept and mopped the kitchen, organized the closets, or wiped the oily fingerprints off the couches that were embalmed in zipper-locked plastic coverings. Before my mom started her Saturday cooking regimen, which could be anything from Oxtail, to Pepper Pot Soup, to Jamaican Sweet Potato Pudding, the air in our apartment was exclusively perfumed by Pine-Sol, Comet and a godly-cleanliness. Mere months before the dreaded GST came into place my mom prudently splurged on a new stereo system, complete with two large speakers, a record player, dual cassette decks, and CD player. Rev F.C. Barnes and Rev Janice Brown's Rough Side of the Mountain was one of the few gospel records we had and was typically on heavy rotation. But the radio was always locked into WBLK 97.3 FM's Sunday morning gospel programming. Broadcasting from Buffalo, NY, it also served the Greater Toronto area. My sister would record songs off the broadcast eventually amassing several mixtapes that became the soundtrack to our cleaning sessions. One song in particular always grabbed my full attention.  

"There was a family on their way down south!" declares a raspy-voiced black man. His voice crackles over a subtle melodic rhythm that the organist slowly keys; cradling not just the song, but somehow the listener too. Then, something quite possibly only perceptible to the human spirit tells your body to rock from side to side, and gladly you comply. As the song progresses you realize you're not just being drawn into a song, or into a story, but a living testimony. He talks about a family, a storm, a dirt road, lightning flashing, a car that goes off the road, a white lady, and the despair that ripples through them all when it's learned the doctor is not able to help the injured young man who was driving the car. It's then that we learn a grandmother was waiting in the car outside this whole time. After hearing the news about her son and the doctor, she kindly asks the white lady if she has a closet. A collage of "Yes Lords!" and "Alrights!", mingles seamlessly with the chorus of knowing laughs and chuckles that bubble up from the, who could feel that God was once again about to turn tragedy into triumph. With the closet door now firmly shut behind her, she begins to sing. At that point, a small, wizened voice utters the first verse with what amounts to the infancy of a bellow.

 Come on, in my room 

Come on, in my room   

Her voice was so fitting I’m convinced she must've been the very same grandmother from the story, come to tell us about what kind of God we serve. I had never heard a voice like that before. A voice chiseled by time? Or maybe by the accumulation of heartaches and injustices deemed irrelevant and permissible by a world that could only view her humanity through a lens in the shape of a question mark? She proceeds to sing her way back onto the rhythm of the song. With each passing line, she mines a little deeper. Her determination steeles itself on the spirit of the enthralled congregation. As she makes her way through to the second verse, the choir eventually joins in taking the song-story-testimony to its penultimate conclusion, and sixteen year old me is struck somewhere deep inside and this feeling, this moment is inked in my memory forever. These are some of the memories that don't make me wince or cringe. Not unlike the easter bun, or my mom’s fried fish, smothered in onions and scotch bonnet peppers, it's become the closest I can get near faith without the thought of it hurting me. 

But what joy I once felt from what I thought was permanent, essential, and true, over the next seven years was swallowed up by my growing rage. Rage because my faith, as I began to understand it, refused to acknowledge the new truths I was beginning to piece together about not only myself, but who the women in my life. If their personhood was never to be recognized as the same as mine in God’s eyes, how could I ever be free? If they could never experience the freedoms I was given by God solely because I was a man, what good was salvation?  So as the years passed I traded in my John P. Kee, Hezekiah Walker, and Kirk Franklin tapes for Raekwon’s Purple Tape, Coltrane, OutKast, KRS-One, or Lauryn Hill on my way to Sunday school. Started reading James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Maya, Martin, and Malcolm. All of it awakened me to how this particular path to salvation I was put on, seemed determined to keep me a foreigner to some of the most precious and vital parts of myself. So over time, and under the pressures of traumas, both seen, and unseen, Christianity, instead of being the thing that fed my soul, sadly became a fish with too many bones, and too little meat. All structure, rules and dogma, but nothing to nourish me. My mouth, mind, and soul could no longer endure the constant, painful sifting of truth from convenient fiction. So at twenty-three years old, I decided to leave church. It’s admittedly the last technical “prayer” I’ve made. One last candid chat with the creator on how I needed to leave the only church I knew in order to grow into the person creator needed me to become. 

Eight years later. 

Recently evicted, and secretly recovering from several months of suicidal ideation, I retreat to the guest room in my mother's new Brampton home. I dump a collection of forgotten cassette tapes I had my sister Janet dig up for me on my bed. Fingertips blackened by sativa ash, I  rummage through the contents of each of the tapes. There's a song I remember. A riff? What were the words again? All I had were the fragments of a memory, and the shadows to an array of feelings I wasn't sure were ever real. But I needed to find this song, and couldn't fully comprehend why. I felt like a junkie chasing a high that I knew was killing some part of me. I wasn't looking to get closer to my personal saviour or to break free from whatever suspended state of grace some were convinced I was in. No. I wanted more than ever to remember what it felt like to believe that when I was admittedly wounded, powerless, felt worthless, or just plain scared, someone or something somewhere would see me and answer my pleas for help.

It’s Good Friday afternoon, and I arrive at my sister’s apartment which is filled with food and frivolity. My whole family including my wife attended church. I was predictably absent and my mom lovingly grills me as to why I wasn’t there. I say I was working, which I was, but we both know I wouldn’t have gone anyway. This has been our routine for decades now. As I take out three perfect loaves of easter bun and cheddar cheese out of my bag I secretly begin to question why I need to disappoint her in this way anymore. I find myself envious of the joy my nieces still derive from church even if they don’t go as much. And joy is a particular emotion I’ve hitched a resolution onto. Something between what has been, and who I’ve become is incongruent with the life I want to live. Micheal Eric Dyson has written about the difference between tradition and the traditional. Dyson sees tradition as something “living and adaptable… a heritage of ideas, practices, and values that can grow and respond to new circumstances." While in contrast “the traditional refers to a “ fixed, rigid interpretation of the past…as being resistant to change”. While there certainly are aspects of my Christian upbringing that are lamentable, I have been blessed to reach the age where more time has been lived outside of those experiences than I ever spent in them. To not let past pain and our experience of them become traditional; a fixed, rigid interpretation of who we are, seems like an acceptable adventure to pursue. To take up the advice of song writer Herb Wilks, and “Don’t Let Nobody Steal Your Joy”. Because otherwise, ain’t the devil happy?