The reverend that day was a woman, a professor in the Harvard Divinity School whose name I’ve forgotten now. She preached on literalism in the church and she began the sermon by asking the congregation to ponder this question: “If the Bible is the infallible word of God, must we approach it literally?”

When I was a child, I would have said yes, emphatically and without a moment’s thought. What I loved best about the Bible, particularly the outlandish moments in the Old Testament, was that thinking about it literally made me feel the strangeness and dynamism of the world. I can’t tell you how much sleep I lost over Jonah and that whale. I used to pull my covers up all the way over my head and shimmy down into the dark, breath-damp cavern it created, and I would think of Jonah on that ship to Tarshish and I would think of the punitive, awful God who ordered him thrown overboard to be swallowed whole by a giant fish. And I would feel my breath shorten in that confined space and I would be amazed, truly amazed by God, by Jonah, by the whale. The fact that these sorts of things didn’t ever seem to happen in the present did nothing to keep me from believing that they happened in the age of the Bible, when everything was weighted with import. When you’re that young, time already seems to crawl. The distance between ages four and five is forever. The distance between the present and the biblical past is unfathomable. If time was real, then anything at all could be real too.

    The reverend’s sermon that day was beautiful. She approached the Bible with extraordinary acuity, and her interpretation of it was so humane, so thoughtful, that I became ashamed of the fact that I very rarely associated those two things with religion. My entire life would have been different if I’d grown up in this woman’s church instead of in a church that seemed to shun intellectualism as a trap of the secular world, designed to undermine one’s faith. Even Nana’s hypothetical question about villagers in Africa had been treated as a threat instead of as an opportunity. The P.T. who had revealed that in the beginning was the Logos, the idea, the question, was the same P.T. who had refused to think about whether or not those hypothetical villagers could be saved and in so doing refused the premise, the question itself.

When Pastor John preached against the ways of the world, he was talking about drugs and alcohol and sex, yes, but he was also asking our church to protect itself against a kind of progressivism that for years now had been encroaching. I don’t mean progressive in a political sense, though that was certainly a part of it. I mean progress in the sense of the natural way in which learning something new requires getting rid of something old, like how discovering that the world is round means that you can no longer hang on to the idea that you might one day fall off the edge of the Earth. And now that you have learned that something you thought was true was never true at all, every idea that you hold firm comes into question. If the Earth is round, then is God real? Literalism is helpful in the fight against change.

    But while it was easy to be literal about some teachings of the Bible, it was much harder to be literal about others. How, for instance, could Pastor John preach literally about the sins of the flesh when his own daughter got pregnant at seventeen? It’s almost too cliché to be believable, but it happened. Mary, as she was ironically named, tried to hide her condition for months with baggy sweatshirts and fake colds, but it wasn’t long before the entire congregation caught on. And soon Pastor John’s sermons about the sins of the flesh took on a different weight. Instead of a punitive God, we were told of a forgiving God. Instead of a judgmental church, we were encouraged to be an open one. The Bible did not change, but the passages he chose did; the way that he preached did as well. By the time Mary’s due date rolled around, she and the baby’s father were married and all was forgiven, but I never forgot. We read the Bible how we want to read it. It doesn’t change, but we do.

* * *

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I became deeply interested in the idea of Logos after P.T.’s sermon. I started writing in my journal more often, but the nature of my entries changed. Whereas before, they were simply recordings of my day and the things I wanted God to do, after, they became lists of all the questions that I had, all the things that didn’t quite make sense to me.

    I also started paying more attention to my mother. When she spoke Fante on the phone with her friends, she became like a girl again, giggling and gossiping. When she spoke Twi to me, she was her mother-self, stern and scary, warm. In English, she was meek. She stumbled and was embarrassed, and so to hide it she demurred. Here’s a journal entry from around that time:

    Dear God,

The Black Mamba took me and Buzz out to eat today. The waitress came over and asked what we wanted to drink and TBM said water, but the waitress couldn’t hear her and asked her to repeat herself but she didn’t and so Buzz answered for her. Maybe she thought the waitress didn’t understand her? But she was talking so quietly it was like she was talking to herself.

There were other moments like this, where the woman whom I thought of in my head as fearsome shrank down to someone I could hardly recognize. And I don’t think she did this because she wanted to. I think, rather, that she just never figured out how to translate who she really was into this new language.

26

Mary, the pastor’s pregnant daughter, was the subject of gossip around our small evangelical community for nine months and beyond. As her belly swelled, so did the rumors. That she had conceived the baby in the First Assemblies’ baptismal one Sunday evening after hours. That the baby was fathered by a NASCAR driver whose mother was a member of our congregation. When Pastor John pulled Mary out of school to be homeschooled by her mother, we all assumed that the school had something to do with the pregnancy. Maybe it had happened there. Throughout all of this conjecture, Mary didn’t say a word. When the father, a sweet, shy boy from a neighboring church, finally revealed himself, the two of them, child bride and bridegroom, were married before her third trimester. The whisperings slowed but they didn’t stop.

The problem was that it wasn’t just Mary who had gotten pregnant. That year, four other fourteen-to sixteen-year-old girls from our church made revelations of their own. Not to mention the girls from churches around town. I was twelve. The most sex ed I had gotten was earlier that year in middle school when a woman from a Baptist church in Madison had visited our science class two days in a row to tell us that our bodies were temples that shouldn’t allow just anyone in. Then she assigned homework, an essay with the prompt “Write about why patience is a virtue.” All of the language was vague and metaphorical. Our holy temples; our silver boxes; our special gifts. I don’t think she said the words “penis” or “vagina” once. I left with no idea what sex actually was. But sin I was familiar with, and as I watched all the older girls carry their sins on their bellies for the entire world to see, I understood that for these girls to be young, unmarried, pregnant, meant that a particular kind of shame had descended on my congregation.

    Soon after Melissa, the last of the five girls, announced her pregnancy, my church had an intervention of sorts. I wasn’t told where we were going, but I and all the other preteen girls climbed into the church van and were driven downtown to an old warehouse building that looked like it was ready to be torn down.

There were several other girls already there. Most of them were older than us; one was visibly pregnant. The room was set up as though for a board meeting, and at the head of the table sat a woman with dishwater-blond hair. She looked like someone who had probably been pretty and popular only a couple of decades before but then had left high school, where admiration had come easily and plentifully, and had suffered in the real world.

“Come on in, girls, grab a seat,” she said.

I and my fellow church girls took seats at the end of the table. “Do you know what’s going on?” we whispered to each other. The girls who were already there glared at us, mean in their boredom.

“How many of you have already had sex?” the woman asked once we had settled in.

Everyone looked around but no one raised their hand, not even the pregnant girl.

    “Come on, now. Don’t be shy,” she said.

Slowly hands started to go up all around me. I made my silent judgments.