Two Years

Two years. It’s been two years since I have felt the freedom to create in my own name. Don’t get me wrong: I have written. My words adorn the pages of other people’s Big Houses. My own words, though, have been curled up in trauma and silence.

My dreams were branded and shackled. I was always always aware that I was on someone else’s land. I would till, plant, sweat, coax, and nurture concepts from the seeds of my mind. I held a little feeble lean-to space but it wasn’t much. The rain always got in. I was never covered. Never safe in that lean-to. It was easily demolished. Erased. And once the harvest came, I could hardly exhale in relief before it was ripped away. Bloody hands and erasure were my rent. After a few seasons, I was numb or enraged. The seeds were modified with grief, indifference, anger. I couldn’t plant no more. And then, I was useless to the Big House.

Some of y’all know what I mean.

You’re told that this is what reconciliation looks and feels like—the rain in the lean-to. The bloody, empty hands. When the pain gets unbearable, when your soul is unreplenished, you are discarded and erased. Nothing changes.

Some of y’all know.

It’s Black History Month and all I can think about is how many times my people in the diaspora have been fed promises and religious platitudes instead of the harvest of their hands. Their breadth of mastery, artistry, the produce of their bodies was vilified, minimized, criminalized. I bless God that a people consistently robbed and lied on could hold sacred the truth of Him even as they caught scraps and leftovers of the gospel from their oppressors’ twisted homilies. It’s truly miraculous. Oppressors tore liberation out of the Bible (still do) but God placed His yes and amen in the souls of my ancestors.

My back straightens when I remember. I remember that I am loved despite the usury that rendered me muted; that made generous room for racism by muzzling me. God isn’t fragile like Big House Christians. He is not indifferent to the cries of His people. He doesn’t wait until it’s on-trend to look interested.

I am loved by God in the silences and exhaustion. I am loved when I walk away from the Big House schemes of bloody hands and dehumanization. There’s a difference between taking up one’s cross and becoming someone’s whipping boy.

Some of y’all understand.

I bless God that He pursues the people in the fields and flimsy lean-tos. We don’t have to be beaten into submission and silence as a penance for being Black and Christian.

Our fields are waiting. Fresh and well-watered by the Father. Created, not colonized. His Spirit fosters the liberty to create as He has created us. God has snatched us out of deformed theology and practice because of His great love before...He’s still doing it. All idols, including the Big House, will be torn down.