Yaa Gyasi - Transcendent Kingdom

But this was Alabama, and who was I kidding? My secret wasn’t mine at all. As soon as I told Misty Moore that I was saved, she told me that she’d been saved two years before, and I felt embarrassed by what little joy I’d carried for a week. Consciously, I knew it wasn’t a contest, but subconsciously, I thought I had won, and to hear that Misty Moore, a girl who had once lifted up her shirt at recess so that Daniel Gentry could see the rumor of her breasts, had been sanctified before me, a girl with no rumors to speak of, stung. The shine wore off, but I did my best to hold on to the feeling of all those hands stretched out toward me, the sanctuary buzzing with prayers.

My mother was back at work, and Nana was always asleep on the couch. There was no one to share my good news with. I started volunteering at my church in an attempt to make use of my salvation. There wasn’t much that needed to be done at the First Assemblies. Occasionally, I would pick up the hymnals that had been left in the pews and put them back in their places. About once every two months my church would take a van down to the soup kitchen to help serve, but more often than not, I would be the only person to show up. P.T., who drove the van for those trips, would take one look at me, standing in my raggedy jeans and T-shirt, and sigh. “Just you today, huh?” he’d ask, and I’d wonder who else he’d been expecting.

The First Assemblies of God also had a fireworks stand, just off the highway at the Tennessee border, called Bama Boom!. I still don’t understand why we had it. Maybe we got it under the guise of ministry. Maybe it was about earning a little extra money. I suspect now that Pastor John just had a fireworks kink and used our church to live it out. I was technically too young to volunteer at the stand, but it wasn’t as though people came around to check ID, so once in a while I would put my name on the sign-up sheet and head to the border with P.T. and the older youth group kids, who were much more interested in hanging out at the stand selling rocket blasters than they were in ladling soup for the homeless.

I could tell that P.T. and the youth didn’t really want me around, but I was used to keeping quiet and out of the way. They put me at the register because I was the only one who could ring people up without having to use the head-sized calculator we kept under the counter. I would sit at the counter working my way through my huge stack of books while P.T. set off fireworks outside. We weren’t supposed to use the merchandise without paying, so every time P.T. skulked off with a box of Roman candles, I would clear my throat loudly and make sure that he knew that I knew.

Ryan Green was one of the youth volunteers. He was Nana’s age, and he’d been over at our house for a couple of Nana’s parties. I knew him well enough to dislike him, but if I’d known him better, known that he was the biggest dealer at the high school, I probably would have hated him. He was loud, mean, dumb. I never signed up to volunteer if I saw his name on the sheet, but he was P.T.’s protégé, and, as such, he got to come sometimes even when the list was full.

“Hey, Gifty, when’s your brother gonna get back on the court? We’re getting our asses whooped without him.”

It was two months after Nana’s injury. The doctor said that he was healing up nicely, but he was still being cautious with his right side, favoring his other ankle, scared to get hurt again. Our mother and Nana’s doctor had cut him off from the pain pill refills, but still, we would find him on the couch more often than not, watching television, or simply looking ahead with that dreamy stare. He had started going back to practice, but he still wasn’t putting much weight on that leg and he always came home complaining of pain.

“I don’t know,” I said to Ryan.

“Well, shit. Tell him we need him.”

I made a noncommittal noise and went back to my book. Ryan looked outside to make sure P.T. wasn’t heading back in. He was different in front of P.T., still loud and obnoxious, but with a prayerful edge. He didn’t curse or spit. He raised both hands during worship and closed his eyes tightly, singing loudly and swaying softly. I disliked him, not just because of his duplicitousness, but because he always carried an empty plastic water bottle around so that he could spit his dip into it. And I would see that thin brown liquid sloshing around in the bottle, and I would see the way he looked at me as though I were no better than the sludge he spit from his mouth, and it would force me to remember that there was an imbalance in my world.

“Hey, why you always reading them books?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“Be better if you tried sports like your brother.” He raised his hands up in mock surrender, though I hadn’t said anything. “Don’t call the NAACP on me or nothing, but them books ain’t gonna get you nowhere and sports just might do it. Too bad Nana don’t play football though. That’s a real game.”

He reached across the counter and shut my book. I opened it and he shut it again. I kept the book closed and looked up at him with all of my fury, and he laughed and laughed.

P.T. finally came in, and Ryan immediately straightened up.

“Anybody come in here yet?” P.T. asked.

I was burning mad, but I knew that telling on Ryan would only make my life worse. He pulled out that water bottle and spit into it, still smiling from the memory of his devilment. In church that Sunday, I saw Ryan up in the first pew standing next to P.T., his arms stretched up toward Heaven and tears streaming down his face as the worship leader asked, “How great is our God?” I tried to focus on the music. I tried to focus on Christ, but I couldn’t stop looking at Ryan. If the Kingdom of Heaven allowed someone like him in, how could there also be a place for me?

31

I miss thinking in terms of the ordinary, the straight line from birth to death that constitutes most people’s lives. The line of those drug-addled years of Nana’s life is not so easy to draw, so direct. It zigs and it zags and it slashes.

Nana got hooked on the OxyContin; that much became clear to my mother about two months in, when he asked to go back to the doctor for a second refill. She said no, and then she found more hidden in his light fixture. She thought the problem would just go away, because what did we know about addiction? What, other than the “just say no” campaigns, was there to guide any of us through the jungle of this?

I didn’t really understand what was going on yet. I just knew that Nana was always sleepy or sleeping. His head was always nodding, chin to chest, before rolling or bouncing violently back up. I would see him on our couch with this dreamy look on his face and wonder how an ankle injury had knocked him so flat. He, who had always been in motion, how could he now be so still? I asked my mother for money, and the few times she gave it to me, I walked to Publix and picked up instant coffee. No one in our house had ever touched coffee, but I had heard the way people talked about it at church, how rapturously they approached the dispensers in the Sunday school classroom. I fixed the coffee in our kitchen, following the instructions on the back of the package. I stirred the powder into the water until it turned a deep, dark brown. I tasted it and found it disgusting and so figured it would be sufficiently medicinal. I’d present it to Nana, push his shoulder, his chest, try to rouse him long enough for him to drink it. He never did.

“Can you die from sleeping?” I asked my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Bell, after school one day.

She was sitting at her desk, shuffling the papers from the homework assignment we had all turned in. She gave me a funny look, but I was used to getting funny looks for the questions I asked. Always too many, too strange, off topic.