Wrath White - Yaccub's Curse

I had started going to church with my mom and Grandmom after the incident in the lot. I can’t say I was making any heroic efforts to obey the commandments, not if it meant turning my back on my boys, but I was trying to make amends for the things I’d done and would do in the future through prayer.

I was wearing my best suit; soft gray, double-breasted, pinstriped, with a black tie and handkerchief. Over my mother’s objections I wore a small platinum crucifix in my left ear. We didn’t have a car at the time so we walked the seven and a half blocks to the massive two hundred year-old Baptist church. We lumbered along at a snail’s pace due to the premature arthritis in Grandma’s knees.

Grandma wore a huge purple hat with a big white bow that matched her purple and white dress. Mom was dressed in a form fitting blue dress that came all the way up to her neck, with an open back that went almost down to her ass. She had a black shawl wrapped around her to make her party dress look more respectable, but that didn’t save her from getting dirty looks from Grandma. Her head was adorned with a blue pillbox hat that matched her dress and she wore black heels and carried a matching black purse. As always, she was the prettiest one in the congregation and stood out both because of her impressive height and beauty and her dress which just barely escaped being scandalous. Jealous whispers and envious eyes trailed us to our seats.

We had sat through three songs, two sermons, and one selection from Hebrews:11 when the choir began to hum softly a tune I recognized: “Jesus Is Calling My Name.” Reverend Thoroughgood told us all to turn to Chapter 42 of The Book of Job. This was the passage in which God rewards Job with “…Fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she-asses…” and also, “seven sons and three daughters.” He then blesses Job with a long life of a hundred and forty years so he could see, “…his sons, and his son’s sons, even four generations…” All this after Job had refused to curse God even after God had smote him with sore boils from head to toe, killed all of his children with a hurricane, and destroyed all his servants, cattle, and wealth in order to win a bet with Satan. The bet was that Job would still praise his name no matter what cruel and torturous shit he did to him.

“And even as Job lay humbled, reduced to poverty and illness he still refused to curse God and God rewarded him with twice what he had before.” The reverend intoned in a deep resonant voice followed by a host of “Amens” and “Praise Jesus” from the congregation.

“So, when God tests you, when your electricity or your heat gets turned off cause you can’t afford to pay the bills, that’s when you should praise God the most!”

“Amen!”

“Praise the, Lord!”

“When you lose your job and you can’t afford to put food on the table. When your loved ones are murdered in the streets or fall prey to drugs or alcohol or crime, when your health is failing, that’s when you need to give thanks!”

“Yes, Lord!”

“Praise his name!”

“When you are victimized and abused by your fellow man. Give him praise!”

“Praise, Jesus!”

“Thank you, Lord!”

It was madness, all of it, complete and absolute insanity. I wanted to jump up out of my seat and scream.

“What the fuck are you people talking about? Give thanks to the bastard that caused all this pain? To some fuckin’ god that doesn’t lift a finger to stop our hardship, tragedy, and disaster in the hopes that he will make it all better eventually? And so what if he does cure your ailments after you‘ve suffered for motherfuckin’ weeks, months, or goddamned years? Couldn’t he have prevented it from ever fuckin’ happening? And when has anyone in the ghetto ever been repaid for their suffering no matter how strong their faith?”

It was lunacy, but I kept my thoughts to myself.

“Just remember in the midst of your suffering that God is merely testing your faith. Once he has seen the truth of your faith and piety, he will set you free. And just as Job was rewarded for his conviction, so shall you receive twice what you had before brothers and sisters. Remember it is all a part of his plan.”

Bullshit! I thought. Fuck his plan!

The whole congregation was on its feet praising God and hanging off the reverend’s every word. Even Mom and Grandmom were waving their hands in the air and shouting for Jesus, but I just sat there boiling in silent rage as Ivan Karamozov’s words echoed in my head.

“It is not worth it. It is too high a price.”

I was enraged that God would put man through such torture merely to test the depths of our love. If God is all knowing then why would he need to test anyone? He would already know who would pass and who would fail. It seemed cruel, capricious, self-centered, egotistical. This God that everyone loved so much seemed to possess some of the most fucked-up human qualities. That day I began to question every notion I’d ever had about God. I began to wonder if God really loved us after all.

I couldn’t understand why we gave thanks to the overseer that kept us enslaved. Why we thanked him for the strength to endure the whip. I thought about all the times I’d heard my Grandma say how blessed we were to have food on the table and wondered if we were then damned on the many nights when we went hungry. I wondered if we were blessed on the nights we laid awake listening to the big sewer rats rumbling through the cracked and water-stained walls and ceilings, afraid to let our hands or feet dangle off the side of the bed at night for fear that one of them might gnaw off a finger or toe while we slept. Afraid the entire ceiling might come crashing down on top of us from where the floor joists had warped and rotted from the leaky toilet above that was constantly overflowing. I wondered if we were blessed when we couldn’t find a single piece of food in the cupboard that wasn’t infested with roaches. I wondered if I was blessed all those times I was teased for wearing hand-me-down clothes that barely fit.

I stood up and walked out of the church.

“Malik! Malik! Where the hell are you going? What are you doing?”

“I’m going home. This is all bullshit.”

“What did you say?” my Grandmother cried appalled.

“That preacher doesn’t make any damn sense at all. I’m out of here.”

I left with everyone shouting at my back.

I picked up the Bible that day and began to read it. I tried to forget about all the things people had always told me about God and read it with a completely open mind. I wanted to see what the Bible was really saying and not what others said it was saying. Every word I read shook my faith further. Worst of all was the Bible’s condoning of the institution of slavery.

“…And the Lord said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger. Genesis 25:23”

I thought of all those white power groups that used the bible to justify their prejudice and was shocked to find that again and again the Bible does just that. It blatantly stated that Christians should make slaves of the heathen races. It was absurd to me that black people, who had suffered these fates, should worship the God that engineered it all. I could not help but to lose some respect for my own race. It was like they were all blind.

Despite all the begging and praying black folks did and all the millions of dollars they dumped into collection plates, God seemed to avoid the ghetto like the plague. Children got killed every day, and every day the pious were drained of wealth yet none of that ever seemed to shake their faith one iota and not once did I see any of them rewarded with a single oxen let alone a thousand. No sheep. No camel. Nothing. Yet still they believed. It was like God had better things to do than to fuck around in the ghetto with a bunch of poor helpless niggas. He was too busy smiling and tap dancing for the white folks who lived in the nice clean neighborhoods with white picket fences and forty-thousand dollar SUVs.