Free Beyond Belief by Cami Ostman Page B

an orphan, since her own single mother had died when she was young. In 1976, her youngest boy, Jose, had been struck and killed by a bus when he was twelve years old. I was born in January 1978.
    I was his namesake. “A miracle,” she said often. “A gift from God.”
    Her God, though, was white, like the majority of congregants in the churches we attended. At home, she collected pictures of a pale-skinned Jesus—his Sacred Heart beaming red and gold—and his mother, the Virgin Mary. Her collection of religious artifacts from items she’d purchased in the St. Patrick’s Cathedral gift shop included calendars bearing smudges of her maroon lipstick where she kissed Jesus’s likeness.
    Maggie wore a safety pin of about a dozen small medals bearing the figures of saints that she affixed to her bra each morning. For years we woke early to attend 7:30 AM mass. Witnessing her fervency, coupled with the realities of our challenging life, complicated my own relationship with God.
    I loved God the way I loved Maggie—deeply, but with skepticism.
    Her distant God had given us to each other, I reasoned. And our complex mother-daughter relationship—shaped by her borderline personality and bipolar disorder—mirrored my relationship with Him.
    I tried to make sense of Maggie singing His praises from the front row of cathedrals from state to state as we went hungry and usually asked priests or rectors for subway tokens or dinner money. I was acutely aware that we were poor black women in a world that favored a white male God and white skin. How could we possibly be made in a white God’s image? I wondered. Were we really like the cursed children of Cain, destined to be slaves because God made it so? And if He really loved us, how were we, His children, allowed to suffer so much?
    As my racial identity and pride as a young black teenagerdeveloped in the inner cities and poor ghettos of New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, I wrestled with these questions, but I never asked my mother how she reconciled her love for God with the realities of race and class that we lived. Given her mental health, I questioned the God she clung to, an almighty presence who inspired unquestioning loyalty even in the absence of assistance with our struggles. She believed God spoke directly to her, even in loss. I didn’t know what to believe.
    While Maggie pursued Catholicism as relentlessly as she pursued everything else—at the cost of alienating herself from her Baptist aunts and sisters—I secretly sided with my aunts. It felt unhealthy to me for black women to worship white saints, especially since the spheres we traveled in were replete with brown waves of people, in Harlem, in Manhattan, in Queens, in Brooklyn.
    The faith of my aunts was derived from their personal relationship with the resurrected Jesus Christ who died for our sins, not the mysterious Trinity and its pale emissaries that my mother worshipped. In the Black Baptist Church my aunts attended, sweaty, well-dressed bodies praised the Lord with their raucous, joyous hymns for hours. This made more sense to me than Maggie’s brand of Catholicism, but though the music and ceremony was rapturous, it still didn’t feel right for me.
    I badly needed a belief system that built me up, not one that reinforced my sense of unworthiness.
    T HE N ATION OF I SLAM had long been on my radar. In Philly, where I was born and raised for the first part of my childhood, I spent hours playing on the steps outside my grandmother’s house, which faced a number of white, wooden storefronts that opened toreveal streams of black men in clean, pressed suits with copies of The Final Call newspaper tucked under their arms. Of course, I didn’t know that those newspapers beckoned their readers to follow Elijah Muhammad or forgo eating pork and other foods that the Nation connected to slavery. But I could sense that, behind those white doors, community was happening in a way that didn’t happen for me in my