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.
In my mind, God took on the persona of every other criminal and con-man in the ghetto getting fat off the desperate hope and naivety of the under-class. Then again, the way fools were killing each other around the way he might just have been scared to come down there. His messengers and so-called “Servants on Earth” certainly seemed to be. They couldn’t wait to climb back into their big shiny Lincolns and Cadillacs and floor it back to the suburbs once all the offerings were counted and all the sheep pacified. Of course, it might not have been so hostile down in the hood if God had taken more of an interest.
I spent many restless nights after the reverend’s sermon reading what was left of my dog-eared copy of The Brothers Karamozov, trying to relate it to my life. I read the Book of Job and tried to accept it. I wanted my faith back but I just couldn’t accept it. I kept hearing Job’s impossible declaration: “…Though he slayed me yet will I trust him.” How? Why? Why would God persecute someone who loved him so dearly just to prove to Satan how much Job loved him? How could he merely replace all the wealth and children he’d destroyed with twice what he had before and think it excused the senseless suffering he needlessly allowed Job to endure? It seemed so cruel and insensitive to me to kill someone’s children and then say, “Oh, don’t trip. I’ll make sure you have twice as many kids to replace those.” I wondered if that’s what God thought when he saw little Black kids gunned down in the street? But when Black kids were murdered, when our wealth and our health was blown away by the wind, despite our refusal to curse his name, we didn’t get so much as forty acres and a mule.
I couldn’t tell you how many times I cried myself to sleep wondering what we had done to make God hate us so?
I envisioned God as one of those white business men looking down on the ghetto from one of those towering office buildings downtown, aloof and immune, wondering how he can suck more profit from our misery. In my mind God was white and he hated us just like all white folks did.
My Mom started dating this Muslim brother that tried to tell me that God was Black. I laughed in his face at first but he persisted. He said that we were all God’s chosen people descended from the tribe of Shabazz. He was trying to make me feel better, I know. I’m sure my Mom had told him about my little episode at the church and how I had refused to ever go back. But all he did was piss me off even more. If God was Black than why the hell wasn’t he doing anything to help Black people?
I thought about all the bourgie Blacks I knew: the doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and politicians, who talked a good game to gain Black support and achieve their positions and then promptly turned their backs on us once they achieved their desired status. They would put as much distance as they could between themselves and the people who helped to make them what they were. I thought of all the big-time players and pimps, the hustlers and gangstas who leeched off the black community and exploited their own brothers and sisters worse than any white man ever had. If God was Black then he was just another bourgie nigga who got large and forgot where he came from. Somehow the idea of a sell-out, house-nigga god, was worse than the idea of a racist white one.
“But it ain’t God doing all that. It’s that trickster, that blue-eyed devil that Dr. Yaccub created to torment the original man, the Asiatic black man. He’s the one making our lives hell, that white devil”
There was that reference to the white man as the devil again. It seems all these Muslim cats believed that shit. I just couldn’t buy it though. Just like all the other racial conspiracy theories, it gave white people too much credit. I just couldn’t see how they could be that slick and crafty to keep Black people fucked up for so long. All the dirt Scratch was doing in the hood would have been more than enough to convince most mutherfuckers that his ass was Satan. I could definitely believe that he was evil. I just still couldn’t accept that all of them were. Still, even if that shit was true, God created Dr. Yaccub, who created the white man, so it was all God’s fault anyway. Besides, he damned sure wasn’t doing shit to correct the situation.
I stopped believing in God. I was convinced that the lives of Black folks, and mine in particular, was just some cruel-ass joke. I started drinking again and getting high. I had never stopped fighting but even that got worse. More and more often I skipped school. Mrs. Greenblade kept trying to bring me back around but I had lost all interest in school or anything else. It was all pointless anyway.