Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

  “Would you mind if I eat dinner with you?” I asked my mother. I brought two bowls of soup into her room, my room, and sat in a dining chair I’d dragged in. The room was so sparsely decorated that even the word “decorated” was too strong to describe it. There was a bed, a nightstand, now the chair. There was also a smell, that funk of depression, sturdy, reliable like a piece of furniture.

  As was typically the case, my mother had her back to me, but I had decided to try to talk to her anyway. I set her bowl on the nightstand and waited for her to turn. I ate my soup loudly, slurping because I knew how much she hated eating noises and I wanted to get a rise out of her. Even anger would be better than this. She’d been living with me for a week and had spoken maybe five sentences.

  I hadn’t spoken much either. I didn’t know what to talk about. What do you say to a woman’s back, your mother’s back? The curve of it, the sloping, sagging flesh of it, was more recognizable to me now than her face, which was once the one thing in this world that I sought out the most. Her face, which my face had come to look like, was the thing I’d studied on those evenings we’d spent in her bathroom, talking about our lives while she applied makeup, readying herself for work. In those just-the-two-of-us years after my return from Ghana, I had studied her face for any sign of collapse, trying to make myself an expert on the shades of sadness I recognized in her eyes. Was it lurking there again, the dark, deep sadness, or was it just the everyday kind, the kind we all have from time to time, the kind that comes and, more important, goes? It had been almost three days since I’d seen my mother’s face, but I had studied her enough to know which kind of sadness I would find there.

  * * *

  —

  In Edward Tronick’s popular “Still Face Experiment” from the 1970s, babies and mothers sit facing each other. At first, they engage with each other readily and joyfully. The baby points and the mother’s eyes follow her finger. The baby smiles and the mother smiles back. They laugh; they touch. Then, after a few minutes of this, the mother’s face turns completely still. The baby tries all of the same moves that had elicited a response only moments before, but to no effect. The mother won’t acknowledge her.

  I first watched this experiment in my developmental psychology class in college, and it reminded me of the audiotapes from my childhood, except the videos of this experiment were far more distressing. Unlike in my tape, there is no attempt at soothing the child’s suffering, and the child is so clearly suffering. The look on her face is one of such pure betrayal, elementary, really, this betrayal. More treacherous still, perhaps, is the fact that it is the mother, of all people, who is ignoring the baby, not a sibling or a father. It is the one person who biologically, emotionally, unequivocally matters most at that stage of life. In class that day, watching the baby’s wariness play out on the projector while my classmates and I took notes, we heard a sudden whimper. It wasn’t the baby in the video. It was a fellow student, a girl whom I’d never really noticed, though she sat only a few chairs away from me. She left the room abruptly, knocking over my notebook as she did so, and I knew she knew what the baby knew. She’d been in the same wilderness.

  My mother and I reenacted the Still Face Experiment, now repurposed as the Turned Back Experiment, except I was twenty-eight and she was only weeks away from sixty-nine. The harm done by her turned back would be minimal; I had already become the person I was going to become, a scientist who understood that what ailed my mother was in fact a disease, even if she refused to recognize it as such. Even if she refused doctors, medicine, her own daughter. She accepted prayer and only prayer.

  “I still pray sometimes,” I told my mother’s back. It wasn’t a lie, exactly, though it certainly wasn’t the truth. The last time she’d spoken, she asked me about prayer, and so I was willing to forgo the whole truth if it meant she might speak again. Maybe religion was the only well that would draw water.

  * * *

  —

  Rejoice always, pray without ceasing. I used to worry over that scripture when I was a child. “Is it possible?” I asked my mother. “To pray without ceasing?”

  “Why don’t you give it a try?”

  So, I did. My first attempts involved getting down on my knees at the foot of the bed. I started by listing everything I was thankful for. My family, my friends, my blue bicycle, ice cream sandwiches, Buddy the dog. I looked up and not even a minute had passed. I kept listing, people I thought God should work on a little more, animals that I thought God had gotten right and a few that I thought he’d gotten wrong. Before long, I got distracted and my mind wandered so far off that I found that instead of praying, I was thinking about what had happened on my favorite television show the night before.

  “I don’t think it’s possible,” I reported back to my mother.

  She was in the kitchen, straining used oil into an empty bottle. She had a habit of sticking her tongue out when she poured things. Years later, in the bathroom pouring soap into a dispenser, I’d caught myself in the mirror making that same face and it had startled me. The thing I feared, becoming my mother, was happening, physically, in spite of myself.

  “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible,” she said.

  “Matthew 19:26.”

  My whole life, my mother had been quizzing me on Bible verses. Sometimes the verses were obscure, so obscure that I’m sure she looked them up moments before asking me, but I prided myself on getting them right. Now, from time to time, a verse will come to me at the oddest moments. I’ll be at a gas pump or walking through the halls of a department store and a voice will say, Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the one who takes refuge in Him! And I’ll reply, Psalms 34:8.

  “What is prayer?” my mother asked.

  This question stumped me then, stumps me still. I stood there, staring at my mother, waiting for her to give me the answers. Back then, I approached my piety the same way I approached my studies: fastidiously. I spent the summer after my eighth birthday reading my Bible cover to cover, a feat that even my mother admitted she had never done. I wanted, above all else, to be good. And I wanted the path to that goodness to be clear. I suspect that this is why I excelled at math and science, where the rules are laid out step by step, where if you did something exactly the way it was supposed to be done, the result would be exactly as it was expected to be.

  “If you are living a godly life, a moral life, then everything you do can be a prayer,” my mother said. “Instead of trying to pray all day, live your life as prayer.”

  I was disappointed by her answer; she could see it in my face. She said, “If you find it difficult to pray, why don’t you try writing to God instead? Remember, everything we do is prayer. God will read what you write, and he will answer your writing like prayers. From your pen to God’s ear.”

  Later that night, I would write my first journal entry, and get hooked on how clearheaded I felt, how even just the act of writing to God made me feel like he was there, reading, listening. He was there in everything, so why couldn’t prayer be a life lived? I watched my mother continue to pour used oil through the sieve. I watched the sieve catch the hardened, charred bits of food left over from the day’s cooking. I watched my mother’s tongue peek out from the corner of her lip, a snail slipping out of its shell. Was this pouring prayer?

  I slurped the last sip of soup. My mother didn’t stir; she didn’t turn. I watched the slope of her back rise and fall, rise and fall. Was this prayer?

  11

  Dear God,

  Buzz and I raced to the car after church today. He won, but he said I’m getting faster. He better watch out. Next time I’ll beat him.

  Dear God,

  Please bless Buzz and TBM and please let Buzz get a dog. Amen.

  12

  In deep brain stimulation, or DBS, the areas of the brain that control movement are stimulated with e
lectrical signals. The surgery is sometimes performed on people with Parkinson’s disease, and the goal is to improve their motor functions. I sat in on one of these surgeries during my first year of graduate school, because I was curious about how the procedure worked and whether or not it could be useful in my own research.

  The patient that day was a sixty-seven-year-old man who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s six years earlier. He’d had a moderate response to medication, and the neurosurgeon, a colleague who’d spent a sabbatical year in my lab doing research, kept the patient awake while he carefully placed an electrode in the subthalamic nucleus and turned on the impulse generator battery. I watched as the patient’s tremor, most pronounced in his left hand, stilled. It was amazing to see, as if the keys to a car had been lost while the engine was still on and thrumming, thrumming. And then, keys found, ignition turned off, thrumming stilled.

  “How you doing, Mike?” the doctor asked.

  “Pretty good,” Mike said, and then, again incredulously, “Hey, I’m doing pretty good.”

  Seconds later, Mike was crying. Desperate, inconsolable crying, as though Pretty Good Mike had been nothing more than a figment of our imaginations. I got to see firsthand one of the problems with DBS and other methods like it, the fact that magnets and electrical signals cannot differentiate between individual neurons. The surgeon moved the electrode in Mike’s brain one-tenth of a centimeter over to try to correct the wave of sadness that had suddenly gripped him. It worked, but what if it hadn’t? One-tenth of a centimeter is all that stood between pretty good and unimaginable sorrow. One-tenth of a centimeter in an organ about which we know so very little, despite our constant attempts at understanding.

  One of the exciting things about optogenetics is that it allows us to target particular neurons, allowing for a greater amount of specificity than DBS. Part of what interested me about Parkinson’s disease studies was my research in optogenetics, but it was also my memories of Mr. Thomas. When I was three, the old man died. I wouldn’t find out what Parkinson’s was until many years later, in high school, when reading about the disease in my textbook conjured up an image of the man my mother used to work for.

  There’s a picture of my family at his funeral. We are standing near the casket. Nana looks like he is both bored and angry, the first signs of a look that my family will come to know well in his teenage years. The Chin Chin Man is holding me, taking care not to ruffle my black dress. My mother stands next to him. She doesn’t look sad, exactly, but there’s something there.

  This is one of the only pictures of the four of us together. I think that I remember that day, but I don’t know if I’ve just turned my mother’s stories about it into memories or if I’ve stared at that picture long enough that my own stories started to emerge.

  What I think I remember: The Chin Chin Man and my mother fought that morning. He didn’t want to go to the funeral, but she insisted. However horrible Mr. Thomas had been, he was still an elder and therefore deserving of respect. We’d all piled into our red minivan. My mother drove, which was rare when both of my parents were in the car together, and her hands gripped the steering wheel so hard I could see her veins pulsing.

  Mr. Thomas’s shithead kids were there, all three of them. The two sons, who were around the same age as my father, were crying, but his daughter is the one who stood out the most. She was stone-faced, staring at her father in his casket with an unmistakable look of contempt. She came up to my family as we took our turn viewing the body, and said to my mother, “He was a god-awful man, and I’m not sorry he’s dead, but I am sorry you had to put up with him all these years, I guess.”

  She was the one who took our picture, though why anyone would want to commemorate that moment, I don’t know. On the way home, my parents couldn’t stop talking about what she’d said. It was a sin to speak ill of the dead like that; worse than a sin, it was a curse. As my parents discussed it, my mother got more and more agitated.

  “Pull over,” she said, for my father was driving this time. “Pull over.”

  The Chin Chin Man got onto the shoulder of the highway; he turned toward my mother, waiting.

  “We have to pray.”

  “Can’t this wait?” he said.

  “Wait for what? For that man to jump out of his grave and come and find us? No, we must pray now.”

  Nana and I already knew the drill. We bowed our heads, and after a moment or so, the Chin Chin Man did too.

  “Father God, we pray for that woman who spoke ill of her father. We pray that you do not punish her for saying those things and that you do not punish us for hearing them. Lord, we ask that you allow Mr. Thomas to be at peace. In Jesus’s name, amen.”

  * * *

  —

  “In Jesus’s name, amen,” the most common ending to a prayer. So common, in fact, that when I was a child, I felt that no prayer was complete without those words. I would go to dinner at friends’ houses, waiting for their fathers to say grace. If those four words were not spoken, I wouldn’t lift my fork. I’d whisper them myself before eating.

  We used those four words to end prayers at Nana’s soccer games. In Jesus’s name, we would ask that God allow our boys to defeat their opponents. Nana was five when he started playing the sport, and by the time I was born, he’d already made a name for himself on the field. He was fast, tall, agile, and he led his team, the Rockets, to state finals three years in a row.

  The Chin Chin Man loved soccer. “Football,” he said, “is the most graceful sport there is. It is performed with elegance and precision, like a dance.” He’d pick me up, as he said this, and dance me around the bleachers behind the old high school where most of Nana’s games were held. We went to every single one, me and the Chin Chin Man. My mother, usually working, would come when she could, the requisite cooler of grapes and Capri Suns in hand.

  One of Nana’s games stood out to me. He was about ten years old then, and he had already come into his growth like a weed in spring. Most of the boys I knew growing up were shorter than us girls until about fifteen or sixteen, when they rounded some invisible corner in the summertime and returned to school the next year twice our size, with voices that crackled like car radios being tuned, searching for the right, the clearest, sound. But not Nana. Nana was always taller than everyone else. To get him onto the soccer team that first year, my mother had had to produce his birth certificate to prove he wasn’t older than the rest of the kids.

  The day of this particular game had been hot and muggy, one of those quintessential Alabama summer days when the heat feels like a physical presence, a weight. Five minutes into the game and you could already see droplets of sweat flinging from the boys’ hair every time they shook their heads. Southerners are, of course, accustomed to this kind of heat, but still it works on you, to carry that weight around. Sometimes, if you’re not careful, it sinks you.

  One of the boys on the other team slid in a careless effort to score a goal. It didn’t work. He lay there on the ground for a second or so, as if stunned.

  “Get up off the damn ground,” a man shouted. There were only a few bleachers at the soccer field, because no one in Alabama really cared about soccer. It was a child’s sport, something to put your kids in until they were ready to play football. The man was on the other side of the bleachers, but that was still quite close.

  The game continued on. Nana was a forward, and a good one. By halftime he had already scored two goals. The other team had one.

  When the whistle blew, the boys came to join their coach on the bench, which was only a row in front of us. Nana grabbed a handful of grapes and carefully, methodically, started plucking them off the stem and popping them into his mouth while the coach talked.

  On the other side, the man who’d shouted grabbed his son by the root of his sweat-soaked hair. “Don’t you let them niggers win. Don’t let them score another goal on you, you hear m
e?”

  Everyone heard him. We’d only spent a little over half an hour in the company of this man, and yet it was already clear that he liked to be heard.

  I was too young to understand the word the man had used, but I was old enough to understand the change in atmosphere. Nana didn’t move, nor did the Chin Chin Man, but still everyone was staring at the three of us, the only black people on the field that day. Was “them niggers” simply a grammatical error, or was the plural supposed to include my father and me? What would we win? What was that man in danger of losing?

  Nana’s coach cleared his throat and muttered some half-hearted words of encouragement in an attempt to distract everyone. The whistle blew and the boys from both teams rushed back onto the field, but not Nana. He looked up toward the bleachers at the Chin Chin Man, who was sitting there with me on his lap. Nana’s look was a question, and I couldn’t see my father’s face, but I soon knew how he answered.

  Nana ran onto the field, and for the rest of that half he was little more than a blur, moving not with the elegance my father associated with soccer, but with pure fury. A fury that would come to define and consume him. He scored goal after goal, even stealing the ball from his own teammates at certain points. No one checked him. The angry parent’s rage was written in the bright red of his face, but even he didn’t say anything else, though I’m sure his son paid the price for that rage in the car on the way home.