What does it mean to grieve in the absence of religious culture? I am, formally, Episcopalian on both sides—an Afro-Saxon—but was not raised going to church, though I spent much of my life until going to college studying ballet and modern dance at a studio in St. Mark’s Church, performing with the company in services. Art is certainly my religion. I believe in the chosen family, especially as I get older. I believe in some kind of encompassing black culture that I am part of—“syncretic,” to use the word Ficre liked—but I am also aware of the romance behind that sense of belonging. I am feeling very Jewish, I keep hearing in my head, thinking not of my actual Jewish Jamaican great-grandfather but rather about a wish for a religious culture that reveres the word and tells you what to do: Rosh Hashanah. Days of Awe. Invite the dead to Sukkot. There seems to be a poetic ritual for everything. I am not a black Baptist who will fall out in her grief and be lifted by the hands of her fellow parishioners. I am not an Eritrean woman who goes through the house keening, Ficre hawe, Ficre hawe, which means, Ficre, where are you? But I want rules. I want the prayers to say every day for a year at dusk and I want them to be beautiful and meaningful. I want to sit shiva and have the neighbors come at the end of the week and walk my family around the block, to usher us into the sunlight.
Where is the village? I remember thinking when I had my first child. Where is my sister? as I struggled to breastfeed, for I have no blood sisters and my mother was of the generation for whom baby formula was a miracle of nascent women’s lib. My mother-in-law showed me, kind of, though we had no common language. We did have the common language of motherhood and its many acts. Yet I was not lonely without the village, without sisters who were also mothers, because I had Ficre.
I hope you’re not turning all Christian, Simon says, when he comes home and finds me uncharacteristically blaring gospel music. I am not, but I am listening to Mahalia Jackson in a whole new way. How I got over, My soul looks back in wonder, I hear it for the very first time. The gratitude in that song is what washes over me, the word thank repeated over and over. My soul does indeed look back in wonder; I had Ficre; I have Ficre; I have these extraordinary children; I have a village; I have an art-form; I am black; we are African; we come from survivors and doers; my parents are wise and strong; my body is strong; I was loved without bound or condition; I exist in time and in context, not floating in space; my troubles are small compared to some; my troubles are not eternal; my days are not through.
“How I Got Over” was one of Dr. King’s favorite songs, and Miss Jackson sang it just before the March on Washington, along with “I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned.” She spurred him on when he briefly stumbled as he gave that mighty speech—“Tell them about the dream, Martin!”—and her voice held millions of people aloft. Who we are as a people and how we make our way through sorrows that feel so profoundly intimate and personal but in fact exist on larger continuums, is what I hear in the song today. The first time she sings “How I Got Over” it is a question: How did I survive? But after that, the phrase is an answer, sung in varied inflection and redolent of varied meeting. This is how, this is how.
About halfway through the song Mahalia Jackson is stirred to clap and stomp, the song now fully in her body, carrying her over to shores unknown. And then, the song moves to astonishment: How I got over! In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms.
When you become a family, you make common culture. Ficre and I shared cultures, folded into each other, and quickly made an indelible family culture. That we grew up around the world from each other seemed totally irrelevant. When he sleep-talked in Tigrinya, I remembered. I remembered sometimes that our entire relationship, and most of his days, took place in his fourth language.
It is genuinely shocking to be jolted out of the world of our common culture into the world of our different worlds, and rituals around death and dying. He is no longer here as the ultimate medium or translator, the one who selected what mattered. There is only unalloyed culture, and no one to negotiate the treaties.
And the strange awareness that there was any culture other than our own.
IV
GHOST OF ALL BOOKSTORES
One