In My Grandmother's House

Black Women, Faith, and the Stories We Inherit

Yolanda Pierce

• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506464718
• eBook ISBN: 9781506464725
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What if the most steadfast faith you'll ever encounter comes from a Black grandmother?

The church mothers who raised Yolanda Pierce, dean of Howard University School of Divinity, were busily focused on her survival. In a world hostile to Black women's bodies and spirits, they had to be. Born on a former cotton plantation and having fled the terrors of the South, Pierce's grandmother raised her in the faith inherited from those who were enslaved. Now, in the pages of In My Grandmother's House, Pierce reckons with that tradition, building an everyday womanist theology rooted in liberating scriptures, experiences in the Black church, and truths from Black women's lives. Pierce tells stories that center the experiences of those living on the underside of history, teasing out the tensions of race, spirituality, trauma, freedom, resistance, and memory.

A grandmother's theology carries wisdom strong enough for future generations. The Divine has been showing up at the kitchen tables of Black women for a long time. It's time to get to know that God.

2

Just above My Head

“Your love is too thick,” he said. . . . “Too thick?” she said. . . . “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”

—Toni Morrison, Beloved

Before we walk into the sanctuary, Mother Johnson hands me a lace doily to cover my head. When Mother Johnson gives me the head covering, she does not speak; her simple gesture is enough for me to obey. My arms immediately adjust the small comb attached to the head covering within my twists. There is no need to look into a mirror, because although it has been at least twenty years since I have done this, I know by mere touch that my covering is properly placed. Even the hairs on my head seem to fall back into a habit from so long ago.

I know I do not have to wear the head covering Mother Johnson has offered me. As a guest, no longer a member of this congregation, I could decline, and no one would expect me to do otherwise. At a glance, I see that pretty much no woman under the age of seventy covers her head. Everyone knows Mother Johnson is a traditionalist, a holdout when it comes to older customs, and most people now ignore the traditions she keeps. To me, she is an ancient and ageless woman who was already old when I was young. Yet the twenty years that have passed since I saw her last have not diminished her spirit.

Church mothers like Mother Johnson are a formidable force. These older Black women are the power brokers in many African American congregations. Even in a hierarchical structure with male bishops and pastors, church mothers wield authority like they wield their tambourines. In some denominations, the “church mother” is an ecclesial office, with a specified set of duties and obligations, particularly to train younger women in the faith. Even in denominations without officially appointed church mothers, there is a cadre of older Black women whose wisdom, experience, and longevity within the congregation give them a position of respect and authority.

The feeling of the lace doily is barely discernible, and yet the weight of years of memories presses down on me. With that featherweight material on my head, we enter the sanctuary together, with Mother Johnson quietly reminding me that “holiness is right.”

Holiness is right: it was a catchall phrase meant to remind us that as Christians, particularly as Pentecostals, we were to live in the world but not be of the world. It was the phrase repeated when someone’s skirt was too short or someone’s head was uncovered in the sanctuary. It was the phrase that barred drinking alcohol and going to the movies. It was the phrase that condemned lipstick and nail polish. Holiness is right: it attempted to impose a legalistic definition of what it meant to be a faithful witness for Christ. It led to a list composed mainly of “thou shalt nots.”

The Holiness-Pentecostal Church is an entire branch of American Christianity that developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States. Its churches place an emphasis on what is called the “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” sanctification from sin, and a life of holiness. The early Holiness-Pentecostal movement urged followers to live by a strict moral code. The modern Pentecostal church rose out of the Holiness movement and can be traced back to Los Angeles and the Azusa Street Revival of 1906: a series of worship services in which largely poor people of color sought a deeper experience of the Holy Spirit.

My longing for holiness was birthed on the hard benches of all-night tarry services like the ones the people of Azusa Street attended. Tarry services lasted from evening until the next morning as the believers shut themselves in the sanctuary to pray, sing, worship, and tarry through the entire night in expectation of God doing miraculous things. But those services also gave rise to a deep skepticism about legalism masquerading as holiness. I struggled with the tension between the unending lists and shifting terrain of codes of conduct, on the one hand, and my developing realization that holiness has everything to do with the state of my heart, on the other.

Holiness is right was also the phrase that created a longing in my soul for genuine holiness: not a code of conduct dependent on rigid interpretation of doctrine but the fear and awe and wonder of living a life that is pleasing and acceptable to a holy God. My quest for a life of holiness has not removed me from the cares and complications of this world. In fact, holiness requires an active and present concern and engagement in the gritty reality of a fallen world. Of what purpose is a holy life if it is hidden out of fear of entanglement with the messiness around you? If we are so holy that we are afraid to walk outside our doors lest temptation beset us, then our holiness has no power and no purpose. Genuine holiness is a beacon of love; it is a light engaging the world.

Holiness is not a perfect life but a life lived with intentionality and purpose. It is holy to love others, even when you do not understand them. It is holy to sow goodness, even when you are constantly confronted with evil. It is holy to work for justice, even when the case for justice has long been denied.

Holiness is a longing for God. When we seek God with our whole hearts and our whole beings, we know holiness. When we surrender our worries to God with the knowledge that even the grains of sand on the beach are numbered, we know holiness. When we rejoice in God’s faithfulness and when we lament God’s silence, we know holiness.

Holiness demands neither a dress code nor a list of rules. The open Communion table is holy because all, regardless of status, creed, or color, are welcomed. The spontaneous fellowship that happens when two or three saints gather is holy, because no formal program is needed to worship God. The laughter and joy of a full dinner table are holy, because we are called to nourish both body and spirit.

Holiness draws us closer to God, to each other, and to our innermost selves. Holiness requires grace, not the shackles of legalism. To be holy as God is holy is to imitate the love of God in all that we do. I was the product of people who loved me, loved God, and firmly believed that if you raised a child in the church, they would never depart from it. And in that respect, the community of this tiny Holiness church in Brooklyn entirely succeeded.

***

Growing up, I felt Mother Johnson unfairly singled me out for attention. Among all the church mothers, she was the one with the biggest list of “thou shall nots,” the most vocal when young women appeared to violate any of the unwritten rules. When I was a teenager, she constantly admonished me for wearing pants in the sanctuary. When I explained that I was arriving at a Tuesday- or Friday-night service straight from volleyball practice, she would insist I change into a skirt in the bathroom. She was the one who noticed the clear lip gloss I dared to wear at fourteen and forced me to wipe it off. My own grandmother did not monitor me as closely for infractions as she did. Mother Johnson caught every skirt that was a millimeter too short; every hint that I was talking to a boy in the congregation; every rumor that I had gone to a movie or failed to dutifully arrive at service multiple times a week. She called all of this holiness that befits a child of God. The older I got and the more I read, the only things I could call this constant monitoring of my body were oppressive and patriarchal.

Reading will change you. In his first autobiography, written in 1845, Frederick Douglass maintains that the primary opposition to teaching enslaved people to read was that it would “forever unfit them” to be enslaved. That is how I felt when I first arrived at college and began reading work written by feminists. I began to understand how the monitoring of clothing and behavior was a form of social control, growing mostly out of fear that women would become “unruly” and step out of their place. I learned how patriarchal cultures, particularly religious ones, sought to stifle women’s voices, agency, and power. I read through two thousand years of Christian history and could see the patterns repeat themselves: a literalist reading of Christian scripture (“Women, be silent”) combined with man-made traditions always led to restrictions on women’s ordination, women’s participation in certain sacraments, women’s leadership roles, and even women’s theological work. I thought about all the churches I had encountered in my youth, in which women were allowed to speak from the floor but not from the pulpit, or in which women could “teach” and “exhort” and “testify” but could not preach. College gave me a vocabulary, words such as patriarchy and hegemony and dominance, to describe so much of what I had seen in church as a child. And those cultural norms and traditions were most often maintained by women.

Reading, once I got to college, gave me the words to express something I had always seen and felt but did not have the language to describe: patriarchy is a structure that requires the participation of both men and women to uphold it. In all my growing-up years in the Holiness tradition, no men had ever commented on the length of my skirt or my uncovered head. They did not have to say a word with women so eager to police and enforce these arbitrary standards.

Reading will change you, and reading in context will change you even more. It was not until graduate school that I encountered texts that not only helped me to understand the patriarchy of American Christianity but that put that information into conversation with the African American context. Reading Delores Williams, the first womanist theologian I ever encountered, was like encountering manna from heaven. In her book Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, she centers Black women’s experiences, taking seriously the lives of Black church women like Mother Johnson and my grandmother and the generations of church women who raised me.

For example, while maintaining that the sins of sexism and patriarchy infect the American church, including African American churches, Williams also offers this poignant observation: “Reflection upon black women’s sources revealed to me the survival strategies they have used to keep the community alive and hopeful. The strategies I saw were: 1) an art of cunning; 2) an art of encounter; 3) an art of care; and 4) an art of connecting. I use the word act here to indicate the high level of skill many black women developed as they created and adapted strategies to ensure their survival and that of their families.”

Williams argues that if we dare to take seriously the context in which Black women live and move, we will understand their theology. When I read about the art of cunning, which Williams describes as “knowledge combined with manual skill and dexterity,” I began to wonder whether there was more to the legalism in which I had been raised than first appeared. Could this legalism be less a simplistic and restrictive reading of scriptures the church mothers loved to quote at me and more a survival strategy?

I had spent most of my life under the assumption that these Black church women were engaged in simple hermeneutics—specifically, a literalist reading of the biblical text. Mother Johnson would quote 1 Corinthians 11:5, reminding me that “every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head.” There were countless Bible study lessons about the Proverbs 31 woman: her modesty, her usefulness, her prioritizing of care for the family. We were drilled in scriptures about the wages of sin, lest we stumble and backslide. But reading Delores Williams helped me to understand that Black women are also pulling theological source material from their own lives and not just from the Christian scripture. How they understand God and holiness and modesty is rooted both in the Word and in the world.

I started paying attention to that source material. I started paying attention to the stories of the women raising me at home and in the church. I started reading history that centered Black women’s lived experiences. And I discovered facts that challenged my simplistic understanding of their theologies. These women had worked in other people’s kitchens, homes, and laundromats to provide for their families. They had toiled in fields and in factories. And through it all, they faced sexual abuse, accusations of hypersexuality, and other forms of sexual trauma. And whether in their workplaces or in their own homes, Black women’s bodies were the constant subject of scrutiny. Hips and breasts and hair and bottoms were the subject of unwelcome touches, jokes, “evidence” of sexual prowess, and surveillance. And for some women in the Black church, modest dressing and legalistic codes became necessary for their very survival. Modesty was their attempt to displace unwanted attention from eyes that reduced them to their sexual function and that stripped from them the fullness of their humanity.

I realized that I had been raised by women busily focused on my survival and their own. They wielded the scripture as their defense against a world in which Black women were devalued and defined by their bodies. They were trying to keep me safe from predators both in the church and outside of it. They were trying to keep me busy with tasks and responsibilities at church and in the home because they wanted me to survive. Knowing that I only had a short time under their influence, and knowing that college and life would pull me away from their teaching, these church mothers spent sixteen years instilling virtues of modesty and holiness within me. The modest clothing, the head covering I was forced to wear as a teenager that marked me as a child of the church—these screamed “Stay away!” to the teenaged boys at the corner. Even if these boys could not have articulated it, they knew from my appearance that I was a “marked” daughter of the church and that someone was looking out for me. They knew someone loved me and would fight for me.

I was raised by church mothers who could not have protected themselves against rape in the fields of sharecroppers or assault in the offices of white men. I was raised by women who feared police intervention in their own homes and therefore had no means of defense against predatory fathers and brothers and uncles. And so they taught me to deflect attention away from my body in hopes that I would be left alone and allowed to grow up undisturbed. They did what they knew to do, using the coping strategies their own mothers and grandmothers had taught them. Even as they chastised me for the length of my skirts, they prayed a hedge of protection around me and anointed me with oil.

These church mothers vocalized only one part of the message to the group of girls growing up under their watch: Cover yourself. But returning to that Holiness church as an adult, I could hear the whole message, the words that went unvoiced by Mother Johnson and the others: Cover yourself, because this world eats up little Black girls, and I want to spare you from some of the pain I know all too well.

I did not know then, and I do not know now, Mother Johnson’s personal story. In the narcissism of adolescence, I never bothered to ask her about her own life. I am now left grappling with only the few facts I can recall, including the startling remembrance that she had no husband or children of her own in a congregation filled with families. Like my own grandmother, she was Southern born and a refugee who fled Jim and Jane Crow. I’ll never know what drove her to take on me and other girls in the church as her special projects. I can only sit with the knowledge that the road could not have been easy for her. In a world that has no love for impoverished Black women, she had survived, and she was trying to pass on some of her survival skills to us.

I spent years resenting a theology that seemed so overbearing and shaming, a theology rooted in hiding the body and crucifying the flesh. But the very fact of my survival—of my thriving—is connected to the love, care, and wisdom of women who knew harsh truths about the world they wanted to spare me from learning firsthand.

***

Black women are made in the likeness of God—in the imago dei. This is not a radical concept. So why would we not draw from the source material of their lives for theological reflection? Why does the field of theology continue to elevate the lives and teachings of white men as somehow the “standard” approach for understanding doctrine or theology, accusing Black women or Asian women or other theologians of color of merely writing from their particular contexts? All theology is contextual, because it emerges from the lived realities of those who are writing, reflecting, and creating language for understanding who God is. No one can attempt to know and understand the divine without tapping into their very human, very concrete experience.

Womanist theology, with its explicit concern about the lives of Black women, speaks for those who make up two-thirds or more of the laity in the Black church, in which the leadership is unquestionably male. It is critical that Black women share, write, and process their own stories and those of their forebearers and ancestors. Otherwise, when others attempt to explain their stories, usually relying upon unfounded stereotypes, a certain violence is reenacted upon Black women’s lives.

The story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who killed her own daughter, distills the atrocities of American slavery. As a student at an Ivy League university, I sat in a classroom and learned about the real-life story of the woman upon whom African American novelist Toni Morrison based her novel Beloved. Garner was likely the product of rape and the daughter of her owner; many enslaved Black women were subjected to systematic sexual abuse by slaveholders, and some gave birth to children who were siblings of their white masters’ children. Sold to her first owner’s younger brother, who likely raped her and also fathered some of her children, Margaret Garner was married to an enslaved man, R...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for In My Grandmother’s House
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• There Is a Name
• Just above My Head
• The Work of Her Hands
• Leaving
• Holy Ghost(ly) Silences
• Being Present
• Tender Love
• A Question of Safety
• Valley of the Shadow of Whiteness
• Sacraments
• How Can I Say Thanks?
• Notes on the State of Virginia
• Afterword by a Daughter
• Acknowledgments
• Notes