No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

by Darnell L. Moore

I relied on God to heal me in the same way I relied on my mother for incessant care, my sisters because of their overprotective concern, Ursula’s always-available empathy, and Lesley’s gifts. God was mother, and the women of the churches I attended were his divine embodiment. And I felt at peace in most of the churches I attended, when I wasn’t castigated by some preacher rebuking homosexuality, because the church, like the home and women’s bodies, was a site I had been taught to dominate.

Why did I hold in the fire I had released upon so many people who loved me and allow him to walk away unsinged?

I began to accept Camden for what it was: a home that had long ago been deemed too black, too poor, too hood, and too hopeless to be reimagined and redeveloped. The shock my peers expressed was not exceptional. They had come to discover what those of us who called Camden home had always known: we had been willfully forgotten.

Their prayers, their pleas, and their rage caused others to take heed of the neglect. Why else was Urban Promise able to buy and develop many properties, ship white missionaries to Camden from around the world, lease vans, and start a school, if not by convincing donors to give money based on white people’s testimony?

The lesson we learn about American success is that it takes individual achievement to bring about collective uplift. But if I knew nothing else growing up in the hood, I knew collective work had always been the salve for individual triumph. It was a lesson I had almost forgotten before I arrived home.

Faith in God can be a powerful tool on the route to self-discovery and healing, but people can’t be healed by God if they don’t fervently believe their bodies and souls are also worth loving.

Every word to follow was like a sledgehammer breaking down the thick walls of shame entrapping me. Her acceptance was more healing than any prayer, more uplifting than any group counseling session, more powerful than any force of hate I internalized. “I’m so sorry for lying to you, mom.” “You didn’t lie. You did what you needed to do to protect yourself. I wanted to talk to you, but I didn’t know how you would respond. I didn’t want to offend you, but I knew. And I waited.”

I wanted to leap and run and scream at the top of my lungs, “I am gay as hell. And I don’t give a fuck who’s mad about it because my mommy loves me! And I fucking love me, too!”

My preferences, like my decision to “top” in sexual relationships, or my desire to wear certain types of clothing only, were shaped by the deeply ingrained commitments to male dominance and sexism I maintained and didn’t deal with. But still I would accept invitations to speak about black life and politics—pointing my finger at others like an itinerant evangelist of a myopic gospel of black liberation—without realizing that the first, and most important, revolution I needed to push was an upheaval of the systems within myself.

black love is not cheap. We fight each other using the same weapons others have used, and continue to use, to destroy us. It’s hard to resist fighting when you are under constant attack, but my comrades taught me how to resist the lure of disposability in a country, a world, that eats away at the humanity of black people every day. In Newark, I learned how to pick my battles. I also learned how to bow out gracefully when I failed.