Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

The saccharine cheeriness of my voice annoyed me so much I bit my tongue in an attempt to bite it back.

Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

Homo sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom, as one of my high school biology teachers used to say. That belief, that transcendence, was held within this organ itself. Infinite, unknowable, soulful, perhaps even magical. I had traded the Pentecostalism of my childhood for this new religion, this new quest, knowing that I would never fully know.

The entire time we’d messaged back and forth I’d wondered if I was the first black girl he’d ever asked out, if he was checking some kind of box off his list of new and exotic things he’d like to try, like the Korean food in front of us, which he had already given up on.

She finished putting her lipstick on, kissed her reflection in the mirror, and rushed off. I kept staring at myself after she left, kissing my own reflection back.

TWENTY MINUTES OF WRITING A DAY OR ELSE. Or else what? I wondered. Anyone could see it was an empty threat.

The two of us back then, mother and daughter, we were ourselves an experiment. The question was, and has remained: Are we going to be okay? —

It’s remarkable how cool you can seem when you are the only black person in a room, even when you’ve done nothing cool at all.

Had she told him that she knew about his betrayal or did she keep it to herself, hold it in the clenched fist of her heart to open only when something between them was truly broken?

My memories of him, though few, are mostly pleasant, but memories of people you hardly know are often permitted a kind of pleasantness in their absence. It’s those who stay who are judged the harshest, simply by virtue of being around to be judged.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But the memory lingered, the lesson I have never quite been able to shake: that I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.

If I’ve thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remind myself what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound. And what a wound my father leaving was.

Whenever I listened to his friends speak about issues like prison reform, climate change, the opioid epidemic, in the simultaneously intelligent but utterly vacuous way of people who think it’s important simply to weigh in, to have an opinion, I would bristle. I would think, What is the point of all this talk? What problems do we solve by identifying problems, circling them?

Now I understand that we have a subconscious life, vibrant and vital, that acts in spite of “ourselves,” our conscious selves.

It was her I cannot beat you in front of all these white people, but just you wait look. I didn’t care. If a beating was inevitable, why stop?

I didn’t want to be thought of as a woman in science, a black woman in science. I wanted to be thought of as a scientist, full stop, and it mystified me that Katherine, whose work was published in the best journals, was content to draw attention to the fact of her womanhood.

“What’s the point of all of this?” is a question that separates humans from other animals. Our curiosity around this issue has sparked everything from science to literature to philosophy to religion. When the answer to this question is “Because God deemed it so,” we might feel comforted. But what if the answer to this question is “I don’t know,” or worse still, “Nothing”?

Live long enough and you’ll forget almost everything you thought you’d always remember.

So it was a bit of a shock, years later, when P.T. delivered a sermon, one of his few memorable ones, in which he told us all that the word “Word” was translated from the Greek word Logos, which didn’t really mean “word” at all, but rather something closer to “plea” or even “premise.” It was a small betrayal for my little apostle’s heart to find out that I had gotten my journal entry wrong. Worse still, I felt then, was the betrayal of language in translation. Why didn’t English have a better word than “Word” if “Word” was not precise enough? I started to approach my Bible with suspicion. What else had I missed?

We read the Bible how we want to read it. It doesn’t change, but we do.

it would force me to remember that there was an imbalance in my world.

In the final stage of Mahler’s separation-individuation theory of child development, babies begin to become aware of their own selves, and in so doing start to understand their mothers as individuals. My mother walking around my lab, observing things, showing tenderness toward a mouse when she rarely showed tenderness toward any living creature, all while in the depths of her depression, deepened this lesson for me. Of course, my mother is her own person. Of course, she contains multitudes. She reacts in ways that surprise me, in part, simply because she isn’t me. I forget this and relearn it anew because it’s a lesson that doesn’t, that can’t, stick. I know her only as she is defined against me, in her role as my mother, so when I see her as herself, like when she gets catcalled on the street, there’s dissonance. When she wants for me things that I don’t want for myself—Christ, marriage, children—I am angry that she doesn’t understand me, doesn’t see me as my own, separate person, but that anger stems from the fact that I don’t see her that way either. I want her to know what I want the same way I know it, intimately, immediately. I want her to get well because I want her to get well, and isn’t that enough? My first thought, the year my brother died and my mother took to bed, was that I needed her to be mine again, a mother as I understood it. And when she didn’t get up, when she lay there day in and day out, wasting away, I was reminded that I didn’t know her, not wholly...