Author’s Note

Before the Argument.

June 30, 1984. A little Black boy held tightly in his mother’s arms, seated proud and upright on the burgundy pews at Eastside Church of Christ in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I was eleven days old. My father took his place on the front pew, and from time to time he would lead song service while I cried out loud, attempting to sing along with him. I did not know then that I would spend the rest of my life doing exactly that, reaching for something I could hear but could not yet name, crying out in a language I had not yet learned was mine. Or so I tell myself now.

I watched my mother and father the way a child watches what they do not yet have words for. My father stood and opened his mouth and filled that sanctuary the way only a man who believes every word can fill it. My mother held her gold-trimmed King James, stuffed with bookmarks, lesson plans, and forty years of notes in the margins. The way her body changed when the singing started was not performed, not rehearsed. It was something older than that. Some knowledge lives below language. I wanted to know where it came from.

She would tell you her faith comes by hearing. He would tell you the same. I have always had a deeper suspicion. That somehow we were more connected to the stories we read every Sunday in that Bible than any of us knew.

My mother made sure I learned to find book, chapter, and verse. My father made sure I knew the words were worth singing, not just reading. I am grateful for both. But I wondered, I ignorantly wondered, how my people could so easily drop their African traditions and pick up a Bible from a master who did not love us.

I loved Jesus while simultaneously carrying a youthful rage that wanted nothing more than the fall of Christendom. I sat in those pews and sang those songs and meant every word, and came home and read Malcolm and wanted to burn the whole thing down before breakfast. I carried both, the way my mother carried her Bible and my father carried his voice. I wanted the proof that the Bible had been used as a weapon on my people. I found that proof. I also could not put the book down.

The further I read, the less I could keep scripture and the slave-trade record on opposite sides of the same desk. Something kept pulling them together. The Psalms of captivity and the captive ships. The God who hears before the cry is finished and the people who prayed in languages their children would never speak. The book in my mother’s lap and the names the captors never bothered to write down were not two stories. They were the same story, told twice. One telling preserved in leather and gilt, passed hand to hand across centuries. The other buried so deep that even the people who carried it forgot what they were carrying.

That is the story this book follows.

I went looking for ammunition and found an inheritance.

The people the Bible was used against were inside the tradition all along. Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. Historically. Genetically. The Arabic chronicles knew it. The Portuguese inquisitors knew it. The Hebrew underneath the English in my mother’s lap has known it the whole time.

My mother still sits in that pew at Eastside Church of Christ, on the Black side of a city still divided by Highway 52. She still has the King James open in her lap.

My father is a man of God. He walked his own road there. The God who walked the Banu Isra’il through the desert walked him through too. He came back to the front pew. He came back deeper. He is loving. He is cheerful. He spreads the word in his own voice, the way he learned from his father, the way I learned from him. The book is for him too. He has been carrying it all along.

This book has to stand in front of both of them. With Deuteronomy on her right hand and the Psalms on her left, both of them in Hebrew underneath the English she learned them in. With his voice asking whether the words are worth singing. If it cannot stand there, it cannot stand anywhere. That was my standard. Not the academic journals. Not the critics. Them.

I was a Marine. A combat engineer. I have been in places where the official record and the actual event are two different things. I know what a structure looks like when it is destroyed deliberately versus when it falls. I know the difference between a gap in the record and a hole that was made.

I held the discipline my parents taught me. Book, chapter, and verse. Where the chronicle is broken, I say so. Where the document was destroyed, I say what was destroyed and what was lost. Where the evidence is established I call it established. I do not turn fragments into kingdoms. I do not need to. The fragments are enough.

I have a daughter and two sons. They will grow up knowing that the feeling I watched on their grandparents’ faces has a history. A long one. One that does not begin with slavery and does not end with emancipation. One that runs through deserts and across oceans and into a pew in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They have always known. This book is the record of why they were right.

My daughter will grow up knowing that the women in this story, the ones who held the keys, who kept the Sabbath in secret, who passed the knowledge down in ceremonies nobody could explain anymore, were the keepers. I believe they are the reason anything survived at all.

I always thought so. It was hard to know until now.Michael Loyd Jr.