The Day I Learned I Was A Girl: Black Girlhood, Purity Culture, and the Architecture of Containment

An Essay for Webwork Dispatches

I. The Hill

The hot Georgia sun baked the asphalt of the apartment complex on Banneker Ave. The air was thick, filled with the exasperated sighs of bored kids released into summer. It was that particular kind of Atlanta heat that settles into everything—the concrete, the cars, the space between buildings—making the whole world feel like it's holding its breath.

My cousin Che and I had gone outside after Ummi, his paternal grandmother, permitted us to play after afternoon prayer. The transition from the cool, carpeted quiet of the apartment—where prayer rugs were still spread on the living room floor, where the scent of incense lingered in corners—to the blazing expanse of the parking lot always felt like crossing between worlds. Inside was the world of discipline, of measured speech, of bodies that knew their place. Outside was something else entirely.

We were standing on the grassy hill that overlooked the nearly vacant parking lot, our shadows sharp against the brown grass, when Che called out to his friends. "Hey yo, let's go walk to the Candy Lady house and get a freeze cup." Three boys, perfumed with the smell of outside and sun, walked over from where they had been sitting on the hood of someone's car. They moved with that particular summer languor of kids who had nowhere urgent to be and all day to get there.

One of them, Hassan, eyes immediately darted in my direction. I felt the shift in the air before I understood what it meant. "Ay yo, who is she?" He reached out toward the hem of my skirt. A skirt I had promised my grandma I would try to wear more, had argued about that morning, had eventually agreed to because it seemed like a small concession to keep peace in the house.

"Nah, don't touch me." I swatted his hand away. The words came automatically, from somewhere deeper than thought.

"My cousin from NC. Don't. She is off limits." My face burned. Being a tomboy, a big and tall girl for my age, no one had ever looked at me that way before. I was never a she in that register. I was never a body that someone thought they could reach toward without permission.

I remember the immediate fear that flashed in my cousin's eyes as something came out that he had been holding. At that moment, I was no longer cousin. I was she. Hassan reached again. I hit him.

What I didn't have language for then, and what this essay is partly an attempt to work out, is that the moment I became she, I also became a problem in need of containment. The skirt my grandmother asked me to wear. My cousin's reflex to announce my limits before I could announce them myself. The presumption that my body was available for comment, for touch, for classification. I was eleven or twelve. And I was already being taught that womanhood was something that happened to you, something managed by others before you had a chance to manage it yourself.

This is where purity culture lives. Not only in the sermons. In the hill. In the parking lot. In the reflex. In the gap between the afternoon prayer and the moment a boy decides your body is worth commenting on. In the space where protection and erasure wear the same face.

II. The Architecture of Containment

Before we ever sat in a True Love Waits class or heard a sermon about the importance of keeping ourselves pure for our future husbands, the architecture was already in place. Physical spaces, social arrangements, the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that Black church communities organized themselves around the management of Black women's bodies and desires.

I think about the youth group meetings I attended in high school, how we were separated by gender for certain discussions. How the boys got to talk about leadership, calling, purpose, while we got lessons on modesty, on the power we held over our brothers' thoughts, on the responsibility we carried for the spiritual temperature of our relationships. I think about how the very buildings seemed designed to facilitate this: separate bathrooms, separate changing areas for baptisms, separate spaces for "girl talk" that always seemed to center on what we shouldn't do rather than what we could become.

The church mothers played a particular role in this architecture. These women, often the most respected voices in our communities, became the enforcers of a set of rules that they themselves had inherited from women who had inherited them from women who had inherited them from a long line of survival strategies that had calcified into doctrine. They meant well, almost always. They were protecting us, they believed. They were teaching us how to move through a world that would punish us for any misstep, any perceived impropriety, any failure to properly contain ourselves.

But there was something else happening in their vigilance, something that connected to older stories about Black women's bodies and who got to control them. The church mother who pulled you aside after service to tell you your dress was too tight. The deaconess who made comments about how you walked, how you talked, how much attention you seemed comfortable receiving. The women's ministry leader who explained, with genuine concern in her voice, that your gift for singing or speaking or leading would be compromised if you didn't learn to "carry yourself properly."

This was not the overt, violent control that our ancestors had experienced under slavery. But it was control nonetheless, a more subtle form of surveillance that operated through love, through care, through the genuine belief that this was what protection looked like. It was the architecture of containment dressed up as the architecture of care.

III. What They Were Really Teaching Us

In 1997, Prophetess Juanita Bynum shocked Black Church women everywhere with a sermon that became a book: No More Sheets. Speaking to a stadium of single men and women, she told women that they were carrying the souls of previous sexual partners inside their bodies, that they couldn't receive a husband because they were too broken, too silly, too spiritually scattered. The solution was containment. Get yourself together. Police your body. Make yourself worthy. Then, and only then, might God grant you a partner.

This message did not arrive in a vacuum. It was already in the hill. It was already in the skirt. It was already in the architecture of church buildings and the arrangement of youth group meetings and the particular way that Black church mothers looked at young Black women and saw liability as much as potential.

What Bynum was doing, and what countless iterations of this message have done—from T.D. Jakes' Woman, Thou Art Loosed to Heather Lindsey's Pinky Promise movement to any number of Facebook "wife school" personalities—was translating a much older set of instructions into contemporary church language. The message: your body is dangerous. Your desire is a liability. Your worth is contingent on your mastery of yourself. And that mastery is always measured against whether a man will choose you.

But there was something specific about the way this message landed in Black church communities, something that distinguished it from its white evangelical counterparts. The stakes felt higher. The consequences more dire. The need for perfection more urgent. This was not simply about personal piety or individual relationship with God. This was about survival. About respectability. About proving, once again, that Black women could be trusted to manage themselves in a world that had built its foundational myths around the idea that we could not.

What gets missed in critiques of purity culture that treat it as a contemporary phenomenon, an evangelical trend, a product of the 1990s, is that for Black women, the roots go much, much deeper. The performance of containment that these messages demand is not new. It is haunted. It carries within it the accumulated weight of centuries of Black women's bodies being sites of contest, of extraction, of claims made by others before we could make claims ourselves.

The "lady doctrine" that runs through much of Black church teaching about women—the emphasis on carrying yourself with dignity, on dressing appropriately, on speaking softly, on managing your sexuality carefully—is not simply borrowed from white middle-class Victorian norms, though it shares DNA with those traditions. It is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, a response to the specific ways that Black women's bodies were positioned in American culture. It is a defense against a set of stereotypes and projections that required constant, vigilant refutation.

To be a lady, in this context, was to argue against every assumption the broader culture had made about who you were and what you represented. To be pure was to refute the hypersexualized imagery that had been mapped onto Black women's bodies since slavery. To be contained was to prove that you were not the thing they said you were. The theology was real. The relationship with God was real. But the performance of propriety was also always political, always strategic, always a negotiation with a hostile world that was looking for evidence that you were exactly as dangerous and uncontrolled as they had always claimed.

IV. The Economics of Purity

What I want to name explicitly is something that often remains implicit in discussions of Black women and purity culture: the economic dimensions of containment. The respectability that churches taught was not just about spiritual formation or personal holiness. It was also about access. To jobs. To educational opportunities. To social mobility. To the kind of life that might lift not just you but your family, your community, your people.

My grandmother, who insisted on the skirt, had worked as a domestic worker for most of her adult life. She had cleaned the houses of white families, raised their children, managed their households while managing her own family on the margins. She knew, in a way that I could not yet understand at eleven, that the world was watching Black women's bodies, looking for any reason to dismiss us, to deny us opportunities, to confirm their existing beliefs about who we were and what we were capable of.

The skirt was not just about modesty. It was about strategy. It was about moving through the world in a way that would not give anyone ammunition to use against you. It was about the long game of survival and advancement in a society that had very specific ideas about what Black women's bodies meant and what they were for.

This is what I mean by the economics of purity: the way that respectability became entangled with upward mobility, the way that church communities became training grounds for a particular kind of performance that was designed to open doors in the broader society. The young women who learned to sit with their legs crossed, to speak softly, to dress conservatively, to manage their sexuality carefully—they were being prepared not just for marriage or motherhood, but for job interviews, for college applications, for any number of situations where they would be judged not just on their qualifications but on whether they fit a particular image of appropriate Black womanhood.

The church became, in many ways, a finishing school for respectability. And purity culture became the curriculum. Not because church leaders were consciously trying to limit Black women's freedom, but because they understood, often intuitively, that freedom in America was contingent on performance. That liberation required legibility. That survival demanded a kind of careful self-presentation that could never look like it was self-presentation at all.

But there was a cost to this strategy, a cost that is still being paid by Black women who learned to police themselves so thoroughly that they lost touch with what they actually wanted, needed, or felt. The mechanism that was supposed to protect us became a cage. The strategy that was supposed to create opportunities became a limitation. The performance that was supposed to grant us access to fuller lives became, for many, the thing that prevented us from accessing our own interiority.

V. The Ghosts in the Grammar

Philosopher Hortense Spillers wrote something that I have sat with for years. She described herself as a "marked woman," not by her own hand, but by a whole history of projections and investments mapped onto her body before she could speak. "Peaches," "Brown Sugar," "Sapphire," "Earth Mother," "Aunty": a "locus of confounded identities," she called it. A body claimed by a national treasury of rhetorical wealth before she had the chance to claim it herself.

Spillers was naming something I had felt in the parking lot without the words for it. Before I was she, I was already she. The category was waiting for me. The grammar of my girlhood had been written by other people, in other centuries, in response to circumstances that I had never experienced but whose effects I was inheriting nonetheless.

What Spillers traces, and what theologian M. Shawn Copeland builds on in her work on the Black body, is the way that slavery created the grammar through which Black women's bodies are still being read. Not just in explicitly racist contexts, but in supposedly neutral spaces, in progressive communities, in Black churches where the explicit message is one of affirmation and love.

The Atlantic Slave Trade dispossessed Black women in at least two ways that matter for this conversation. First, dispossession: the theft of the body from its land, culture, people, and its own interiority. Second, fragmentation: the literal and psychic splintering of self that happened when every part of a Black woman's body was used, extracted from, claimed by the slaveholding economy. Nothing belonged to her. Not her labor, not her sexuality, not her reproductive capacity, not her children, not her death.

Copeland is careful here. She is not saying that Black women today are simply re-enacting slavery. She is saying that trauma does not disappear when the formal structures end. Theologian Shelly Rambo writes that trauma "does not go away. It persists in symptoms that live on in the body, in the intrusive fragments of memories that return. It persists in symptoms that live on in communities, in the layers of past violence that constitute present ways of relating."

The performance of purity culture, the demand that Black women contain themselves, police their desires, prove their decency before they can claim their humanity, is one of those layers. It is not simply conservative theology. It is a haunting. The ghost of a historical wound that was never fully dressed. The echo of a time when Black women's bodies were legal property, filtered through centuries of supposed progress, showing up now as church doctrine, as family wisdom, as the well-meaning advice of women who love you and want to protect you but who are also carrying ghosts they cannot name.

This is why the grammar feels so familiar, so naturalized, so much like our own beliefs rather than something imposed from outside. By the time it reaches us, it has been laundered through generations of Black women who received it as survival strategy, who passed it down as protection, who genuinely believed that this was what love looked like. The ghost in the grammar is not malicious. It is not intentionally harmful. But it is a ghost nonetheless, a presence from another time that shapes how we move in our bodies, how we understand our desires, how we relate to our own capacity for pleasure and power and joy.

VI. Respectability Was Always a Negotiation

After emancipation, Black communities faced a question that was never simple: how do you rebuild personhood in a society that was built to deny it to you? How do you create families, institutions, traditions, ways of being in the world that affirm your humanity in the face of ongoing efforts to deny that humanity? How do you protect your children from a world that sees their Black bodies as threats to be contained rather than lives to be nurtured?

The adoption of Victorian norms of respectability—contained bodies, proper femininity, regulated sexuality, careful speech, conservative dress—was one answer. It was, in many ways, a survival strategy. To perform decency was to argue, in the only language the dominant culture recognized, that you were human. To demonstrate self-control was to refute stereotypes about Black people's supposed inability to govern themselves. To show that you could master your body, your desires, your impulses, was to claim a version of personhood that the broader society might, grudgingly, recognize.

But there was a cost. The mechanism you used to assert humanity came from the same epistemology, the same system of knowledge and power, that had denied your humanity in the first place. You were proving yourself by the rules of the people who had enslaved you. The standards of measurement had been set by the same culture that had written laws declaring you to be property. The very categories of "respectability" and "propriety" and "decency" had been constructed, historically, in explicit opposition to Blackness, in explicit exclusion of Black women's ways of knowing and being in the world.

Feminist scholar Sarah Cervenak calls this the bind of the post-emancipation subject: "black people's capacity for self-control figured as essential in the acquisition of freedom," but that self-control was defined by a white supremacist framework that always positioned Black bodies as inherently reckless, always in need of discipline. The Black Church, for all its liberatory power, carried this bind inside it.

To be a good Black Christian woman was to prove, through the management of your body and your desires, that you were worthy of the dignity that had been withheld from you. The containment was not just spiritual. It was political. It was a response to a wound. It was an attempt to create safety in an unsafe world. And it was passed down, from generation to generation of Black women who understood themselves to be protecting the daughters they loved from a world that would punish them for any perceived transgression.

This is why simple narratives about "leaving purity culture behind" often miss the mark when applied to Black women's experiences. The respectability that churches taught was not just about controlling women's sexuality for its own sake. It was about survival in a context where Black women's bodies were always already hypervisible, always already subject to scrutiny and judgment, always already sites of contest between different claims to authority and power.

The church mothers who enforced these standards were not simply internalized patriarchs. They were women who had lived through Jim Crow, who had navigated workplaces and schools and public spaces where any misstep could have devastating consequences, not just for them but for their families and communities. They were passing down what had worked for them, what had kept them safe, what had opened doors that might otherwise have remained closed.

By the time I was sitting in a True Love Waits class in my early teens, being told that my body was a temple that needed protection, that desire was dangerous, that purity was my most important gift to offer a future husband, those instructions had passed through so many hands that no one was tracking the original source of the fear. The wound had become wisdom. The negotiation had become doctrine. The strategy had become identity.

VII. The Lady and the Trap

I want to spend more time with the figure of the "lady" because she haunts so much of Black church teaching about women. The lady is always contained, always appropriate, always in control of herself and her circumstances. She speaks softly but carries herself with dignity. She is beautiful but not sexual, desirable but not available, powerful but not threatening. She is the answer to every stereotype, the refutation of every assumption, the proof that Black women can, in fact, be trusted to manage themselves.

The lady is also an impossible standard, a moving target, a performance that can never quite be perfected because the terms keep changing and the audience keeps shifting and the stakes keep rising. To be a lady in a Black church context is not just about personal conduct. It is about representing your family, your community, your race, your gender, your faith tradition. It is about being a credit to all the people who came before you and all the people who will come after you. It is about never giving anyone a reason to say that they were right about Black women all along.

I learned to be a lady from women who loved me. From church mothers who pulled me aside after service to adjust my dress or lower my voice or remind me to sit with my legs crossed. From Sunday school teachers who explained, with genuine care in their voices, that I had a responsibility to help my male peers stay focused on spiritual things. From mentors who taught me how to navigate predominantly white spaces, how to speak in meetings, how to dress for job interviews, how to be taken seriously in contexts where I would be one of the few Black faces in the room.

These lessons were gifts, in many ways. They were the accumulated wisdom of generations of Black women who had figured out how to survive and sometimes thrive in hostile environments. They were strategies that worked, doors that opened, opportunities that materialized because someone had taught me how to perform a version of Black womanhood that white people could understand and respect.

But they were also traps. Because the lady is always performing, always conscious of how she is being perceived, always measuring her words and movements and choices against an external standard that she did not set and cannot control. The lady lives in a state of hypervigilance, constantly monitoring herself for any sign that she might be slipping, any indication that she might be perceived as too much, too loud, too sexual, too angry, too ambitious, too free.

The lady cannot afford to have bad days. She cannot afford to be messy or complicated or human in ways that might be misinterpreted. She cannot afford to express anger, even righteous anger, because anger on a Black woman's face will always be read as proof that we are exactly as dangerous and uncontrolled as they always suspected. The lady is a survival strategy that becomes a prison, a form of protection that becomes a form of self-surveillance, a way of claiming dignity that requires the constant denial of large portions of the self.

This is what purity culture does to Black women that is particularly insidious: it takes survival strategies that our grandmothers and great-grandmothers developed to navigate impossible circumstances, and it spiritualizes them. It makes them about God rather than about white supremacy. It makes them about holiness rather than about safety. It makes them about personal character rather than about systemic oppression.

So when you start to question the standards, when you start to feel the cage closing in, when you start to wonder whether the performance is worth the cost, you are not just questioning church doctrine or family expectations. You are questioning the wisdom of women who sacrificed enormously to give you opportunities they never had. You are seeming to reject strategies that kept your people alive through centuries of violence and exclusion. You are appearing ungrateful for lessons that were taught through love, even if that love sometimes felt like control.

VIII. Coming Back to the Hill

Here is what I want to say about that afternoon on the hill, that I couldn't have said at twelve: My cousin was not wrong to be afraid. There was something real in his eyes, a recognition that the moment I became she to Hassan, something protective had ended. The world was going to start reading my body in ways that were not about me, that had nothing to do with who I actually was or what I actually wanted or how I actually moved through the world. He knew that I was about to become subject to a form of surveillance and judgment that he, as a boy, would never experience. And he knew it because he had watched it happen to other girls, other women, other bodies that had been claimed by the grammar of hypersexualization and hypervisibility that defines Black women's presence in American culture.

But the response—she is off limits—was also its own kind of erasure. My limits were announced before I could announce them. My protection was performed by someone else. My body was administered, even in care. I became a problem to be managed rather than a person with agency. The moment I was perceived as sexual, I ceased to be seen as a subject with my own capacity to navigate desire, consent, relationship, and pleasure.

That is the knot at the center of Black women and purity culture. The harm and the protection can come in the same gesture. The containment and the care are often indistinguishable. The love and the surveillance wear each other's faces. Phillis Sheppard writes that "shame has an adhesive quality because the interior has been colonized and sees this colonization as self-created. Shame begins to be the self and therefore its power is intertwined with identity."

When the message has been repeated long enough—that your desire is dangerous, your body needs management, your worth depends on your discipline—you stop experiencing it as something imposed. You start experiencing it as something you believe. You start doing the policing yourself. And then you tell the next girl. This is how intergenerational transmission works. Not through malice, usually. Through love, often. Through the genuine belief that this is how you protect someone you care about.

This is also why the work of untangling purity culture for Black women is not simply a matter of individual liberation or personal choice. It is archaeological work, genealogical work, the slow excavation of layers of survival strategies that have calcified into doctrine. It requires understanding not just what we were taught, but why we were taught it. Not just what the messages were, but what circumstances produced the need for those messages. Not just how the containment functioned, but what the containment was meant to contain us from.

IX. What the Erotic Actually Is

Audre Lorde wrote an essay in 1978 called "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" that I return to constantly. She is not talking about sex, or not only. She is talking about something deeper: a "resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed and unrecognized feeling."

She is talking about the capacity to feel deeply, to know deeply, to let what you know from the inside out guide how you move through the world. She is talking about the difference between living from your surface and living from your center, between responding to external expectations and responding to internal authority, between performing a version of yourself that others can understand and inhabiting a version of yourself that you can recognize.

What Lorde argues is that this capacity, this interior authority, is precisely what systems of oppression work to suppress. Because if you can feel deeply, you will also feel when something is wrong. You will feel when the container you've been handed doesn't fit. You will feel when the performance you've been asked to maintain is costing you access to your own life. You will start asking questions that disrupt the arrangement.

This is why the erotic is feared. Not because it is about sex, though it includes that. But because it is about epistemological authority: your right to know yourself from the inside. Your capacity to trust your own perceptions, your own desires, your own sense of what is life-giving and what is death-dealing. Your ability to say no to what diminishes you and yes to what expands you, regardless of whether your choices make sense to other people.

Purity culture, particularly its Black iteration, does its most significant damage here. It doesn't just police behavior. It colonizes the interior. It teaches you to distrust your own perception of your desires, your body, your relational needs. It creates a fundamental break between you and your own capacity to know. It trains you to measure every feeling, every impulse, every attraction, every moment of pleasure against external standards that were not created by you or for you.

The result is a kind of spiritual dissociation, a split between who you are and who you think you should be that can persist long after you stop believing in the explicit teachings of purity culture. Even when you intellectually reject the idea that your worth is tied to your sexual choices, even when you consciously choose different values and different practices, the internal surveillance can continue. The second-guessing. The shame. The sense that there is something wrong with wanting what you want, feeling what you feel, knowing what you know.

Coming home to yourself after that rupture is not primarily about leaving the church, or rejecting the theology, or announcing a deconstruction. It is much slower and stranger than that. It is learning, piece by piece, to trust what you feel. To let your body be a source of knowledge rather than a site of surveillance. To recognize the difference between the voice of wisdom and the voice of control, between the guidance that comes from love and the guidance that comes from fear.

This is what I mean by reclaiming the erotic: not just the right to sexual pleasure, though that is part of it, but the larger capacity to live from your own authority, to trust your own perceptions, to let your deepest knowing guide your choices even when those choices don't make sense to other people. It is the difference between being a good girl and being a whole woman. And for Black women, that difference is not just personal. It is political. It is spiritual. It is a form of resistance against every system that has ever tried to convince us that we are dangerous to ourselves and others.

X. The Performance of Failure

Jack Halberstam has a concept that I find useful here: the queer art of failure. The idea is that there is something generative in refusing to succeed on the terms set by dominant culture. To fail at performing the prescribed womanhood, to be too big, too loud, too queer, too much, too unwilling to make yourself small and palatable, is not simply a loss. It is also an opening. It creates the possibility of a different way of knowing and being.

For Black queer women, Halberstam's argument resonates in specific ways. The normative subject, the one the culture has optimized for, was never us. The performance of proper femininity that purity culture demands was always borrowed from a framework that didn't account for us, wasn't built for us, and was often explicitly built against us. To fail at that performance, then, is not a failure. It is a refusal. And out of refusal, something else becomes possible.

I think about this on the hill. I hit him. I was not a good girl in that moment. I was not demure or managed or contained. I did not defer to male authority or accept that my body was available for comment. I was a girl who understood, in my body, that something was being taken without permission and that this was not okay. I was a girl who trusted her own sense of violation over social expectations of compliance.

That refusal, rough and untheorized at twelve, was the beginning of something. It didn't resolve anything. The formation I received over the following years would do significant work to suppress and complicate that impulse. But the impulse was there. The body knew before the theology could override it. The interior authority functioned before the external authority could silence it.

This, I think, is what Lorde means by the erotic. The knowledge that lives in the body before language gets to it. The capacity to recognize what serves life and what serves death, what expands possibility and what contracts it, what honors your humanity and what reduces you to a function. The ability to feel the difference between protection that creates safety and protection that creates captivity.

For Black women navigating purity culture, failure becomes a form of freedom. Failure to be the lady. Failure to contain yourself appropriately. Failure to make yourself small enough for other people's comfort. Failure to prioritize other people's peace over your own integrity. These failures create space. They open up possibilities that compliance forecloses. They allow you to discover who you might be when you are not performing who you are supposed to be.

But failure is also costly. The Black women who choose themselves over respectability, who choose truth over palatability, who choose wholeness over acceptance, often pay significant prices. They lose jobs, relationships, opportunities. They are excluded from communities that once claimed them. They are labeled as angry, as difficult, as too much. They are told that they are betraying their families, their cultures, their faith traditions.

This is why the choice to fail at purity culture is not simple or straightforward for Black women. The performance that constrains us is also the performance that has, in many cases, protected us. The respectability that limits us is also the respectability that has opened doors for us. The containment that diminishes us is also the containment that has kept us safe in unsafe spaces. To choose failure is to give up certain forms of protection, certain types of access, certain kinds of safety. It is to bet your life on the possibility that there might be something more valuable than security, something more important than approval, something more life-giving than acceptance.

XI. For Those Still Inside

I want to be specific about who I'm writing for. I am not writing for people who have completed a deconstruction arc and are now safely on the other side, speaking from somewhere comfortable and outside. That story is real and valid, and it has its own literature. I am not writing for people who have found it possible to simply leave, to walk away from church communities and family expectations and religious formations without looking back. That is a legitimate choice, and for some people, it is the only choice that preserves their sanity and integrity.

I am writing for people who are still in, still attending, still serving, still loving particular communities and particular traditions while also knowing, in the body, that something doesn't fit. I am writing for people for whom leaving is not simple, or not possible, or not desired. I am writing for people who need a different kind of language, not an exit narrative, but a diagnostic one. People who need to understand what is happening to them without necessarily needing to choose immediate separation from the contexts where it is happening.

I am writing for the women who still teach Sunday school while questioning the curriculum. For the women who still sing in the choir while wondering about the lyrics. For the women who still sit in pews while feeling increasingly alienated from the sermons. For the women who love their church families and their faith traditions and their theological inheritances while also recognizing that some of what they inherited was wound alongside wisdom.

This is not a comfortable position. It is not a position that gets celebrated in progressive circles, where the assumption is often that awareness should lead immediately to action, that recognition of harm should result in immediate separation, that staying in relationship with institutions that have harmed you is a form of complicity or self-betrayal.

But the reality is more complicated than that. For many Black women, church communities are not just sources of spiritual formation. They are also sources of social support, economic opportunity, political organizing, cultural preservation, and family connection. To leave church is not just to leave a set of beliefs. It is often to leave networks of care that have been essential for survival, to abandon communities that have provided resources and relationships that are difficult to replace, to give up forms of belonging that have been central to identity formation.

What Michel Foucault argues, and what womanist theologians have been arguing from different directions, is that the genealogies of power that produce our sense of self are not visible to us without work. The instructions handed to us feel like our own beliefs because by the time we receive them, they have already been naturalized. The shame feels self-generated. The fear feels personal. The containment feels like wisdom.

The work is to trace it back. Not to be free of history—that is not possible. But to see the history clearly enough that you can make choices about which parts of the inheritance you will carry forward and which parts you will name as wound. This is not a short process. It is not a podcast episode or a workshop or a single conversation with a therapist. It is the work of years, often accompanied by trusted community, by spiritual direction, by the willingness to sit with a great deal of discomfort.

But it begins with a question. And the question is: where did this idea about my body come from? Not just the immediate source—the pastor who preached the sermon, the church mother who offered the correction, the Sunday school teacher who taught the lesson—but the deeper source. The historical context that created the need for the instruction. The circumstances that made the containment feel necessary. The wounds that the protection was meant to address.

This is genealogical work, archaeological work, the slow excavation of layers of survival strategies and adaptive responses and well-meaning interventions that have, over time, calcified into doctrine. It requires learning to distinguish between the wisdom that emerged from our ancestors' experiences and the trauma responses that also emerged from those experiences. It requires developing the capacity to honor the strategies that kept previous generations alive while also recognizing when those strategies have outlived their usefulness.

XII. Conjuring

The final section of the original paper was called "Conjuring." I want to keep that word. To conjure is to call forth. It is to name something that is present but not yet visible. It draws on a tradition, African, diasporic, rooted in the understanding that the spirit world and the material world are not cleanly separated, that what has been cannot simply be discarded, that the dead are not done with us and we are not done with them.

What womanist theology at its best does is conjure. It does not pretend that the history of Black women's bodies is not present in the room. It does not ask you to get over the wound before you can access the healing. It names the ghost. It traces the haunting. And then it asks: given all of this, what does it look like to love your flesh?

M. Shawn Copeland writes that "in order to restore her body to wholeness, the freed woman had to love her body; and to love her body meant dealing with the wounds of slavery." I sit with that sentence often. The loving and the dealing are not sequential. They happen together, or they don't happen. You cannot love what you refuse to see clearly. You cannot heal what you will not name. You cannot be free of what you pretend is not there.

For Black women still navigating institutional church life, still holding the tension between the tradition that formed them and the harm it has sometimes done, the conjuring work is this: to look clearly at what was handed to you, to grieve what the containment cost you, to trace the genealogy of the instructions back to their sources, and to begin the slow, particular work of coming home to your body.

Not performing freedom. Not announcing liberation. Not claiming to be beyond the reach of the systems that shaped you. But slowly, in real time, learning to trust what you feel. Learning to recognize the voice of your own authority. Learning to distinguish between the protection that creates safety and the protection that creates captivity. Learning to choose yourself, not in opposition to your people, but in service of the fullest possible version of your people's flourishing.

This work happens in therapy sessions and spiritual direction meetings and late-night conversations with trusted friends. It happens in moments of prayer and meditation where you practice listening to your own voice without the overlay of external expectations. It happens in small choices—what to wear, how to speak, which invitations to accept, which relationships to prioritize—where you experiment with trusting your own judgment rather than deferring to inherited wisdom.

It happens in the recognition that the erotic, in Lorde's sense, is not the enemy of the spiritual but its deepest expression. That the capacity to feel deeply is not a threat to holiness but its foundation. That the body is not a site of danger but a source of knowledge. That desire is not a liability but a gift. That pleasure is not selfish but sacred. That joy is not frivolous but essential.

This is not easy work. It requires grieving the versions of yourself you were taught to be. It requires disappointing people you love. It requires giving up forms of safety and approval and belonging that have been central to your survival. It requires learning to live with uncertainty, with complexity, with the discomfort of not knowing for sure whether the choices you are making are right.

But it also opens up possibilities that compliance forecloses. It creates space for relationships based on authenticity rather than performance. It allows for forms of intimacy that are not mediated by surveillance. It makes possible a spirituality that emerges from your own encounter with the divine rather than from other people's interpretations of what that encounter should look like.

I'm still doing this work. I don't think I will finish it. The ghosts are not easily exorcised. The patterns are not easily changed. The muscle memory of containment runs deep, and the world is still not entirely safe for Black women who choose themselves over respectability.

But I am more convinced than ever that it is the right work to do. Not just for individual liberation, though that matters. But for collective healing. For the girls who are standing on hills right now, learning what it means to become she, who need different models of what that becoming might look like. For the women who are sitting in pews right now, feeling the gap between who they are and who they are supposed to be, who need language for naming what they are experiencing. For the communities that are ready to imagine what it might look like to protect Black women without constraining them, to honor the wisdom of our ancestors while also acknowledging the wounds they carried.

This is the conjuring: the calling forth of a different possibility. Not the absence of tradition, but tradition that has been consciously chosen rather than unconsciously inherited. Not the rejection of community, but community that can hold the fullness of who we are. Not the abandonment of faith, but faith that is grounded in our own encounters with the sacred rather than in other people's interpretations of what the sacred demands.

The work begins with a question: where did this idea about my body come from? It continues with an investigation: what circumstances made this instruction feel necessary? It deepens with acknowledgment: what has this cost me, and what has it protected me from? And it flowers in choice: given all of this, how do I want to live in my flesh? What does it look like to love my body, in this moment, in this context, with this history?

I hit him. I was twelve. I didn't know anything about feminist theory or womanist theology or the genealogies of power that produce our sense of self. But I knew, in my body, that something was being taken without permission. And I said no. That was the beginning. Everything since then has been elaboration, explanation, the slow work of catching my analysis up to what my body already knew.

The conjuring continues.