Whose Baby Iz Yew?: Getting My Holy Ghost Songs Back

Indhira Udofia

Mother Lillian Lloyd did not come to play.

If you know, you know — the clip of her hollering at her phone after a Maverick City co-founder suggested that traditional Black gospel music doesn't sell has become a whole liturgy for Black churchy kids of a certain formation. "Stop singing that mess. You better get your Holy Ghost songs back." It has lived in my spirit as rebuke, invitation, and diagnosis all at once.

I have been avoiding my writing.

Partly the transition into a new season of work has been rough on the body, mind, and spirit in ways I did not fully anticipate. Partly I was sitting with the particular grief of a space that was supposed to offer respite revealing itself as something smaller than that promise. But underneath both of those things, if I am honest, was the older avoidance — the one that has been present since long before this season, the one that is less about circumstance and more about a complicated relationship between my voice and the question of who gets to authorize it. The things that take root in my heart and head chase my imagination. My writer part, if I am being precise about it, is more haint than human. And I had spent a long time praying the knowing quiet — closing the gate between what I carried and what I let myself speak — out of fear of what the full opening might cost me.

Mother Lloyd's rebuke found me in the middle of that avoidance and named it. Because what she was really asking — what I have been circling in my research, in my spiritual practice, in the slow and sometimes reluctant work of returning to myself — is not just about music. It is about the archive. It is about what we have forsaken in the name of legibility and palatability. It is about the mother tongue we stopped speaking because someone convinced us a flatter, more acceptable language would serve us better.

Some of us were told that lie very directly. By people we loved. In kitchens and cars and ordinary afternoons that we did not know we would be carrying for decades.

But there is another part of the archive I have been slower to name. Not the tongue. Not the knowing. The rage.

When I started Webwork Dispatches, my intention wasn't to build a space for my Quare womanist rage. I didn't expect that the thing to finally launch this writing into the public would be triggered by the villainy of Black men and their allies. But I shouldn't be surprised. When I reflect on what it means to be a Black feminist educator and scholar — a Black Queer femme with a PhD, teaching in Leadership Studies, navigating what I can only describe as the most toxic landscape of evil, daily — I realize that one of the things I have not spent enough time doing is thinking about anger as a birthright.

Toni Cade Bambara opens The Salt Eaters with a question that has haunted me since the first time I read it: Minnie Ransom, the fabled healer, sitting across from Velma Henry, who has tried to take her own life, asks her plainly — are you sure you want to be well? The question isn't tender. It's a challenge. Velma is stiff on the stool, gown ties knotted tight across her back, joints dry, face frozen. She cannot even perform the Velma-things — the sucking of teeth, the rolling of eyes — that might constitute an answer. Minnie is humming, swirling her shawl, draping her silky fringe like it's a veronica she might use to wipe Velma clean. And what she's really asking is not whether Velma wants to survive but whether she is willing to do the whole thing — to be well in a way that does not require the flattening of any part of herself. Because Minnie knows, as the old swamphag knows, that many of these daughters of the yam have forgotten how to draw up the powers from the deep. Not full sunned and sweet anymore.

I think about that question in this season of my life and career. The question of whether I want to be well — whether I am willing to accept the wholeness that includes the fury. Because the avoidance of my writing was never only about voice or tongue or legibility. It was also about rage. About the fact that the full opening of the gate means letting through not only the knowing but the anger that accompanies it — the rage at every structure, every relationship, every tender ordinary afternoon that conspired to teach me that a good woman, a good daughter, a good scholar keeps it quiet.

Audre Lorde understood this. In "The Uses of Anger," she writes about living with anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid her visions to waste. She names it precisely: anger as a response to racist attitudes and the actions and presumptions that arise from them. She draws a distinction that has become essential to me — anger expressed and translated into action as a liberating act of clarification, versus guilt and defensiveness, which are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder. The wall serves none of our futures.

But Lorde also names something else — something I have been carrying in my body for years without having the language for it. She describes reading from her work and being asked by a white woman how to deal directly with anger. Lorde asks her, how do you use your rage? And then she has to turn away from the blankness in that woman's eyes before being invited to participate in her own annihilation. She writes plainly: I do not exist to feel her anger for her.

I have lived inside that refusal without naming it for most of my adult life. The refusal to metabolize what is not mine. But what I am reckoning with now is the companion realization — that I also stopped metabolizing what is mine. My own rage. My own fury at the architecture of patriarchal power that I watched operate in my own household, in the church, in the academy, in the daily choreography of being a Black woman who is expected to hold everything and say nothing about its weight.

Sara Ahmed would call this the work of the feminist killjoy — the one who ruins the dinner, who gets in the way of other people's happiness by refusing to sit quietly, by refusing to take it all in. Ahmed writes about being seated at the dinner table, her father making a challenge, and then the accusation: another dinner ruined. Whatever she said, however she spoke, if the discussion became heated, she would be treated as its cause. You become a feminist killjoy, Ahmed says, when you are not willing to go along with something. When you react, speak back, to those with authority. When you use words like sexism because that is what you hear.

I have been a feminist killjoy since before I had the language for it. And the cost of that position — the accumulation of every ruined dinner, every eye roll in a meeting, every invitation to be softer, more palatable, more containable — is the particular exhaustion that brought me to Minnie Ransom's stool, asking myself whether I was really willing to be well.

My father is a proud Naija man. This has never been subtle.

He never changed his citizenship — kept his green card, kept his full allegiance, kept the line between what was his and what was merely where he lived clean and unambiguous. When his family called me by my name, they called me by my Nigerian middle name, the one he had quietly submitted on the paperwork when my mother asked him to handle my name change before kindergarten. She had asked for one thing. He filed another. Two inheritances, one child, one form — and my father made a unilateral decision about which one would be legible to his people before I was old enough to have a say.

We ate the food even when our cousins weren't made to. We were badgered to learn his language, though his mother as teacher was not a compelling one and the lessons never quite took root. He said our last name with particular emphasis — Udofia — and the weight he put on it was instruction as much as pronunciation. We were to carry it a certain way. We were to sit at the feet of his parents despite the fraught complexity of those relationships. We were to understand, without it always being stated directly, that this lineage was the one that conferred worth in a world that was always trying to diminish us.

Then one afternoon — after I had been talking about some microaggression or another, the particular exhaustion of being Black in a predominantly white space — he said it. "Remember, your people came on the PanAm, not the Amistad."

The words didn't land harder than other things he had said. But they lingered longest.

What they produced in me, slowly and without my full awareness, was a kind of internal flattening. I began to hide the southern accent that was developing in my speech — the one that had come from my mother's people, from summers and visits and the particular music of that lineage. I began to relate to other Black kids through a competitive lens, measuring proximity to worthiness rather than simply being in community. I worked to make my Naija father proud in the ways he had made legible to me — performing a certain kind of excellence, a certain kind of distance from the parts of my inheritance that he had implicitly marked as lesser.

What I did not understand then — what I am still learning now — is that the part of me he was asking me to thin out was not less than. It was, in fact, the part that knew things his framework had no language for.

And the thing he never named, because naming it would have made the architecture visible: it wasn't just the tongue he wanted thinned. It was the temper. The holy fury. The part of me that could see the cracks of patriarchy sitting at the helm of someone's greatness and someone's call and refuse to look away.

I grew up with brothers, a father, uncles, and men in my life who could have been — and often were — objectively seen as good men. But I saw the cracks. I always saw the cracks. The permission that was granted to the boys in my class for being bombastic and brilliant while I was expected to temper my own fire into something more manageable. The way my father moved through our childhood, the peeling back of layers revealing that my obligation as a daddy's girl was always colored with the rage of responsibility thrust upon us — to fill in the pieces, to be casualties to his pursuit of greatness.

I have choked down disrespect from men subordinate to me. I have watched men look bewildered when I cannot share in their remorse over my own harassment. I have carried a feminist ethic that is read as adversarial simply because it refuses to pretend the cracks aren't there.

My misandry is rooted in my experience of "great men" being absolute horrors behind doors. My misandry is rooted in doing the hard work to consider safety and softening, only for that same work to become the grounds on which my own greatness is resented — only to be expected to emotionally hold the very people trying to destroy me, to protect their ego, to keep something of a life.

I embraced the politics of misandry at a young age, and I am only now understanding that what I was doing was not rejecting men wholesale. I was refusing the terms of a covenant that required my diminishment as the price of their elevation. I was seeing, clearly and early, that the celebration of certain bodies in the Black community — the theological affirmation that scholars like Kelly Brown Douglas have spent their careers naming — has never been evenly distributed. Douglas writes about the Black Church's failure to fully celebrate all Black bodies within its walls. She names how the push for ontological Blackness, as articulated by first-generation Black theologians, often coded as the celebration of the Black heterosexual male, leaving women and queer people in a silence that constituted its own form of subjugation. Douglas built her blues theology at the crossroads — the intersection of the sacred and the profane, the place where the blues women lived and where the sanctuary refused to go. She insisted that liberation requires going to those intersections, that the sources for freedom are not only in the hymnal but also in the juke joint and the blues lyric and the holler and the cuss.

I felt that theology in my body before I had any intellectual framework for what I was feeling.

Jessica Marie Johnson writes about this bodily knowledge differently — through the archive of Black women's flesh itself. In Wicked Flesh, she traces how African women and women of African descent used intimacy and kinship to construct freedom in the Atlantic world, how free status was never simply a legal category but something that gained its texture from struggle. Johnson names how slaveowners declared African women lecherous, wicked, and monstrous even as those same slaveowners navigated imperial desire for Black flesh. The word wicked — applied to Black women's bodies as condemnation — becomes in Johnson's hands a reclamation. The flesh they called wicked was the flesh that refused to be still. That pushed back. That made freedom out of what was supposed to be bondage.

I think about my own flesh and its refusals. The way my body has always known things that the approved frameworks couldn't hold.

There is a scene in the original stage production of Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf — the "Somebody Almost Walked Off Wid Alla My Stuff" choreopoem — that I return to every time I need to remember that rage has a liturgy.

The lady in green is furious. Not sad. Not resigned. Not performing the acceptable version of Black women's grief that the world has learned to digest. She is furious, and her fury is an act of reclamation. Somebody took her stuff — not just the material things but the intangible ones. The laugh. The memories. The rhythm. The parts of herself that she had allowed someone else to carry and that someone had tried to walk away with, casual as anything, as if they had a right.

I want to sit with what Shange is doing in that scene because I think it holds the key to what I am trying to do with this dispatch. The lady in green is not making a request. She is making an inventory. She is standing in the middle of the stage, naming each thing that was taken — her rhythms, her improvisational music, her sweat, her stuff — and in the naming, she is performing the refusal to let it go quietly. She is not asking for her stuff back. She is declaring that it was never available for the taking. The declaration itself is the act of repossession.

And notice — she is not composed. She is not performing the version of Black womanhood that the Church or the academy or the family dinner table would find acceptable. She is loud. She is specific. She is furious in a way that is not palatable. The choreopoem does not resolve into forgiveness or understanding. It resolves into a woman standing in her own fullness and refusing — with every fiber of her wicked flesh — to let somebody walk off with what is hers.

There is a particular way that the lady in green holds the word stuff in her mouth. It is not abstract. It is bodily. She is talking about the things that live in the flesh — the way she laughs, the way she walks, the rhythm of her particular knowing. Somebody tried to take the things that cannot be separated from the self without violence. And what Shange understood, what she built her entire choreopoetic practice around, is that for Black women, the theft is often perpetrated by the very people we were taught to love. The somebody who almost walked off with alla her stuff is not a stranger. He is intimate. He is the one who was close enough to know which parts of her were the most vulnerable, the most portable, the most easily pocketed. That is what makes the inventory an act of courage — because she has to name what was taken by someone she chose.

This is what I mean when I say rage has a liturgy. It is not chaos. It is not destruction. It is inventory and refusal and declaration, all at once. It is the moment the lady in green stops being the kind of woman that the world can carry around in its pocket and becomes the kind of woman who takes up the whole room. Traci West, writing about Black women and resistance ethics, names this refusal as a moral act. She argues that Black women's resistance to violence — whether physical, spiritual, or epistemic — constitutes an ethical practice that the traditional moral frameworks of church and academy have failed to recognize. The lady in green is doing ethics. She is doing theology. She just doesn't look like what the seminary taught us theology is supposed to look like.

When Beyoncé structured Lemonade around the emotional arc from intuition through denial, anger, apathy, emptiness, accountability, reformation, forgiveness, resurrection, hope, and redemption, she was building on the same architecture Shange laid down. The movement from "Hold Up" to "Don't Hurt Yourself" is the movement from the lady in green's first realization to her full declaration. It is the movement from grief to fury, and from fury to freedom. The visual album's journey through those stages refuses the shortcut — refuses to skip the anger, refuses to perform the composed version of a woman processing betrayal. The yellow dress and the baseball bat are not decoration. They are liturgical garments.

Douglas would recognize her. Douglas built her crossroads theology precisely for this — the intersection where the blues women lived, where the juke joint and the sanctuary collide, where the cuss and the prayer are the same breath. The lady in green is standing at that crossroads. She is choosing the profane — the cussing, the claiming, the refusal to be composed — as her act of worship. Minnie Ransom, draping her shawl and humming up and down the scales, would look at the lady in green and ask the same question she asked Velma: are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?

And the lady in green, unlike Velma frozen on her stool, answers yes. She answers yes by refusing to be still.

That is where I find my Holy Ghost song.

My mother never allowed us to live in the lie.

She held the fullness of what we were without apology or negotiation. She never permitted the myth that being "one of the good ones" — more African, less American, more respectable, less entangled with the particular grief and glory of Black life in this country — was an inherent sign of worth. She understood, in the way that Black women who have had to hold complicated things often understand, that our matrilineal inheritance was not a liability to be managed but a resource to be honored.

My grandmother was born in Eutawville, South Carolina — a small town in what was considered upstate country. When she left the family sharecropping plot with her mother and siblings, they moved down toward Charleston, closer to the ancestors who had worked the land of the Sea Islands, closer to the man my great-grandmother would later marry. I have been learning these names only recently. Tracing the family tree has been an act of excavation as much as documentation — names surfacing that explain things I felt long before I had any intellectual framework for what I was feeling.

The Sea Islands hold their own archive. The folk traditions carried from those islands — the Brer Rabbit trickster tales, the haint stories, the root work and the songs — are not quaint relics. They are technologies of survival. They are the evidence of a people who maintained an epistemology across the Middle Passage, who kept their knowing alive in the soil and the water and the language, who built a world out of what the slaveholding world insisted was nothing. When folklorists came to the Sea Islands in the early twentieth century to collect the stories, they found a tradition so intact, so layered, so irreducible to the categories of Western knowledge that it could only be transcribed, never fully translated. The tales move between the human and the animal, between the living and the dead, between cunning and devotion, with no interest in maintaining the boundaries that Western epistemology insists upon. The trickster outsmarts the powerful. The haint carries messages from the ancestors. The root worker holds knowledge that the doctor cannot access. These are not charming folk artifacts. These are the philosophical traditions of a people who refused to let the slaveholder's framework define the limits of the real.

When I encounter the traditions of the Sea Islands, I am not reading history. I am reading a letter addressed to me across centuries, written in a language my body has always been trying to remember.

The body knows what the mind hasn't caught up to yet.

I remember a trip to Edisto Island as a teenager. My mother told me later that she had noticed me looking melancholy out the window as we drove toward the beach. What I remember is the immense heaviness that settled into me as I watched the landscape pass — a weight that was not sadness exactly but something older and more specific than sadness. I remember saying out loud that I could feel Black people's spirits in the trees. That I couldn't shake it loose.

What I did not say, because I did not have the language for it, was that this had been happening for as long as I could remember. Before I learned to close the gate — to pray the knowing quiet — I could sense presence. Grief, comfort, pain, restlessness — they arrived as feeling before they arrived as thought. I used to be able to see how haints rode bodies, the flashing of face imagery that told me something about what a person carried underneath what they presented. I prayed to stop it. Not because it felt wrong but because I was afraid of what the full opening might reveal, what it might cost me, how it might make me unreadable to the worlds I was trying to belong to.

What I understand now is that the prayer to close the gate was the same move my father's words had produced in me. The flattening of something irreducible into something manageable. The CCM move — turning the wild, uncontrollable, untranslatable thing into a format legible to the mainstream. I prayed away a gift that was, in fact, my inheritance. That had always been my inheritance. That the Sea Islands and Berkeley County and Eutawville had been trying to return to me every time I came close enough to receive it.

But I also prayed away the anger that came with the gift. The fury at being asked to choose. The rage at the terms of my own belonging. That, too, was part of the gate I closed.

There was a family reunion. I do not remember exactly how old I was.

What I remember is my cousin — her Gullah Geechee accent thick and unhurried, the particular music of it — turning to me and asking the question that became the title of this essay:

"Whose baby iz yew?"

I could not answer her. Not because I didn't know I belonged to these people — I felt it in my body every time I was near them, every time the soil of that part of South Carolina registered in my chest as something ancient and recognizable. But I could not translate. The tongue that would have let me answer had been slowly, quietly thinned out — by the pressure to be legible to my father's world, by the prayer that closed the gate, by the accumulated weight of belonging to so many different registers at once and learning to prioritize the ones that seemed to confer the most safety.

I remember the embarrassment that arose in me. Not at my cousin — never at her — but at myself. At the distance between who I was standing there and who I might have been if different pressures had been allowed to shape me. At the gap between the inheritance my body was reaching toward and the one my tongue could actually hold.

The more connected I felt to my mother's people, I had noticed over the years, the less respect I seemed to receive in the broader world. The southern accent was a liability in certain rooms. The Gullah Geechee roots were not the kind of African heritage that earned the specific respectability my father's lineage was supposed to confer. The knowing — the haint-seeing, the somatic recognition, the particular way that certain soil and certain water registered in my body as home — none of that translated into the currencies that the worlds I moved through valued. So I had learned, without fully deciding to, to keep it quiet.

And the rage? The rage translated least of all.

A Black woman's anger is the most untranslatable thing she carries. It is the thing that every system — patriarchy, the academy, the church, the family — conspires to make inaudible. Lorde knew this. Shange knew this. Bambara knew this when she wrote Minnie Ransom asking about the daughters of the yam who had forgotten how to draw up the powers from the deep. Douglas knows this when she writes about the blues women who sang what the sanctuary wouldn't hold. Johnson knows this when she traces how Black women's bodies were called wicked precisely because they refused the terms of their own containment. The anger is always the last thing we get back, because it is the thing that the structures most need us not to have.

I am learning to unlearn that quieting.

It has come, as most important reckonings come, sideways and through grief. A family tree. A pandemic. The particular silence of loss that strips away everything that was never really holding you anyway. Names I had not known that suddenly explained why certain places felt like deep wells. The traces I kept finding in my research — reading Gullah and recognizing something in the language that exceeded academic analysis, that required a different kind of knowing to receive fully. Ancestors who had apparently been waiting for me to stop running long enough to listen.

But the unlearning has also come through anger. Through seasons of professional fury that I was not prepared for and could not, in the end, keep praying quiet. Through the particular education of watching men I trusted reveal themselves as architects of harm, and then being asked — by institutions, by colleagues, by the very structures that failed to protect me — to hold their remorse, to process their guilt, to make my pain palatable enough for them to metabolize.

Lorde wrote that every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against the oppressions that brought it into being. She said that anger focused with precision can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change — not a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, but a basic and radical alteration in the assumptions underlying our lives. She was not talking about being polite. She was not talking about waiting for the right moment or the right tone. She was talking about the liberating act of clarification that happens when you stop containing the thing that the world has told you is too much.

I think of what it means that Bambara's Minnie Ransom — the healer, the swamphag, the one who can see what others cannot — describes the women coming to her as no longer being full sunned and sweet. She asks her spirit guide what is wrong with the daughters of the yam, why they have forgotten how to draw up the powers from the deep. And what strikes me about that question is that it is not a judgment. It is a grief. Minnie is grieving the loss of something that the daughters of the yam were supposed to carry — a fullness, a power, a way of being in the world that included the sweet and the bitter, the gentle and the fierce, the prayer and the cuss. The flattening that I am describing — the one my father's words produced, the one the academy reinforces, the one the church blesses — is what produces daughters of the yam who can no longer draw up the powers from the deep.

Bambara's old spirit guide, Old Wife, tells Minnie that Velma is off dancing in the mud with cowries. Minnie asks what is wrong with the women — if they aren't sticking their heads in ovens and opening their veins, they're looking for some man to tear his head off. The exasperation in her voice is not contempt. It is the despair of a healer watching a whole generation of women lose access to themselves. And what Minnie understands, what Old Wife keeps trying to tell her in her own roundabout way, is that the healing is not about returning to some prior state of calm. The healing is about returning to the full range — the mud-dancing and the cowrie-throwing and the powers from the deep, which are not gentle or composed or palatable but which are real. The daughters of the yam are not sick because they are angry. They are sick because the anger has no place to go.

I know this in my own body. I know what it is to have the anger with no place to go — to choke it down in meetings where men subordinate to me speak to me as if I am the help, to swallow it at dinners where my credentials are treated as cute rather than authoritative, to fold it into professionalism while watching someone who harassed me receive the institutional compassion that was never extended to me. The anger does not disappear when you contain it. It calcifies. It becomes the stiffness in Velma's joints, the frozen face, the inability to swivel. It becomes the prayer to close the gate.

What I would add to Minnie's question — what I am learning to say out loud — is that the expectation that Black women will manage white and male guilt for them is itself a form of violence. It is the emotional equivalent of somebody almost walking off with all my stuff. And the remedy is not the quiet, composed, theological response. The remedy is the lady in green, standing in the middle of the room, naming every single thing that was taken and refusing to let it go.

So I am taking it back. All of it. The tongue. The knowing. The accent. The ancestors. The haints. And the rage.

What I am understanding now is that the call to get our Holy Ghost songs back is not nostalgia. It is not a retreat from the present into a romanticized past. It is an epistemological act — a refusal to continue operating from the impoverished archive that respectability and legibility have handed us in place of the real thing. The Gullah Geechee language and spirituality I am slowly, clumsily returning to requires an unruptured relationship with the fullness of myself. My Southernness. My Blackness. My queerness. My ancestors. My homeland. My fury. The repair of a breached covenant that shows up every time I am asked to be legible and palatable at the cost of being whole.

What is comforting about this space — Webwork Dispatches, this place where I begin to read the webs within my own world — is releasing the flimsy cobwebs of passivity and obligation. I think that tapping into the spirit of my work means that sometimes my Holy Ghost song is being able to cuss out the powers and structures that continue to impede on our ability to be whole, healthy, and well.

Sometimes my Holy Ghost song is in the laughter and joy that hugs my relationship with Black women, femmes, and non-men. Sometimes it is in the expansiveness of my lungs and the strengthening of my voice. Sometimes it is in the reading — in Lorde, in Shange, in Bambara, in Douglas, in Johnson, in Ahmed, in every Black woman who ever sat down and wrote the fury that the world told her to keep quiet.

And sometimes it is in the wicked flesh itself — the body that was called dangerous and monstrous and lecherous, the body that refuses the terms of its own containment, the body that carries the haint-knowledge and the Sea Island soil and the southern accent and the holy, untranslatable rage. Johnson wrote that African women endowed free status with meaning through an active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practice. I am doing the same thing with my own freedom — with my own voice, my own writing, my own refusal to keep singing a flattened version of a song that was always meant to be wild.

Lorde wrote that her fear of anger taught her nothing. That our fear of anger will teach us nothing, also. I have spent too many years being afraid of the weight. Afraid that if I let the full fury through, the rooms I am trying to belong to will not hold me. But the rooms that cannot hold my anger were never holding me in the first place. They were holding a version of me that I constructed for their comfort — a version that kept the gate closed, the accent hidden, the haints quiet, the cuss contained. That version is the CCM version. That version is the mess Mother Lloyd is telling me to stop singing.

As much as I attempted to hide whose baby I am — trying to sever my connection to my maternal lineage in order to live up to the Udofia name — I realize that love, rage, and wisdom are all parts of what it means to fully return and remember. It is not enough to hold the words. I have to hold the rage as well.

My father told me a lie about which inheritance was worth carrying. My mother told me the truth. And the weeping willows of Berkeley County, and the soil of the Sea Islands, and the traces of a language that survived the Middle Passage and the plantation and the sharecropping plot and the migration — all of it has been telling me the same truth my mother told me, in a register that goes deeper than language.

My cousin asked me whose baby I was.

I am still learning how to answer her. Not because I don't know — I have always known, somewhere beneath the flattening — but because the answer requires a tongue I am in the slow, necessary work of recovering. It requires reopening gates I prayed shut. It requires letting the haints ride again, trusting that what they carry is not threat but inheritance. And it requires letting the rage ride, too — trusting that the fury is not a departure from the holy but a return to it.

The Holy is in the full celebration of the wholeness of who I am.

That is the song I am trying to get back. That is the archive I am trying to return to. That is the tongue I am trying to remember how to speak.

"Stop singing that mess. You better get your Holy Ghost songs back."

Yes ma'am, Mother Lloyd.

I'm working on it. And this time, I'm not being quiet about it.