The Tree of Life

She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: And happy is every one that retaineth her.

— Proverbs 3:18

Smoked a lot of trees

enough to make a nation heal

— The Lonely Rager

I thumbed through the forms. A checklist for PTSD. The trauma listed: car accidents, violence, death. None of them fit the bill.

What if this doesn't work? Just make up a story about being molested — that's what Orlando told me years before. I couldn't do it. I needed something closer to the truth. Something believable. I needed to prove that I was suffering from PTSD to get this Medical Marijuana Card.

I'd rehearsed it with my wife the night before. What if I tell them I grew up in a cult? Whoever was on the other side of this door would be my first audience. The thing is, I'd never really considered my upbringing traumatic. It's just how I grew up.

I looked up at the woman sponsoring the day. Big, Black, happy as a kite. I filled out the form, handed over the clipboard, and waited.

"Mr. McPherson?"

I took a deep breath and headed down the narrow hall to a small room in the back. I sat across from an older Spanish woman, late 50s. She looked like Aunt Rosa. She reminded me of a church sister.

Damn. I hope this woman is not a church woman. I prayed she wasn't a Christian. Or at least not the same strain as me.

"Hi. So tell me why you're here."

"Where do you want to start?"

What I wanted to say was that I grew up afraid of dying. Not afraid of death — afraid of the timing of it. Afraid of getting hit by a car on the way home from the wrong place and going straight to hell. Afraid of the rapture catching me on a bad night. In college a guy named Tyrone came back from the club drunk and crashed his car, and for weeks the only question that mattered was where he'd ended up.

Outside that world, the fear sounds crazy. Inside it, it's #13. Declaration of faith. Jesus could come back at any moment. And so you better be ready.

I'd never said any of this out loud.

Here I was, trying to get weed to cope with anxieties brought on by the church. My livelihood was at stake. Weed made it all easier. I'd occasionally get paranoid, but I was getting better. And I knew it had everything to do with —

[queue the tire screech]

— It was a stretch.

Growing up, we looked at other sects — Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons — as cult-ish. Our church was different. We had the truth. The Church of God has 30 million members worldwide. It made its way to Jamaica in 1917 as the New Testament Church of God. That branch made its way to Bridgeport, CT, where it found me.

"Tell me more." She took out a pen and pad.

I let out a big sigh. "Where should I start?"

"Wherever you want."

"I guess I'll start when we came to America."

"Who's we?"

"Me and my mom."

"Go on, continue…"

In Jesus Name

We believe in one God eternally existing in three persons; namely, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost

Summer 1995

I was eight when I had my first doctrinal conflict.

Who do I believe?

What do I believe?

A year after we arrived in America, my mom's friend introduced us to a small church on the east side of Bridgeport, housed in what used to be a funeral home — East Bridgeport Church of God. A few big families anchored the place. It felt like family because it mostly was. The pastor was 27. His wife was about 36. They had a boy of six and a girl of four, and the whole congregation organized itself around them.

I kept asking my mom to come with me. Eventually she did. She hadn't played keyboard since high school — technically she'd backslid — but she became the church's keyboard player anyway. We weren't just attending. We were in.

That same summer I went back to Jamaica for four weeks. I brought 'Til Shiloh on cassette and played it the whole flight. Buju performed in Bridgeport later that summer, and somehow I ended up backstage. He nodded at me like an uncle would. Like he knew something about who I was going to be.

Jamaica was where I learned my Bridgeport church was wrong.

My grandma's church, Richmond Apostolic, was Oneness Pentecostal — Jesus only. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost weren't three persons. They were three names for one. To call them three was to worship more than one God, and to be baptized in three names instead of one was to be baptized into nothing at all.

The consequence was hell. Or missing the rapture. Grandma never said it loud. She didn't have to. She handed me her books and let them say it, and at her kitchen table I read the arguments — the verses, the genealogies of the doctrine, the names of the men who'd gotten it wrong and the men who'd gotten it right. By the end of four weeks I knew where I stood.

I came back to Bridgeport quiet about it. I sat in the pews. I sang the songs. But every Sunday when the pastor closed with In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I added under my breath:

In Jesus' name.

If I was going to follow anybody's doctrine, it was going to be Grandma's.

Children of Refuge

"We believe in the premillennial second coming of Jesus. First, to resurrect the righteous dead and to catch away the living saints to Him in the air. Second, to reign on the earth a thousand years."

By 12, we were members. Baptized. My mom on the organ, returning to a skill she'd honed growing up in Jamaica. Grandma satisfied.

We'd become close with the pastor's family. When he and his wife went away, my mom would play nanny — his two kids, a boy of 8 and a girl of 6.

I cried one day because I missed my dad. He lived in England, and the silence from him was deafening. My mom thought the pastor could fill the void. The pastor agreed. I don't remember the conversation. I remember the result. He started introducing me at church functions as his other son, and I detested it. It made me feel like a bastard. A fatherless boy who was the charity case of his pastor.

He wasn't officially my father. He was something more awkward — surrogate, spiritual, unspecified. The most awkward part was when he asked why I didn't call him dad. I was afraid of being disrespectful, so I tried, feebly, letting the word fall out of my mouth. Never in front of his actual kids. That would have been even weirder. If he called the house, I'd tell them, YOUR dad called. Not ours.

He wasn't my dad and I didn't feel that kind of affection for him. But as far as male role models went, he was the best I had. In England I had a host of men. America took all of them. The few my mom dated, with one exception, were clowns. I never said it. I read them. They didn't want anything to do with me anyway.

The exception was Rex.

Rex was Ghanaian, which reminded me of my mom's friends back in England. He took me to the barber every Friday and got me McDonald's on the way home. Sometimes Toys R Us. Sometimes a new PlayStation game. He kept doing it for at least a year after he and my mom stopped dating. I ran into him recently. He was dating a woman my age. She had a daughter about 7 or 8 — the same age I was when he was around. He was in a loop, helping her with her fundraiser, introducing me as his son. I didn't mind.

By high school I was typing the pastor's sermons every weekend. These were no ordinary sermons. He'd grown up not knowing how to read, so he overcompensated by using all the big words. His messages ran two hours. He wrote and rehearsed constantly. He worked hard and cared hard. I didn't like not having a dad. Sometimes I didn't mind. This guy was the leader of our flock. Maybe there was something I could learn.

One thing I learned was faith. He gave a lot, often on faith. In 1999 the church moved from a funeral home on the east side to a synagogue on Main Street. It was a faith move. Before we gutted the new building we renovated the old one, and I watched that energy carry into the next. The lesson was: when you're getting ready to move, maximize your current place. Be grateful for it. Then your next will open up.

Academically I had everything a public school could offer, because we went to school two towns over in one of the richest towns in America. School in one zip code, church in another. Five days a week I crossed between them and didn't think much of it.

But because of church I didn't mix much after school. If I wasn't at home or in class, I was in the building. Sunday school, asking too many questions, acting too smart. Going to the store for chips. Recording the service, making copies. Waiting after service for three hours. Going out to eat. Going back to church to sleep in the back pews. Monday: ladies' meeting. Wednesday: prayer meeting. Thursday: choir. Friday: youth fellowship. Saturday: sermon typing.

I couldn't do anything else even if I wanted to. So I tried to make sense of it.

I had to.

The biggest hurdle was time — how this gospel was condemning all these people to hell who I thought didn't deserve it. I'd imagine some distant person who'd never heard of Christ and think it was crazy that they'd burn for the silence. I heard the rebuttals every week. I could plug all the holes.

So I gave up.

All I wanted was to make it far enough to have a girlfriend, have sex, and figure it out from there.

But I was deathly afraid of getting a girl pregnant. So I didn't have a problem waiting.

I wanted to be a good guy. I wanted a good girl. And the clock was ticking.

The Devil is a Liar

I was heading home from church when the blizzard started. Every Sunday, I'd drive an hour and a half from Jersey to Connecticut to be in church, then make the long drive back so I could be at work Monday morning. I rarely missed a Sunday. If I did, it had to be for a good reason.

I'd been wrestling with what it meant to be saved for years by then. Every Sunday in service, every weeknight in between. On the way to a party, on the way home from one, every time something happened that I couldn't square with what I'd been taught. The wrestling didn't stop when church ended.

I was about 20 minutes from Morristown, NJ, heading south on 287, when my 2007 VW Jetta started to slide. Brake lights flared in front of me. I slammed on the brakes. The car kept sliding.

Kanye West's Monster was blasting through the speakers, a dark anthem that suddenly felt like a twisted soundtrack to my last moments. I didn't even like it that much, but listening in that moment made me feel guilty, as though I'd invited disaster into my life. My biggest fear had always been dying and going to hell — either because I was somewhere I shouldn't have been, or under the influence of some secular force.

The thought that came next wasn't fear of death. It was: they gonna say at church on Sunday he was listening to Monster. They gonna have to pray extra hard at his funeral.

I remembered Ty, the guy who played keyboard for a group I sang with in high school. He died in a car accident, apparently coming home from a strip club in New York. The church was full of stories like his — people dying in sin, supposedly going straight to hell.

Not me. Not yet. Not this.

I gripped the steering wheel, desperately turning it, praying to avoid a fatal collision. The car swerved sharply, the tires losing their grip. Somehow, I steered away from the cars ahead, but I couldn't control where I was heading. The Jetta jerked to the side, skidded up an embankment, and crashed into a small tree.

Hours later, when I finally made it home, my mom called. After lecturing me about the insurance and what to do next, she said, "The devil is a liar." She rebuked the plan and attack of the enemy, but for some reason, her words didn't land like they used to.

The truth was, I'd turned off the traction control myself earlier in the trip because I thought the squiggly lines symbol was for snow. Turns out it was the opposite, and I'd been driving too fast for the road conditions.

I pressed the button. I didn't know what it did. I drove too fast for the snow. The car slid because of physics, not because of an enemy.

And that's when I caught what the construct had been doing for me my whole life. The devil wasn't tempting me. The devil was where I'd been putting things. The crash was mine. The DUI a month earlier was mine. The wrestling every Sunday was mine. But the construct had always given me somewhere to set those things down, somewhere outside of me, so I didn't have to carry them as my own.

I used to hear Christians say, "The devil's best trick is convincing you he doesn't exist." But what if his best trick is convincing you he does?

Speaking in Tongues

We believe in speaking with other tongues as the Spirit gives utterance and that it is the initial evidence of the baptism of the Holy Ghost.

Was everyone just faking it?

That was the question. Speaking in tongues was supposed to be the sign that you were filled — filled with the Holy Spirit. Some said you had to say Jesus a thousand times. Most said it was a gift of the spirit. Either way, you were either in or you weren't, and you could tell by listening to a person's mouth.

The tongues at Pentecost were languages real people on the ground could understand. The tongues in our church were the language of angels. Nobody seemed to ask why the gift had changed.

I wanted to know for myself.

I was on the Youth Board, which meant I had a leadership role — helping plan programs, showing up to the things you were supposed to show up to. After service one Sunday, a few of us stayed behind to pray.

Like most prayer meetings, it got intense. There was always a weird feeling raising my hands in public, worshipping out loud, eyes possibly on me.

As we prayed in the circle, Sis. Kesha — standing next to me — put her hand on my stomach. She raised my hands in the air in surrender.

I was hungry for God. For truth. For whatever this was supposed to be.

I decided to let go.

The fear of being seen. The fear of being judged for how I worshipped. The watching of myself from outside myself.

Something opened. My tongue loosened. Syllables started flowing and I heard myself speaking in tongues.

It was like the first time I masturbated. The build-up to the unknown, then an ecstatic release at the climax.

What is this? I felt the presence of otherworldly beings — male and female. We were in communion.

The tongues kept flowing. I moved around the church, praying in the spirit. I couldn't believe it.

It was real.

Our impromptu prayer meeting turned into a revival.

Hearing me speak, the youth leaders called my best friend Courtney, the pastor's son. No one could believe Omari was speaking in tongues.

I'd been read in that church as the kid who asked too many questions. The one acting too smart in Sunday school. The one most likely to argue his way out of belief, not be overtaken by it. So the call went out: come see what's happening to him.

We prayed with Courtney. It touched him too.

By evening, every young person was back in the building. Fifty-three of us testified to the infilling of the Holy Ghost.

It was a real Pentecostal moment.

It didn't answer my question.

If 53 of us could be filled in one impromptu prayer meeting, what was happening at the school across town? What was happening to the 1,200 kids I sat next to all week who'd never even heard the language?

Mondays were my least favorite day.

When my peers were talking about weekend parties, I was quiet about church. How crazy would it have sounded to anyone outside this world? I prayed for three hours after service and felt the presence of male and female beings and ended up speaking syllables I'd never learned. You don't say that at lunch.

Which meant socially I didn't have any friends. None I could invite into my world.

Sometimes my mom would say, "Why don't you invite them to church?"

I was supposed to witness. I didn't want anyone to witness me. Not in this faith I wasn't sure about.

Besides — no one at school was saved. Twelve hundred kids. All on their way to hell?

I knew our church wasn't for everyone. But it made no sense that the rest of them would burn for not being one of us.

Jesus Walks

My last year of high school, Kanye dropped The College Dropout.

Rap was my favorite genre and I couldn't listen to it openly. It was secular. It was forbidden. And then Jesus Walks came on the radio and a song about Jesus had a beat I'd been trained to fear. For the first time, the two worlds I'd been tightroping touched.

Kanye was the bridge.

To explain why that mattered, I have to go back.

Rewind.

My love for music started with MJ.

Man in the Mirror. I was two years old. At first, it was all about dancing like him.

When I was 8, I had a cassette of Buju Banton's 'Til Shiloh and I played it religiously. By the tweens it was gospel rap from Bread of Life, the Christian bookstore on the east side of Bridgeport — Cross Movement, KJ-52, the Grits. I'd recite my Christian raps. The form was secular. The content was sanctioned. I didn't yet know that was the trick I'd spend the next decade trying to pull off in every other domain of my life.

In 7th grade the girl behind me was singing All About the Benjamins by Puff Daddy and Mase. I wanted to know it too. I couldn't buy the album.

The next year I started getting bused to Westport.

Westport is one of the richest towns in America. Bridgeport is one of the poorest cities in Connecticut. The two are 20 minutes apart. Every weekday morning I crossed the line and every afternoon I crossed back. I was one of two Black kids in the program from my town.

The school had a computer lab open before first period. I had an hour. I used it to search Eminem lyrics. The internet had everything. I'd print them out and study them on the bus ride home, the way I studied scripture on Sundays. By the end of high school I'd done it for four years.

Music was how I held the two worlds in my head at the same time. Westport had the kids who already had what the videos promised. Bridgeport had the church that said wanting it would damn you. The bus was where I read the lyrics.

After months of being one of two Black kids from the poor town, I came home one day and saw a guy on TV with platinum hair, chains, a white outfit, dancing on the beach.

If $iggo was loved, I could be $iggo.

So at 13 I became mini-Sisqo. Dancing down the halls. Breaking into song. I had an audience — boys and girls, both. By the end-of-year dance I was king of the dance floor. I'd found the thing that would get me what the church couldn't.

Then they sent home the video from the dance.

I dubbed over the tape, hoping to hide the evidence. I was riddled with guilt. When my mom found it, I lied.

That was the lesson. Joy required concealment. Concealment required lying. Sisqo cost me my honesty before I knew that was the price of admission.

In high school I had to find myself again. This time it was Dipset, D-Block, Tims, jerseys, fitteds. I tried to look like the guys in the videos. Westport didn't help — everyone there was wearing Abercrombie. I found my place at the minority table.

Every day I got home around 3:30, just in time for Rap City: The Basement.

One day a new song came on.

Dr. said I had bloodclots, but I ain't Jamaican, man.

The beat — Through the Wire — hooked me. I wanted to make beats like that. The wordplay was my language. A Jamaican-coded line in a non-Jamaican rapper's mouth. A man with his jaw wired shut still rapping. The form bent the rules. The content bent the rules. Both at once.

Then Jesus Walks.

It was the first time secular music had said the name out loud without being Christian rap. Christian rap had always been corny to me — the form was secular but the content was sanctioned, which is the same trick I'd been pulling and I knew it didn't fool anybody. Jesus Walks was different. Kanye was talking to God on a beat that belonged to the world I wasn't allowed in. He wasn't trying to pass either inspection.

I listened in secret anyway. Habit.

But I could listen.

Kanye gave me what Sisqo had given me — an identity I could hang on to, to make sense of my environment. The difference was Sisqo had cost me the lie about the dance video. Kanye didn't ask me to choose. He stood on the bridge and refused to come down.

When I got to college, my boy gave me a program called Fruity Loops.

I was finally able to do the thing I'd heard on Through the Wire. Sample.

I'd been rapping in church for years by then. We'd take instrumentals and flip them — Courtney and I and whoever else was in the room. Always coming up with rhymes. Every time I saw him I had something new.

One day we flipped 50 Cent's P.I.M.P.

Pastor was livid. We had the whole church bumping.

I don't know what yuh heard about me… I'm young, but I serve G.O.D.

It was the same trick the gospel-rap kids were running, just with a song that was too obviously a song about pimping. The form had crossed a line the content couldn't redeem. We knew it. That's why it was funny.

Music was a big deal. Every once in a while raps or cassettes Courtney and I had recorded off the radio would get confiscated. There was a period around the 50 Cent flip when a DVD called The Truth About Hip Hop started circulating in the church. It confirmed demonic forces and spirits in the music and the industry. Pastor ran a campaign. People brought their secular music in to be burned on the altar.

It was intense.

I didn't bring mine.

I'd already learned the lesson Sisqo taught me. The institution always asks for the evidence. You don't have to give it to them.