Whether you’re religious, agnostic, or atheist, it requires a certain amount of faith to carve out a place for yourself where there is none. To look at what one might consider a grim prospect and see the opposite: an opportunity to fly. And as Black women, we do exactly this and have done it for generations.
But what that faith looks like is changing for many of us. Historically, we have been more religious than most. (That’s especially so in America, where Black women make up 83 percent of those who claim to be highly religious.) Scroll through our biggest changemakers, old and new—Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Shirley Chisolm, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Oprah Winfrey, Ava DuVernay, Tarana Burke, the list goes on—and you find powering most, if not all, of them is an unwavering sense of self and purpose that seems deeply spiritual.
And, spirituality increasingly looks different for many of us. Less patriarchal, more female centered. Less churchy, more witchy. Fewer pastel-colored, wide-brimmed hats, more head wraps. Fewer Bibles, more bundles of sage.
The problem was that the church, in the historic sense, became sticky, repressive, and at times oppressive. It represented all the ills: too homophobic, too sexist, and in the case of the historically White churches, too racist. So many women, including me, simply stopped going. And that’s even as our sense of purpose and need for some kind of spiritual grounding increased in this unusually unpredictable new decade. The church’s complicated relationship with women is largely to blame.
For me this divide between our religious past and present, our transition from one kind of faith to another, became clear during an afternoon spent watching Aretha Franklin’s funeral while getting my hair done in Notting Hill. The service highlighted just how much the church can alienate women and reminded me of the experiences in my own life that led me to walk away.
“Somebody swaddle Stevie Wonder in bubble wrap. He’s all we got left,” a woman said as a stylist braided her hair. She was quoting a popular meme that would circulate whenever anyone of a certain generation of Black icons died. And there had been a string of these deaths in the space of just eight years, each one signaling not only the passage of time but also the end of an era. Michael Jackson—as controversial as he was (August 29, 1958–June 25, 2009). Whitney Houston (August 9, 1963–February 11, 2012). Prince (June 7, 1958–April 21, 2016). All deaths that rattled the collective consciousness, sending us into a state of mourning for our childhoods, carefree teen years, first loves, and the many other chapters of our lives their music stoked. All departures that heightened the feeling that nothing was solid and stable anymore.
The making of a true icon is in the longevity—in the artist’s ability to connect with another’s soul at multiple touchpoints throughout time. In so doing, the icon becomes something greater than a musician. Something greater than the mere body. The icon borders on the spiritual. Aretha Franklin went two steps further. She was the daughter of a Black American minister and civil rights activist who became a towering figure in both the church and civil rights movement in her own right. Her music soundtracked many eras, yes, but she also connected the cultural, the political, the personal, and the religious.
So when the singer, songwriter, pianist, and activist died on August 16, 2018, at seventy-six years old of pancreatic cancer, the world grieved. And I felt, for a moment, unmoored. But as I watched the funeral unfold over a slow and moving eight-hour marathon, I gained clarity on why I had to let my attachments to the evangelical religion of my formative years go and release the identity it had imposed on me. It was only in finding a new faith that I was able to grow into a fuller version of myself.
To be frank, I never gave Aretha Franklin much thought until I reached adulthood. I don’t recall my parents playing her music as I was growing up. Aretha didn’t factor in among the Stevie Wonder, Luther Vandross, and Earth, Wind & Fire albums in their music library. And yet she was always around, her music seeping into every crevice of our life, seasoning it like a bouillon cube, its flavor transforming everything it touched. I heard Aretha’s music on the radio, at church, and on television. But her anthems also inspired the musicians whose voices filled my childhood home: Whitney Houston, Chaka Khan, and Mariah Carey.
In many ways she was the soundtrack to my life, even if I hadn’t particularly noticed it. Before I knew what feminism was or how to cite theory, I knew the words to “Respect.” And her cover of “Young, Gifted and Black” underscored my earliest lessons in Black pride long before I learned the language to articulate it.
Her influence spread far and wide, like any queen’s would, stretching across generations, continents, and countries, all the way over here to the UK.
And like that of a true queen, Aretha’s passing demanded extended days of viewings and mourning, commanding the kind of media coverage that rivaled the deaths of some of history’s more popular heads of state, starting with a public viewing on a Tuesday and ending on a Saturday night after a particularly long funeral, which included an impressive lineup of outfit changes (because, queen) in between.
The world was riveted from the start: an image of Aretha in glamorous, peaceful repose inside a gold-plated Promethean casket, enveloped in overflowing pink and lavender roses, her ankles delicately crossed to reveal red, sky-high custom Christian Louboutin stilettos on her feet. The red shoes, which matched her red chiffon and lace dress, lips, and nails, were meant to signify her membership in the historically Black sorority Delta Sigma Theta. Outside the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, once the largest Black museum in the country, where the viewing was taking place, a pearly white 1940 Cadillac LaSalle, the same one that carried Rosa Parks’s body to her funeral thirteen years earlier, stood at attention.
Over the following days, there would be more outfit changes, in pale robin’s egg blue and rose gold, and more Louboutins—clothes befitting a woman one mourner described to the Associated Press as “a diva to the end.”
The funeral was naturally momentous. So there we were, at 2:30 p.m. in Charlotte Mensah’s salon in Notting Hill, clients and hairstylists tuning in to a marathon of mourning in honor of an icon and a woman of faith.
Meanwhile, Black Twitter was live-tweeting, #Aretha Homegoing commentary unfolding in real time with the velocity usually reserved for the Oscars and Grammys. And no wonder: the program was ambitious, as most Black church gatherings are, with fifty-two scheduled special guests, performers, pastors, and choirs slated to sing, sermonize, and pray. Aretha, icon that she was, deserved it.
What she didn’t deserve from the epic memorial was the sexism, as a string of senior-ranking preachers’ and bishops’ acts of misogyny not only stole the show but also displayed to the world the Black church’s fraught history with women.
I was at the salon to get my hair braided, an experience that, like church, can be incredibly time-consuming though rewarding. I wondered which would take longer: the homegoing or the hair braiding. The stylist assured me the braiding would be shorter. I explained that where I come from, deep in America’s Bible Belt, the Black church services aren’t a sprint but a marathon of prayer, praise dance, offering, sermon, altar call, baptism, and communion (because the blood of Jesus can’t be rushed)—all that worship ending with a lunch consumed so late in the afternoon it was commonly called a church dinner.