I learned a set of skills growing up in a storefront church in Brooklyn, New York, not the least of which was breath and voice control. In a storefront church, you learn how to use your big outside voice when reading the scripture, and you learn how to use your quiet voice when the Holy Spirit falls heavy over the congregation. You learn how to use a mic, both how to hold it and adjust it, but also how close or far away you need to be for optimal speaking range. And you learn how to conserve your singing voice, since you are likely to sing for several hours on any given Sunday and multiple other days in a week.
We who grew up in storefront churches didn’t even know we were being taught to live in harmony with external noise. The sounds of ambulances, car sirens, loud people at the corner bodega, and honking horns formed a musical backdrop for the choir singing or the Hammond B3 organ playing. One year, while rehearsing our Christmas play amid the cacophony of crying younger siblings and bored older siblings, the church elders kept exhorting a group of us kids to “speak up!” We had to use our big voices, they told us, so as to be heard above the ambient noise. Or as one deacon told us, “You have to speak louder than the crying babies.”
In terms of volume and pitch, I don’t know if there is a noise louder than a crying baby—a baby who really, really wants to be heard and tended to with food or attention or comfort. When I became a parent, it came as a revelation that my tiny six-pound daughter could make her needs known from every room in the house, no baby monitor needed. How something so little could be so loud remains a great mystery to this day. Yes, you develop a mother’s intuition for every tiny whimper and coo. But those loud wails of real hunger or distress could scarcely be ignored by anybody in the house. In church, I’ve experienced the dueling sounds of the preacher preaching and a baby wailing, both trying to express their heart’s deepest pangs. The preacher with the mic usually wins as the contrite parent tiptoes out of the sanctuary to the nursery or even outside the church building.
What I learned in that storefront church, and what I learned in the early years of parenting, was that raising your voice above the noise is a necessary life skill. In a world filled with competing sounds and voices all vying to be heard, the ability to make yourself and your needs known is no easy task. But the consequences of not doing so are severe. People will mistake your silence as an affirmation that all is well in your world or that all is well with your soul. When writer Zora Neale Hurston suggests “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it,” she is speaking of the personal and historical consequences of not elevating the needs of those who are in pain. People will assume that you are no longer hurting, that your pain is long past, and that the harm you endured no longer has any repercussions. When you are silent, people will forget that you’ve been injured and that your pain is real.
Yet it is a risk to raise your voice above the noise. It’s a risk to write about the racial wounds and trauma this nation has inflicted and is still inflicting. The risks run in many directions. You risk being ignored by those who wrongfully think they already know the full story of racism in America. You risk hurting those who share wounds that are still tender and healing. You risk being seen as someone who makes a spectacle out of Black pain and suffering. And you risk being misunderstood by those who are dismissive of the faith that has sustained “many a thousand,” as the hymn “The Old Ship of Zion” reminds us.
But to be silent is to risk that stories will be forgotten, root causes of pains will be ignored, and extraordinary moments of healing will go unrecognized as a provision of God’s justice. As a womanist theologian—one who reads the biblical text through the lens of Black women’s experiences and wisdom—I believe our stories are too important to forget, and I have set myself to the work of a particular kind of memory. For wounded people, landscapes, and communities exist not only as a legacy of traumas and harms but as evidence of the undeniable power of memory and the unstoppable quest for justice.
When the wounds bear witness, the world can never claim ignorance of another’s pain. When the wounds bear witness, there is awe and wonder at the capacity for laughter and joy even in the midst of sorrow. When the wounds bear witness, they tell the truth about both the extent of the injury and the extraordinary work of healing.
This is an excerpt from the introduction of The Wounds Are the Witness.
