My TRUTH was Hidden

I’m from Mobile, Alabama. Gulf water, red dirt, and church bells that never asked if you belonged before they rang. By 7th grade I was in Catholic school. Plaid skirt, rosary beads, Our Father like a rehearsed mantra. And in every hallway, every classroom, every textbook: Jesus. Blue-eyed. Thin-lipped. Thin nose. A stranger. 

They handed me a Bible and told me it was the truth. Then handed me a mirror that erased me. 

That’s the violence nobody names. You can colonize a child with a picture. You can make her doubt her own spirit before she even learns to spell ancestor. I did. I loved God with all my heart and still went to bed wondering why He never made anyone who looked like me holy. Not the saints. Not the angels. Not even the demons. Everybody in heaven and hell was white except me.

I remember Sister So and So told me “we’re all made in God’s image” while standing under a white Christ nailed to a cross. Don’t insult me. If we’re all made in His image, why did His image never look like my mama? Like my grandmomma or my granddaddy? Like the men on MLK or in Prichard? You taught me shame and called it salvation. You taught me exile and called it gospel.

So yes, I grew up Christian. I also grew up spiritually starving. I could recite Bible verses but couldn’t name one spirit that claimed my blood. I knew Revelations but not the revelation that my people had divined with 16 sacred nuts before Alabama was even a state. I knew about manna from heaven but not about Oshun’s honey. I knew about parting seas but not about Yemoja’s tide. You gave me Daniel in the lion’s den and stole Shango from my mouth.

You told me my ancestors were heathens. LIES. 

My ancestors read the sky better than your priests read Latin. They spoke to God without a middleman, without guilt, without needing to bleed to be worthy. You called it witchcraft because you couldn’t control it. You called it darkness because it didn’t reflect you.

I didn’t leave the Bible. I set it free. I stopped reading it through the eyes of empire. Now I see Moses and recognize a priest at the crossroads, staff in hand, negotiating with Eshu. I see the Psalms and hear Yoruba oriki. I see Elijah calling fire and know that’s not a miracle — that’s Shango. The book was never empty. The room was. You cleared out everybody who looked like me and then asked why I couldn’t feel at home.

Well, I’m home now. 

IFA didn’t convert me. It remembered me. The Odu speak like my grandmother after she’s been reading you for filth: proverbs with teeth. The patakis don’t ask me to worship suffering. They show me Orisas who bleed, love, fail, rise, and still rule. Obatala didn’t need to be crucified to prove compassion. Oya doesn’t need permission to bring the storm. Ogun clears paths without asking Rome. This is not mythology. This is my bloodline with a voice.

Mobile knows about memory. Africatown is still breathing. The ancestors didn’t drown. They became the water. So no, I won’t sing Amazing Grace and pretend I was the wretch. The wretch was the system that tried to orphan me from my own spirit. 

Catholic school gave me scripture. IFA gave me myself.

So let me be clear: I don’t serve a white God anymore. I serve the God that looks like me. The God that speaks Yoruba. The God that lives in my Ori, not on your wall. My altar doesn’t need your approval. My spirit doesn’t need your translation. 

From the pew to the mat. From the crucifix to the opon Ifa. From begging to belong in someone else’s story to knowing I *am* the story — born of Orunmila, child of the Odu, descendant of people who were never lost, only stolen. 

You told me I was grafted in. No. I was the root. 

And I’m not whispering that anymore.

TO BE CONTINUED……