Chapter 38
A poem in the church
Ana
My dad threw away my mattress.
He lit candles.
Had a prayer group over to sanctify the house.
They walked the halls, anointing the doorknobs with oil. Singing. Chanting. Like my body was a battlefield they had to reclaim. Then he sat me down and had me relive my night with Soulé in detail.
Every touch.
Every gasp.
Every place Soulé held me, and “poisoned” me.
How she kissed me, and “tainted” me.
How she knew me—and, in knowing me, “spoiled” me.
I didn’t censor. I gave him every detail.
Where she kissed me.
How I trembled.
How I came.
I left nothing out.
And I expressed no regret.
That riled him, so I was punished.
He stripped the room.
Since then, I’ve slept on the floor for the past three days.
A single sheet. A thin blanket.
A Bible for my pillow.
“You need repentance,” he said. “You need saving. Only through deprivation could you find salvation for the soul you lost in depravity.”
He took my phone.
He took away my journal, books, iPad, and laptop.
Everything.
“Knowledge tempts,” he said. “Earthly flesh ruins.”
The room was dark and quiet. The candles had burned out, but the walls still smelled of oil and shame. I lay on the floor, my spine pressed to the carpet, and the Bible stiff beneath my head. I hadn’t slept. I had drifted in and out of silence, too sore to dream.
I shifted, and the Bible slipped from under me. It fell open, its pages fluttering like wings that no longer knew how to fly. I stared at the words. And the scribbles in the margin. Verses my mother once made me memorize.
But two lines stopped me cold. “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.” —Hosea 6:6
I exhaled. My lips parted. It was a crack in the stone, something trying to bloom within me again, even now. And below it, illegible, circled in faint ink:
“The lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those
crushed in spirit.” —Psalm 34:18
Crushed in spirit.
Wasn’t that what I was now? Splintered. Flattened and ashamed and unashamed all at once.
And still…
…still, He might be close?
I clutched the Bible to my chest. Not out of obedience, not out of fear, but because, for the first time in weeks, something boasted true.
I closed my eyes. I didn’t pray.
The words had already done it for me.
I lay there, the floor cold beneath me. Something inside me was settling, not healed, but seen.
Then, the door creaked open.
Soft footsteps. I didn’t look. I knew who it was.
My mother.
She stood there for a while, saying nothing.
Breathing. Watching.
“I brought you some tea,” she finally said.
She set the mug down on the dresser, her eyes lingering on the Bible in my arms.
“He shouldn’t have hit you,” she whispered.
I said nothing. It wasn’t because I forgave her silence but because I didn’t have the strength to ask why she let him.
She stepped further into the room. Knelt beside me, her knees popping.
She reached out and brushed a curl from my face.
“You were always so tender-hearted,” she said. “I used to pray you’d grow out of it. Be strong. Obedient. Like a good daughter should be.”
I opened my eyes.
“I am a good daughter,” I said. “I told the truth. And I loved with honesty. Isn’t that what you taught me?”
My mother’s eyes darted everywhere but to me. Her mouth trembled.
Then she pressed something into my hand—a folded scrap of paper.
I opened it. A verse. In her handwriting.
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted…
She didn’t say anything else. She stood, smoothed her dress, and walked out.
Leaving the door ajar.
***
It was now Sunday.
The church thrived in its usual scent of old hymnals, rose oil, and sweat.
The fans oscillated with a rhythmic hum, failing to cool the tension pressing against the walls. Men in crisp suits nodded; women in wide-brimmed
hats and pressed skirts fanned themselves. I sat by my mother, in the front like a lamb on the altar. My back was straight. My mouth was dry. My body
was still raw from the floor I’d been sleeping on for days.
My mother didn’t meet my eyes. My father clutched
his Bible as if it were a blade.
He preached with fury this morning.
Not the usual performative wrath—the kind that
danced at the edge of the pulpit and pulled back before it cut.
No.
This was personal.
And then he stopped reading from the Word.
“A word from the Lord,” he said, his gaze sweeping the congregation. “But also… a warning.”
He stepped down from the pulpit and into the center aisle, where everyone could see him.
“I come to you today with a heavy heart,” he said.
“Because Satan has made his way into my home.”
The room went still. Whispers began.
My mother stiffened beside me.
“My daughter,” he said, turning toward me. “Ana
Salomé Célestin… has fallen.”
My blood turned to ice.
He raised a folded piece of paper. I knew that paper.
A piece of paper I had once tucked into the back of my prayer journal.
A poem.
A wound shaped like Soulé.
Not here.
Please, God—not here.
“Ana Salomé Célestin,” he said, loud and clear.
Every syllable of my name cracked against the walls like thunder.
“I raised you to be clean, obedient, and saved. Yet,” he snapped the paper open, eyes burning with betrayal. “This is what I found.”
My father raised the paper, trembling with self-righteous fury.
“She wrote this,” he said. “Not for God. Not for repentance. But for a woman.”
He didn’t censor it; he didn’t translate.
He read it in the original Creole—his native language, now twisted into a weapon.
In front of the whole Congregation, he began, word for word:
Renmen’m avèk lang Kréyol ou.
Lang sa k’ap désimayé Lespri’m ki di,
Lang sa Bondye ba ou pou palé lavi–
–nan kò’m ou révéyé, lè jé’m tonbe sou ou.
There were gasps as if I had bled in the pews.
One of the mothers clutched her chest. A deacon’s wife whispered, “Jézi!”
My father’s voice grew louder:
Lang sa ki long, l’ap touché anndan’m—
–anndan mwen ki pou ou—,
–andedan krèk mwen ou anvayi,
Jiskaske lang ou touché san’m—
He winced at the words, as if they had perforated his skin, but kept going.
E san’m tresayi
y’ap kouri nan tout zantray mwen,
Pou ya’l mande kè’m jwenn lanmen ou.
Murmurs turned into open disapproval.
A few stood up, someone walked out, but most stayed hungry to watch me kneel.
One woman whispered, “Se mové lespri!”
One woman dropped her fan.
And yet—
A young girl in the back, fifteen, with her eyes wide, not in disgust.
E mwen renmen sa, mwen renmen lè lang sa—
Lang sa k’ap fè chichòy nan twou m,
Lang sa k’ap palé ak lespri’m,
Lang sa k’ap sousé sous lavi anndan’m ou bwè,
“Jesus!”
“This is bad spirit!”
Ou renmen’m avèk li, Sousou.
Renmen’m avèk lang sa,
Renmen’m avèk lang Kréyol,
Avèk lang manman’m, Ayiti.
L’ap pi dous, l’ap pi fò, l’ap vérité
Li pa’p janm yon péché
He spat the last lines; they burned his tongue:
…mwen sipliyé’w
Renmen’m an Kréyol, Sousou.
His eyes roamed the page with disgust.
Laughter. Gasps. A woman said, “Se sak rive lè ou pa kenbe pitit ou yo anba kòd disiplin.”
My father’s voice now thundered. “This is what Satan does. He crawls into your daughters’ beds. She wears temptation like sin. She poisons love and calls it holy.”
He then turned to me. “Stand.”
I stood.
He took a step closer; the church had gone silent. Even the children stilled.
“Kneel before your God,” he said. “Receive the prayers.
Repent. Be cleansed.” Then softer, more venomous: “Or be damned.”
The church watched me like a crowd at a stoning.
Some faces were twisted with pity. Others with hunger.
My legs were stone. I couldn’t breathe. My hands were trembling in my lap, fists curled against my skirt.
Then he stepped back and raised his voice to the room. “My daughter has fallen in love with a woman. She has allowed perversion to claim her. I ask you, my church family, to pray for her soul. To help me cast this thing out.
“This is what happens when you don’t discipline your kids.”
To bring her back to God before it’s too late.”
The choir stirred. The deacons stood.
“Come now,” he ordered. “Meté’w ajenou!”
The silence pressed on my chest like a hand. I stared at the floor, and it stretched miles away. I remembered
Soulé’s lips on my throat, her voice saying, “You feel like home.” The way my body had trembled, not in shame, but in freedom.
I thought of the poem—my poem—not filth, not a disease, and as the words settled inside me, my gaze lifted to the cross. The carved wood, the twisted figure suspended in both agony and grace, the image of Jesus who suffered not so we could be pure, but so we could be free.
Then my eyes dropped to my knees, to the floor, to the space where he wanted me to be small.
And I knew:
If I knelt now, I would vanish.
“Kneel, Ana,” he ordered again, urging, threatening.
“Receive the prayers. Let us cast the spirit out. Let your soul be saved.”
Still, I didn’t move.
“DENY HER,” he roared. “Deny Soulé. In front of me.
In front of your church. In front of God.”
Every breath hurt.
Every second, I was being consumed by a holy fire.
But I stayed standing because I knew, if I bent here, I might never stand again.
The hush in the room was no longer silence; it was expectation, pressure, and violence.
My father stared, as if he could will me to kneel. The congregation watched with wide eyes, waiting, needing me to make this easier to swallow. To pretend none of it had happened.
“Kneel!”
But I didn’t move.
I let the silence stretch until it pulsed at the edge of breath. Until the air itself trembled. And I spoke up. “No.”
Gasps broke through the church. Hands flew to mouths, to pearls, to Bibles.
But I wasn’t finished.
“I will not kneel,” I said, louder now so that they could all hear me. “I will not repent for I have not sinned. I will not deny her.”
My voice shook from force.
“Her name is Soulé Amandélé Nallamoutou, and I love her with a heart God Himself gave me.”
My father stepped forward, but I didn’t step back.
“I told the truth in that poem,” I said. “I love that woman. I will not deny my love for her in front of you, in front of this church, and in front of God.”
I turned to face my dad. “You don’t get to turn truth into sin because it doesn’t make you comfortable.”
I found the cross once again. The carved wood. The twisted figure in agony and grace.
Ribs split. Head bowed. A body betrayed and still divine.
“Jesus didn’t suffer so you could shame me,” I said. “He suffered so I could be free.”
The room fell still. No more gasps, no tongues, no prayer. I let them sit under the weight of everything they thought God couldn’t hold.
“I’m a lesbian woman, dad,” I said to him, “not the Devil.”
Then I turned and walked down the aisle. And when I opened the doors and stepped outside, the sunlight hit me so hard, I thought it might lift me off the ground.