Beneath the bathroom sink at my parents’ house, a mysterious box lay hidden. I don’t remember the exact age I discovered it, but its colorful lettering caught my eye: JUST FOR KIDS. Below the bold words was an image of a girl who looked even younger than me. Curious, I flipped the box over and scanned the ingredients: sodium hydroxide, ammonium thioglycolate, sodium thioglycolate.
I liked deciphering codes, searching for hidden meanings and patterns. Around eight or nine, I began noticing a recurring question whenever my hair grew: When do you plan to cut it? I soon cracked the code—what they really meant was, I hate what’s growing from your head. My hair was thick and woolly, like Jesus Christ’s. If everyone kept saying it, they must be right—something had to be wrong with my hair. And now, in my hands, I held what seemed like the answer: a box promising transformation, designed just for kids like me.
I went straight to my mom, mystery in hand, and asked her to help me tame my nappy roots. She obliged.
I perched on a stool in the bathroom, still and expectant, as my mom spread the thick paste through my hair, coating every strand with precision. The name relaxer was a lie—just like how the Department of Defense specializes in war. The sharp stench of chemicals filled the air, acrid and suffocating, like something burning. I pinched my nose shut, staring at my reflection—my head encased in a nuclear, marshmallowy glaze. Behind me, my mother stood like the Secretary of Defense, overseeing the operation with steady hands.
The back of the box said twenty minutes, so we waited. The longer the paste sat, the hotter it burned. It felt like the devil was tap-dancing on my scalp in high heels. When the egg timer finally chimed, my mom stuffed my head beneath the faucet. My hair was agitated, every follicle furious at my commitment. But when the terrorism of the chemicals finally settled, my wool turned to silk. I smiled at my reflection.
Three days after my relaxing, my mother and I went to church. My scalp still tingled, tender from the burn, but I sat quietly in the front row, listening to Pastor Scott. He was a retired alcoholic who looked like Jeff Foxworthy, and the congregation hung on his every word, captivated by his redemption song.
That day, his sermon took a turn. He first spoke of Abraham and Isaac’s binding, and then feeling lynched spiritually—the weight that drapes over you, an invisible rope tightening around your neck, squeezing the breath out of you, but you can’t see the hands holding it. “It’s not always a noose around the body,” he said, his voice a gravelly rasp that held the room. “Sometimes, it’s a noose around the soul. It’s that feeling of being suffocated by your past, your sins, the weight of everything that has tried to choke the life out of you. You can’t see it, but you feel it. It holds you in place, strangles your will to move forward.”
He paused, eyes sweeping across the congregation, lingering on faces like mine. “We’re still lynched in the spirit,” he continued, “held by the sins of the world, trapped in cycles that repeat like old wounds. But there’s a freedom in Christ, a way to cut that rope, to break free. You don’t have to die with it around your neck. You can rise, you can breathe again.”
As he spoke, something in me shifted. It wasn’t a thought, not in words—more like a picture forming in my mind. I saw myself floating in a fishbowl, my bare feet sinking into the sand, my palm pressed against the curved glass. Beyond it, if I looked far enough, I could see the fish—big ones, small ones—all swimming fast, rushing away from the bowl.
Religion, I realized, was the same way. Once it’s inherited, it doesn’t really belong to you. It’s not yours to wear or to shape. Belief is not an heirloom—it’s a box your parents give you, wrapped in the best intentions, packaged tight with the kind of care that makes it hard to return, even when it doesn’t fit. They teach you to look for answers in the corners of that box, and you follow, believing it’s the only way to see, the only way to be. Sitting there, listening to Pastor Scott’s testimony, I knew it—knew that I wasn’t following the instructions on the back of my box. I was playing someone else’s part, reading someone else’s script, locked into a story I didn’t write. And then, right on cue, the Spirit moved. But all I could think was that the fish had already swum away.
A woman caught the Holy Ghost. Her shrieks tore through the sanctuary like a fresh relaxer searing a raw scalp. It was always the same—the way her cries melted into slurred gibberish, the way her body fell to the floor in surrender. Every Sunday, a different woman, but the response never changed. This time, it was a big woman whose name I can’t remember, though I’d seen her speak with my mom a few times. I watched the Spirit of Christ enter her, waiting for clarity to come, waiting for understanding. But it never did.
~
I told you I like deciphering codes, right? I read the world the way some people read scripture—searching for patterns, tracing the logic beneath the surface. That’s how I learned religion. That’s how I learned racism. Both move like ghosts—impossible to touch until they find a body to inhabit, a moment to anchor them, an act to make them real.
After church, I typed “lynching photos” into Google. I don’t recommend it. Each image is soaked in the same haunted air—black bodies strung up like grotesque ornaments, the grainy permanence of history pressing in from the edges, suffocating. But the people in the crowd, the ones gathered beneath those trees, didn’t look like monsters. They looked like people you could know—doctors, lawyers, bankers—hands tucked in their pockets, smiles easy, as if this was just another Sunday. They weren’t outsiders to the world. They were its architects. They built it, piece by piece, from the ground up, making it look so much like home that even now, we’re still trying to figure out how to escape it.
I studied their faces—serene, content, eyes fixed on the spectacle before them. There was no urgency, no frenzy. The energy in those rituals wasn’t wild, not the way people imagine. It was calm, familiar. It felt like therapy, like release. A moment to exhale, to be reminded that the world still worked the way they believed it should. The way they hoped their God did.
And if belief is nothing but an idea made tangible, then what did this say about the faith they carried? What did it say about the world they’d built in its image?
Human beings crave familiarity. We want to see ourselves in the things we love. It’s no different from a homeowner hanging a portrait above the fireplace—not because they’ve forgotten who owns the house but because the reminder matters. The self must be reflected, reaffirmed. And if a guest ever forgets, they can just look at the wall.
I was still thinking about those lynching photos when I walked into school the next day, my hair silky, my scalp stinging. My last great experiment had been shaving my head bald—a botched cut that left me no choice but to own it. I walked the halls with my scalp gleaming under fluorescent lights, swearing it was on purpose. I told them I was like Michael Jordan. They believed me.
But this time, the transformation wasn’t one I could claim as my own. My classmates were in shock. They reached for my hair the way pilgrims reach for relics—fascinated, reverent, eager to touch something newly blessed. Even Mrs. Riley, my elderly white teacher, stroked my strands between her fingers, her curiosity unbothered by my discomfort. I sat still, face unreadable. That was the game. You let them have their moment. You let them marvel at the miracle.
By midday, Letty, a girl in my class, leaned in close. “Can I put it in a ponytail?” she asked. I had never worn a ponytail before, never felt my hair pulled back into something manageable, presentable. I thought about the hands that had already touched me that morning, about the portrait hanging above the fireplace, about the reflection people needed to see.
Gently, she gathered my hair into her hand, her fingers careful, deliberate. “You know you can tell them to stop touching your hair, right?” she said.
I could have. But America doesn’t teach that kind of defiance. This country does not break its habits—it just makes them look more polite. America is not a terrible place, but nothing about it is ordinary. The United States is like that uncle who watches too much late-night TV and calls conspiracy theories research. He rants about the government staging the moon landing, drinks all the Coors Light, and talks about himself all night without asking how you’re doing. He’s writing a novel but doesn’t remember that you just graduated. And before he leaves the party, he asks you for money. And you give it to him—because when you were seven, he bought you a Hot Wheels ‘67 Chevy Impala just because you asked. And in some twisted way, you feel like you owe him.
America is always owed something. That’s the nature of the deal. That’s why, when a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist walked into Emanuel AME Church and gunned down nine Black souls at prayer, the police took him to Burger King. He was calm, they said. He hadn’t eaten, they said. So they fed him.
And they let New Orleans drown. They knew the levees were weak. Knew Katrina was coming. Knew the warnings, the risks, the lives at stake. And still, they stood back and watched the water rise. Because what is a flood if not a reckoning? What is a flood if not a cleansing? And what does the Good Book say about washing the world clean?
It has always been this way. Let them suffer. It feels instinctual—almost divine. And yet, I have never understood it. I have never understood why we are the ones chosen to endure, why the system looks at us and sees something to exploit. It must be more than race. It must be something deeper—something older. Something that whispers to them: This is the group to break. This is the group whose scalps you can scorch. Trust me—they won’t mind.
The key to dismantling oppression is to tell the emperor he has no clothes. Don’t let him believe he wears Gyges’s true ring. And if he does, make sure he shares its power. And if you have no use for jewelry—sell the ring when it’s your turn to wear it.
Power is a currency, and it circulates like blood—feeding some, choking others. But those who hold it never believe it can be taken. They believe in their divine right to rule, in the myth of their own invincibility. They believe in their rings, their robes, their crowns, in the magic that makes them chosen.
I used to believe in magic too. Once, I believed that burning my hair would make me different. That a little pain, a little chemical warfare on my scalp, could turn me into something acceptable. If my classmates asked why I suddenly changed, I imagined myself pulling a manila envelope from my backpack, CLASSIFIED written across the front. Inside: photographs of lynchings from Google. I’d pass them around one by one.
“Don’t look at the bodies. Look at the eyes of the people watching,” I’d instruct.
I used to think the people in those photographs were monsters. But monsters don’t smile like that. They don’t look peaceful, don’t pose for cameras like they’re capturing the highlight of their week. They look satisfied. They look like people who know their power will never be taken from them.
After church that day, I went to Pastor Scott. I asked him to explain the story of Abraham and Isaac. He made time for me, as a good pastor does, and said, “It was a test of faith.”I suppose faith is the belief that the fire won’t burn you, that the knife will stop before it cuts too deep. Faith is trusting in a love that demands your sacrifice.
People want to see themselves reflected in the things they love. But if something we love doesn’t love us back, sometimes we’d rather put heat to it until it changes form. Faith, I’ve learned, isn’t just belief—it’s expectation. The people in those photographs had faith too. Faith that the world would remain as they had built it, that the fire would always burn someone else. Faith that the knife would never turn in their hands.
I don’t know if Abraham would have gone through with it. I don’t know if he believed the blade would stop, or if he simply accepted that Isaac was the cost of being chosen. But I do know that faith—true faith—is not just surrender. It’s the willingness to ask, Who does this sacrifice serve?
Maybe that’s the trick to dismantling oppression. Not just telling the emperor he has no clothes, but asking him why he thought they made him king in the first place.
Over time, the relaxer in my scalp lost power. My hair, defiant in its own right, rejected the lie I had tried to make true. The silky illusion thinned, cracked, until the roots—thick, stubborn, unbending—rose from beneath the surface. Nature does not apologize. It does not ask permission to exist.
And yet, the world still does its best to smooth us down, to flatten us into something manageable. That is the lesson. The heat is always coming, the fire always waiting to burn away what does not belong. They do it with words, with laws, with history rewritten to make sense of the guilt. They tell you the rope is gone, that the scars are old, that the world has changed, but the hands remain. They have only learned to move differently, to press down with a softer touch.
But power, real power, is knowing the burn will not last. It is understanding that no matter how many times they try to lay us flat, the truth—the root—always finds its way back. It may take time. It may take pain. But the truth cannot help but grow.
I did not know that then, sitting beneath my mother’s hands, scalp stinging, heart hopeful, that transformation could be found in a box. I did not know it as my classmates reached for me, as my teacher studied me like something exotic, something made new. I did not know it when I watched that woman convulse with the Spirit, or when I stared into the faces of men who hung bodies like warnings in the wind.
But I know it now. I know that faith, like fire, can be weapon or warmth, can build or destroy, depending on the hands that wield it. I know that belief is a tool, shaped by those who have the power to tell the story. And I know, more than anything, that I was never meant to stay relaxed, to be tamed into something that fit inside their hands.
The heat comes, the fire rages, but the root—oh, the root—always returns.
