The clearest picture of shalom that we get in Scripture is found in the first and second chapters of Genesis. The word is not used in these texts, but we see the nature of shalom in the relationships God creates, including the relationship between genders. In the epic Hebrew poem that we call Genesis 1, we see that all people were created in the image of God—men and women were both called and created with the capacity to exercise dominion in the world. In chapter 2, we see the nature of marriage; a union that brings life-long companionship where love and trust and truth and justice and reciprocity and protection and service and stewardship flow uninhibited. God created humanity to desire this radical connection. I believe it is the deepest longing of our souls. Yet, for many Black women in today’s world it never comes.
How do Black women hold their broken hearts--untouched by the intimacy of marriage? And how do we find peace in the midst of the longing?
The Price of Oppression
My longings have been complicated and even blocked by the lie of human hierarchy, which permeates every fiber of American society. Traumas passed down from generation to generation laid foundations upon which my own generation’s traumas abide. Any shadow of shalom was shattered at least 12 generations ago in African-American families—the day the first Africans were forced onto Virginia’s shores in 1619. Yet, we are human; made in the image of God. We long for shalom connection like all humanity.
Throughout my teens in Cape May, New Jersey, I escaped from the emotional mayhem of my blended family by diving, nose first, into the world of Silhouette romance books—a publishing imprint dedicated to steamy romances that usually involved a Christian woman and a man whose faith was indescript. Nearly every week, I stopped in our local bookstore and bought the newest Silhouette story and spent hours over the rest of the week on a park bench, on the beach or locked in my room with my head buried in a paperback-world filled with white women and men who met, hated each other, felt attraction, tried to fend it off, found themselves in close quarters, couldn’t resist, kissed, felt guilty, ran away, but always eventually found their way back to each other. If life was anything like a Silhouette romance novel, then finding my prince shouldn’t be that hard. All I needed was to be faithful, like the women in the books. Surrounded by white girls who picked up and dropped boyfriends as easily as the ones in the books, I was sure that God would bring my husband. And if he wasn’t Christian, well, as in the Silhouette world, he would become one before wedding rings were exchanged. In a perfect world, it might be that easy. But our world is not perfect.
Shalom is not without context.
In Genesis 1 and 2, shalom’s context was the rule of God. From Genesis 3 forward, shalom’s context is a fallen world where two formidable enemies war with God for supremacy—oppression and poverty. At the time when the Confederate Army fired its first shots on Fort Sumter, there were 4 million enslaved women, men and children in the United States. They were worse than poor. They were counted as property. Plus, enslaved people were not allowed to marry under protection of law. Some were able to engage committed relationships under the authority of their owners, but they often lived on separate plantations and had no authority of their own to retain family cohesion. Husbands, wives and children were often sold down river, into the Deep South, to square masters’ debts. To boot, in the wake of the rise of King Cotton and the 1808 end of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Antebellum slavocracy found another way to fill its appetite for free labor. They bred it. By 1820, breeding farms peppered the northern South. Enslaved African men were forced to serially rape enslaved African women to birth profit for their masters. Children were often raised in holding pens by women whose unpaid job was to nurse them. How do Black women hold their broken hearts--untouched by the intimacy of marriage? And how do we find peace in the midst of the longing?
Oppression has been the garment of people of African descent in the U.S from the Colonial era through present-day. Each generation of white lawmakers has passed a piece of that garment to the next generation of African Americans. Shalom between genders shattered in my family in 1705 when my first American born ancestor was indentured because she was the product of a Senagalese/Scottish mixed-race relationship, according to court records. She was raped by her master or his son for the free labor that her illegitimate children would produce, according to colonial Maryland law. In the Antebellum era, my 3rd Great Grandmother, Lea Ballard, had 17 children, according to family lore. We believe she was likely forced to be a breeder in South Carolina. She married at least three times, as many as five. Since Lea, every generation of women on my mother’s line of the family has experienced sexual abuse of some sort – including me.
White Jesus
I met White Jesus two years after I met puberty. In my white evangelical church, I vowed to remain pure—to abstain from sex until marriage. Likewise, I vowed not to be “unequally yoked”—to only date other evangelical Christians—which basically meant white boys or the one or two Black boys I met in that entire world, who always dated non-Black girls.
Throughout high school, college and my twenties, crushes accrued like a chain-linked fence. Some became vulnerable friendships—one step from dating. I could see the other side, but I couldn’t get there. The supremacy of whiteness in my white patriarchal evangelical world placed me, a Black woman, on the bottom rung of the marriage hierarchy. I felt it. Then I saw it, as I looked around at my Black sistahs—all single—wading through the steady stream of weddings and baby showers for our White friends. White Jesus blessed the purity of our white girlfriends with relationships set up by friends and protected by the community. But he left racial hierarchy intact.
It Wasn’t Supposed to Be This Way
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Before there was the man-made scaffolding of human hierarchy called race, there were human beings—one family spread across the world. Before there was slavery and war and poverty and oppression and empire and colonization there was humanity, naked and unashamed at play and work in an extravagant garden with two trees at the center. There was the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil too (Genesis 2:9).
The tree of life was simple. Eat of it and you will live and love and flourish forever in the context of a bonded community. But the tree of the knowledge of good and evil made the humans aware of the only point of need in paradise—God.
“Don’t eat of this tree, lest you die,” God commanded (Genesis 2:17). Here was the one point in the garden where humanity faced two pointed questions: Do you trust God? And will you choose God’s way to wholeness? The answer would reveal the presence or lack of their love for God.
Ish and Ishshah, the man and woman, chose their own way to peace and forfeited shalom. They ate and, in the doing, revealed a lack of love for God. Love requires trust. Instead, they received what humanity’s peace strategies are able to garner: domination, rape, exploitation, neglect, isolation and separation.
I grabbed at my own peace through physical padding and social isolation. Layers of fat encircled me; muting my inner wail and buffering me from further disappointment. I also immersed myself in mostly white spiritual communities and committed to celibacy before marriage. There, I would be utterly safe. No one would transgress the boundaries of my body in that space—they wouldn’t want my body at all. And they didn’t. And now, at 51, single and without children of my own, I close my eyes and breathe. Our identity is human—ones created in the full image of God—ones with the capacity to exercise agency in and over our lives and our bodies and our hearts and our bank accounts.
I breathe in and catch the rhythm of generations of women in my family. We were all abused in some way—dominated sexually, physically, emotionally. Like so many Black women we carry the scars of white patriarchy passed down through Black and White men. But our identity is not “victim.” Our identity is human—ones created in the full image of God—ones with the capacity to exercise agency in and over our lives and our bodies and our hearts and our bank accounts. As humans we can let God heal our traumatized minds through therapy and our broken hearts through healing prayer. We can carry our tears to our friends and ask them to help us hold them. And we can give oppression the side-eye as we stand full into our broad hips and sway to the rhythm of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” and join Toni Morrison’s Baby Suggs, the great Black ancestor who lived through hundreds of years of slavery and called the women to The Clearing—that place where never married and married and use-to-be-married Black women go to be healed by God and each other.
And in the Clearing, holding hands, we find a shadow of shalom in this ransacked world. We find connection—to God, to self, to each other and to the earth. And we find our power to choose to heal and live and laugh and lean into God’s bosom…and feel shalom.