Episode 98: what the devil is capable of // Tuesday, July 14

Vernon: My father passed away about a month ago. That was tough. He was in poor health, and he's had dementia for about two years now. So it was kind of like the death of his physical body. You know, I felt it, but it was something that I was preparing for for a while. 

My father always had an issue with saying sorry. When he’s trying to repair a harm that he has done,  “sorry” manifests in many different ways. That manifests in him asking out of the blue if I needed anything, or when I did live in Virginia, it looked like him hitting me up to go to dinner and a movie. “Sorry” just looks like different things to people who don't vocally say, “I'm sorry.”

And I do feel like right before my father started showing signs of dementia, he was trying to make these strides to repair the relationship. But then his health caught up with him, and it just became too late.  

Laura: Yesterday we announced that we’re ending season one of Shelter in Place at episode 100 this week. We’ve been going non-stop since March 17, and it’s been quite a ride. We’re hoping that over the next couple of months we’ll be able to generate enough support to come back with season 2 in the fall. 

In the meantime, I’m sharing one final conversation with a Bay Area poet and teacher I really admire and appreciate.

Vernon: I'm Vernon Keeve III, and I am a high school English and history teacher here in Oakland, and I am also a published poet. And hopefully I am doing all of the right things to get some of my students to be writers one day as well.

Laura: One of the things I appreciate about Vernon is his willingness to dive into meaningful and even vulnerable conversations. We met a couple of years ago when I was putting together a panel for the AWP Writers’ Conference. The panel was on how Race, Faith, and Sexuality find their way into our writing, and a writer friend suggested I reach out to Vernon both because he was a great poet and because he had an interesting story when it came to all three of those categories. 

Vernon: I am a Black Queer man from the South. I grew up in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I am a pastor's kid.

Laura: Vernon was a great on our panel, which was one of the best panels I’ve ever been a part of. But that conversation in front of several hundred people ended up being the only one we had. As I was moderating, I started not feeling so great. I kept it together for the panel, but by the time it was over I had a high fever and spent the rest of the conference in bed. 

I decided it was finally time to have a proper conversation with Vernon. We both grew up in the church, but we’d landed in very different places as adults. I asked him if he’d be willing to share a little more of the backstory of his experience.

Vernon: My father was a pastor and an attorney. I did grow up Southern Baptist, but my parents weren't as heavy-handed with the religion as some preacher's kids. My dad wasn't, like, militant religion, but he had his own ways of being controlling, and I guess verbally abusive.

As I got older, it wasn't a requirement for me to go to church every Sunday morning. They started giving me more and more room with it. But when I was an undergrad, I kept taking religion classes because I thought this philosophical argument was going to come up with my father and my sexuality. And I thought I was going to have to defend myself, so I kinda just accidentally double majored in religion. I kept taking these religion courses so I could equip myself with the language for that conversation that never happened. ‘Cause it never happened. 

I came out of the closet--which was more like him pulling me out of the closet. I was in my second year of college, and I think my father just got frustrated with dancing around this assumption that he and my mom had. While I was at the University of Virginia, I remember him calling me. I was trying to rush him off the phone because I had just gotten home from work. I was still in my work uniform. I smelled like the food I was serving all day, and I remember him just asking me. It wasn't a nice way. It was straight to the point. It was, “what do you sleep with?” How there was no sense of humanity in that question. I just remember how jarring that was, because I just knew immediately that okay, this is something that you're not okay with

And also just me not understanding Black, Southern parents who lived intolerance, but then act really shocked when they find out you didn't tell them about your sexuality. So it was weeks of that, where  my father just kept reminding me that I was this liar that didn’t come to him with, you know, my truth. The truth is you've never created a space for me to feel safe in that. 

It was a dark point in my life because I went from being this academic star my first year of college to failing. I was suffering from depression and I knew this because I rarely left my house. I was smoking marijuana every day instead of going to class. I was doing a lot of drinking. I was on academic probation. And then I was forced to go back home to live in that environment that had showed me that being gay wasn't okay. In this environment that was trying to blame all of the anxiety and depression I was going through at the time--tried to blame that on my sexuality. It was a very rough time. My maternal grandmother died around that time, and my father still expressed a lot of anger towards me as I was even mourning my grandmother's death.

Religion wasn't forced upon us. We weren't made to live the life of typical Southern preacher’s kids. But my father was controlling in other ways. In some ways I think my father was just a pastor because he was narcissistic himself. It was almost like he was the God in his house. My father  always had an issue with saying sorry.

He was still practicing law right up until he couldn't anymore. And I do feel like right before my father started showing signs of dementia, he was trying to repair the relationship. And I do remember him saying he wanted to include on his new cards that he was open to performing LGBTQI marriages.

I feel like he was making strides to repair the relationship. It was beautiful to see and have those conversations. But then his health caught up with him, and it just became too late.

Laura: In a faith where God is often referred to as God the Father, I’ve often thought about the extent to which our parents shape our faith. Even though my parents gave me a lot of freedom in my faith, and encouraged me to question and even doubt, I can’t deny that my view of God is an incredibly warm and loving one because my earthly father is one of the kindest, most selfless people I’ve ever known. 

It’s much more complicated when your only experience of a father is someone who did not accept you as you were, who made you feel unwelcome in your own home. It would be easy to understand if Vernon were bitter toward his father even after his recent death. But instead Vernon has extended tremendous grace to his father. Even though he never quite said the sorry that Vernon longed for. 

All of those years of studying religion did not ultimately bring Vernon to his father’s faith. But they shaped him in significant ways. 

Vernon: While I was in school, I read the Zora Neale Hurston book Moses, Man of the Mountain. That was the book that made me want to really take writing seriously. It made me want to write like Zora Neale Hurston. You know, she writes through this lens of anthropology, but in that specific book, Moses, Man of the Mountain, it was through this lens of Christian dogma that Black people kind of digest, just adopt, that was used to enslave us. That book is a whole allegory about these slaves that keep trying to escape, but keep going back to their master, and they're afraid of the world. And it's like this allegory that uses a lot of Biblical language. And I wanted to write like that. And I kind of had like this aha moment to continue taking these courses, and to continue exploring  religion through the humanities. But I guess it just made me more inquisitive. If you read a lot of my work in undergrad and even some of the poetry I have out in the world right now, you can see that I am speaking to the world through this lens of Black Christianity, but I don't consider myself much of a Christian. When the need comes to me to pray, yes I do pray through that lens, but it's because it's the only lens I have right now.  

Religion--hopefully for everyone--raises their curiosity of the world, of these connections that we have with one another that we can see.

It's raised the curiosity in me to explore African religions through my writing, and to teach myself about them through the writing process, to include mythologies that weren't taught to me in public school. It's also making me think more of my ancestors, of the oral traditions of my people. As someone who has traveled very little, it is making me want to go and trace these steps back in Africa. It's given me curiosity to explore the religions that were there before Christianity was kind of put on my people.  

Right now I'm trying to decolonize my religion a little bit, I'm trying to familiarize myself with Yoruban practices and Indigenous practices.

I did just go full agnostic for some time, where I just didn't believe in anything--you know, I just believed in humanity in the world. But the older I get, the more I do think about this invisible world of belief and what it means to believe in something.

Laura: Vernon and I have had very different experiences of Christianty. But I think I know what he means by decolonizing his faith. Throughout history, Christianity has been used to oppress people and fight unjust wars. In C.S. Lewis’s novel “The Screwtape Letters,” the demon Screwtape says, “one of our great allies at present is the Church itself.” 

My experience of Christianity has been largely positive--but this does not mean that I condone everything the church has done. Even today, there are ways that the Church disappoints me. I do understand why people have thrown out the whole religion after seeing some of the things its followers have done. 

The process of decolonizing my own faith has been one of going back to the roots of Christianity--back to Jesus. When I see the way he interacted with people, it gives me a much better picture for understanding my faith. He was a close friend and advocate of people who were marginalized and oppressed at the time. The people he was most critical of were the religious leaders of the time. When I look at the times in history when Christianity has disappointed me, the people I see leading that charge look a lot like those religious leaders. I can’t think of a single instance where they look like Jesus.

I’ve chosen to raise my own children in the church because I believe not in the people who attend it, but in Jesus. When I look at his life, I see everything that our world needs right now to heal itself. But I don’t shy away from conversations with my kids about the problematic history of my faith. We’re having those conversations side by side with the conversations we’re having about our country’s history. 

I don’t know if my kids will ultimately decide to embrace the faith that is so important to me. I think the biggest hurdle they’ll have to overcome is that I am a consistently flawed model of that faith. At the very least, I hope that what they learn from that faith is a desire to fight for justice. I hope they learn to live with the compassion and grace I see in Vernon. 

Vernon: What has given me hope right now is the people who are waking up, and the people who I am seeing who are speaking out against injustice, who I did not see speak out for injustice before, and really hold capitalism accountable for what it is doing to everyone . . . the unfairness of it all--you know, all of my friends who work in the service industry who are now getting paid more unemployment than they did when they were working. All of these things are hopefully waking up a movement and I'm hoping that the movement keeps moving, and that we all bring about a future for the next generations to come. And I'm hoping these are the beginning steps to that. That's what's giving me drive and hope. As much as I don't want to be a Zoom teacher in the fall, I have this hope that the more we sit in this station in place, the more people are going to just realize the changes that need to really take place. 

Laura: Vernon has been thinking and writing a lot about our changing world, especially in his work with the Bay Area Writing Project, an organization of, by, and for teachers of writing at all grade levels and in all disciplines, dedicated to improving the teaching and uses of writing. 

Vernon has been teaching and writing for a long time, and has a book of published poetry called Southern Migrant Mixtape. One of the things I’ve appreciated about Vernon is that he brings a lot of humility to his work. And maybe this is the teacher side of him. He understands that we’re always learning and growing. That we need to keep being students of the world even as we’re teaching others. 

Vernon: My writing career--I feel like it's just very, uncanny. I didn't get the confidence to really share my writing until I got into my MFA program. And then in my MFA program, I just really felt the need to get to know the Bay Area literary scene for all that it is. Because it's a very rich literary scene filled with a lot of supportive people. So I pretty much just immersed myself in that--you know, shared my work at readings. And then one day when I read at one of these readings, the director of Nomadic Press was in the audience and asked me about my work. 

I've been on panels where a lot of the people in the audience are asking all of these questions about agent, agent, agent, agent, agent. And I'm just like, I've never had an agent. Can't say I never will have agent. Can't say I don't want to have and agent. But I made it this far without an agent just by continuing to write through a vulnerable lens, and continuing to share that with audiences. So, you know, I always give writers that are coming up behind me that same advice.

I'm currently in the Bay Area Writing Project. Thank God for that, because it has gotten me to look at my own teaching practice and to be able to articulate the things I do in my classroom. And it's also  helping me to think of myself more as a professional writer. 

I'm still coming into my voice as a writer. And I'm still trying to figure out where to go after my first book. There's just so many things I've always wanted to do that aren't poetry, like to explore more of my fiction writing. But the past three weeks in the Bay Area Writing Project have been really eye opening with everything going on, like this revolution that is happening out in the streets, especially surrounding  trying to get justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. I've been writing more about that.  

I started writing these small poems to Emmett Till's mother. I just call them “Poems from Mamy Till.” And of course what's going on right now is giving me a lot of fuel to keep writing in that vein. It's not  me spending full days writing. It happens in the moment and it's, like, a quick, short burst. I feel like I'm not doing a lot, but I guess I am doing some writing. My writing is just as scattered as I know I am right now, but I'm doing it. 

Laura: I asked Vernon if he’d be willing to share some of these poems with us. 

Vernon: To me, a poem never feels complete, but they're at a point where I can at least share them. 

Mamie said Emmitt was more like a brother.
My mother looked after him while I worked, she said.
This common narrative of how capitalism disrupts black nuclear families,
lower class families
makes black parents appear neglectful
when they cannot show up at school meetings,
make single parent households seem loveless.

Media has always been spreading fake news about black homes,
privacies we were never given,
As if our hovels are forever on the outskirts of the big house.
He was a breached baby Mamie said
feet first out of the womb
As if to stand for something from the moment he was born
living to wake up a movement with a nightmare so true you wish it were a lie.

When Mamie moved out on her own out of her mother's home
she recalled how Emmitt didn't abide by her.
Like he did his grandmother
and she didn't get much time to be the mother.
She wanted to grow out of being his big sister
Emmitt gave Mamie his watch before he got on that train,
which took him to Mississippi.

It was the last thing he ever gave her.
I don't need it where I'm going. Emmitt said.
I repeat. He gave her his watch and said, I don't need it, where I'm going. 

The second poem from this is:

There was blood already smeared above the door.
Snapped branches, sap dripping down onto the sunken wooden planks.
And death still knocked on the door in the dead of night,
the door of Moses, right?

Demanded more
while still drunk with the afterbirth of this nation on its breath.
We just want to whip him and turn him loose.
Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam said.
In the living room of Moses right in the dead of night.
And those two black adults, aunt and uncle knew,
That they could not protect their nephew Bobo
from two white men with a gun and money, Mississippi.
They knew that they had to sacrifice the branch in order to save the bough. 

And the last poem I have from this is:

Mamie said they took her son
Emmitt’s teeth
Like the teeth in George Washington's mouth from his slaves.
Are they in that river, the Tallahatchie
Whose mantle might they adorn?
She said my baby had pretty teeth.
So. Who died with them, rattling in their skull.
Lynching is a word, but what they did to make Mamie’s son
Was to show him what the devil is capable of. 

Laura: I appreciate the history in Vernon’s poems, but even more than that I appreciate their humanity. It reminds me that we are vessels of creativity, capable of displaying the most beautiful and gracious love--but also the most hateful and dangerous parts of humanity. 

The daily sanity I’m receiving from Vernon today, that I hope you’re able to receive too, is that we don’t get to choose our parents or our upbringing. We have very little control over our circumstances. But we do get to choose every day if we are going to stand up for justice, if we are going to forgive, if we are going to say we’re sorry before it’s too late.

If you’ve been listening, then you may have noticed that we’ve been including Easter eggs at the end of some of our episodes. Often it’s a personalized thank you to our supporters. Sometimes it’s a little something to make you laugh. If you’d like to hear your name in the credits, you can support us for as little as $5/month at shelterinplacepodcast.info. 

Today I’d like to thank Karyn Klouman, who made my world bigger by introducing me to the women of FIERCE: Essays by and About Dauntless Women. Karyn, your vision and work on this book is a beautiful picture of what our world needs right now: gracious conversations with each other and with our complicated histories. It has been a joy to partner with you this past month, and I can’t imagine a better way to finish our season than with your beautiful work.

Nick & Jesselle Miura, you have quietly and generously supported us for years long before we began this podcast. From dinners left on our front porch to that extra carton of eggs you picked up to early morning airport drop offs to caring for our kids when our car broke down on the Bay Bridge, you have shown us friendship that is deep and loyal and enduring no matter how messy and inconvenient life gets. You’re a big part of the reason that Oakland feels like home.