Most of the semester passed this way. Yao, who had established himself as the leader of our small group, would order everyone around, doling out our assignments for the night and shutting down any of the ideas proposed by women. He was tyrannical, misogynistic, but the rest of the group—Molly, Zach, Anne, and Ernest—were easygoing and funny. I enjoyed being around them, even though they merely tolerated me.

Zach was the clown. At five foot two, he was shorter than both Molly and me, but he used his humor and his intelligence to fill up whatever room he was in. Most days he spent half of our group time trying out little bits on us as though we were judges on a stand-up comedy reality show. It made it hard for us to know when he was being genuine or when he was setting up an elaborate joke, and so, though he was funny, everyone approached anything he said with some amount of discomfort.

“I passed by these dudes in the quad who were handing out little orange Bibles,” Zach said one day.

“They’re so pushy,” Molly said. “They practically shoved one into my pocket.” Molly was both smart and striking, but she was often dismissed because her voice, with its lilting, questioning sound, made people assume they could ignore anything she had to say.

“If they touched you, you could scream sexual harassment,” Ernest said. “I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time someone used Christianity as a cover-up for sexual assault. This is Boston, after all.”

“Oof, harsh, dude,” Yao said. He turned to Zach. “Did you take the Bible?”

    “Yeah, I took it and then I climbed onto John Harvard’s lap and just started waving it around shouting ‘GOD DOESN’T EXIST! GOD DOESN’T EXIST!’?”

“How do you know God doesn’t exist?” I said, interrupting their laughter.

They all turned to face me. The mute speaks? their faces said.

“Um, you’re not serious, are you?” Anne said. She was the smartest one in our group, though Yao would never admit it. Before this, I’d sometimes catch her watching me, waiting to see if my silence harbored brilliance, but now she looked at me as though I had finally confirmed her suspicions that I was a complete idiot, a mistake of the admissions process.

I liked Anne, the way she would sit back and listen to the rest of the group fumble before swooping in at the last second with the right answer, the most clever idea, leaving Yao grumbling and huffy. I was embarrassed to have earned her ire, but also, I couldn’t help myself. I doubled down. “I just don’t think it’s right to make fun of other people’s beliefs,” I said.

“I’m sorry, but believing in God isn’t just ridiculous, it’s fucking dangerous too,” Anne said. “Religion has been used to justify everything from war to anti-LGBT legislation. We aren’t talking about some harmless thing here.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way. Belief can be powerful and intimate and transformative.”

Anne shook her head. “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” she said, and I shot her a killing look.

“Opioids are the opiates of the masses,” I said. I knew what I sounded like. Wild, crazed.

Anne looked at me as though I were a lizard molting before her very eyes, as though she was finally seeing me, some spark of life. She didn’t press.

Yao cleared his throat and moved the group on to a safer topic, but I had already exposed myself. A backwoods bama, a Bible thumper. I thought of the religious student groups on campus that spent some of their days hanging up flyers in the dorms’ common rooms, inviting people to worship. Those flyers had to compete with the hundreds of other flyers, for dance marathons, Greek parties, spoken-word shows. They didn’t stand a chance. And, though I hadn’t worked out how I felt about the Christianity of my childhood, I did know how I felt about my mother. Her devotion, her faith, they moved me. I was protective of her right to find comfort in whatever ways she saw fit. Didn’t she deserve at least that much? We have to get through this life somehow.

    My outburst broke the dam, and after that day I started speaking up more in class. My grade recovered, though my small group didn’t bother hiding their disdain for me. I don’t think any of my ideas were ever taken seriously until someone else repackaged them as their own. After all, what could a Jesus freak know about science?

18

I have been saved and baptized in the Spirit, but I have never been baptized in water. Nana was baptized in water as a baby at my parents’ church in Ghana, where they have a more capacious attitude toward the rules and conventions of Protestantism than most American Pentecostal churches have. There was a kind of “more is more” attitude toward religion at my mother’s home church. Bring on the water, the Spirit, the fire. Bring on the speaking in tongues, the signs and wonders. Bring on the witch doctor, too, if he cares to help. My mother never saw any conflict between believing in mystics and believing in God. She took stories about vipers, angels, tornadoes come to destroy the Earth literally, not metaphorically. She buried our umbilical cords on the beach of her mother’s sea town like all the mothers before her, and then she took her firstborn to be blessed. More is more. More blessing, more protection.

When she had me in Alabama, she learned that many Pentecostals here do not believe in baptizing babies. The denomination is characterized by the belief in one’s ability to have a personal relationship with Christ. To choose the Lord, to choose salvation. A baby could not choose to accept Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior, so while Pastor John would be happy to say a prayer for me, he wouldn’t baptize me until I chose it myself. My mother was disappointed by this. “Americans don’t believe in God the way we do,” she would often say. She meant it as an insult, but still, she liked Pastor John, and she followed his teachings.

    When my friend Ashley’s little brother was born, my family was invited to his christening. Ashley stood onstage in a white dress and white shoes with crystal kitten heels. I thought she looked like an angel. Colin cried the entire time, his face red, his mouth sputtering. He didn’t seem to like it very much, but his entire family was radiating happiness. Everyone in the room could feel it, and I wanted it.

“Can I be baptized?” I asked my mother.

“Not until you’re saved,” she said.

I didn’t know what it meant to be saved, not in the context of religion. Back then, when people at church talked about salvation, I took the word literally. I imagined that I needed to be near death in order for salvation to take hold. I needed to have Jesus rescue me from a burning building or pull me back from the edge of a cliff. I thought of saved Christians as a group of people who had almost died; the rest of us were waiting for that near-death experience to come so that God could reveal himself. I suppose I’m still waiting for God to reveal himself. Sometimes, the children’s church pastor would say, “You have to ask Jesus to come into your heart,” and I would say those words, “Jesus, please come into my heart,” and then I would spend the rest of the service wondering how I would ever know if he’d accepted my invitation. I’d press my hand to my chest, listen and feel for its thumping rhythm. Was he there in my heartbeat?

Baptism seemed easier, clearer somehow than almost dying or heart-listening, and after Colin’s baptism I became obsessed with the idea that water was the best path to knowing that God had taken root. At bath time, I would wait for my mother to turn her back and then I would submerge myself in the water. When I lifted myself up, my hair would be wet, despite the shower cap, and my mother would curse under her breath.

    Black girl sin number one: getting your hair wet when it wasn’t wash day.

“I don’t have time for this, Gifty,” my mother would say as she brushed out my curls, braided my hair. After my third surreptitious DIY baptism, I got a spanking so bad I couldn’t sit without pain for the rest of that week. That put an end to that.

* * *

—

When the wounded mouse finally died, I held his little body. I rubbed the top of his head, and I thought of it as a blessing, a baptism. Whenever I fed the mice or weighed them for the lever-press task, I always thought of Jesus in the upper room, washing his disciples’ feet. This moment of servitude, of being quite literally brought low, always reminded me that I needed these mice just as much as they needed me. More. What would I know about the brain without them? How could I perform my work, find answers to my questions? The collaboration that the mice and I have going in this lab is, if not holy, then at least sacrosanct. I have never, will never, tell anyone that I sometimes think this way, because I’m aware that the Christians in my life would find it blasphemous and the scientists would find it embarrassing, but the more I do this work the more I believe in a kind of holiness in our connection to everything on Earth. Holy is the mouse. Holy is the grain the mouse eats. Holy is the seed. Holy are we.

* * *