We were headed to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive, which lines the entirety of Manhattan’s smooth eastern edge. The FDR doesn’t have traffic lights, so I knew Cam and the boys were ready to rip.
Back then—and to this day, for sure—it was life-threatening to be a young Black man in an exotic sports car speeding up the highway, especially on Manhattan’s east side. But we were high on a night of frivolity and other purple treats, tearing into the fresh morning. We were feeling young, sexy, and free; the fear of arrest (or death, for that matter) was nowhere in sight. We were chasing fun and freedom, and we captured it, if only for a few miles on a stretch of New York City highway.
As one might imagine, much of my life has been monitored and measured by other people, and in this moment of exhilaration, I got the urge to try and lose my security. Cam eagerly accepted the challenge, shifted gears, and hit that gas. It was like being shot out of a cannon, and the big black vehicle with the big bad bodyguard instantly became a tiny speck in the rearview mirror. Cracking up the whole time, we felt as if we’d just pulled off the hip-hop version of a Little Rascals–type caper, with me playing Darla, of course. I’ve often felt it was a struggle to just have fun, to keep that inner child alive. But I remembered that promise I once made myself, that I would never forget what it felt like to be a kid. I would never let my little girl go.
By the time we peeled off the FDR at 135th Street, the sun had risen. Good morning, Harlem! As we pulled up to the stoplight at the corner of Lenox Avenue, next to Harlem Hospital, I realized we were somewhere close to my great-aunt Nana Reese’s church. I only knew of it through stories and a single photograph, but I thought if anyone could help me find this brownstone basement church, it was Cam. And that’s exactly what he did.
This wasn’t a paper picture in a frame—I was actually there. I could touch the bricks that my family once owned, in the place where they lived, prayed, sang, cried, praised, married, died, and caught the spirit: this is where they had church.
I know much of my parents’ families through frozen moments in gilded frames. My family pictures are sacred—they ground me, reminding me who I come from and who has come and gone from me. These photographs are kept in a private little room off my Hollywood-style mirrored and marbled dressing parlor. Behind the endless rows of high heels, the racks of minidresses, floor-length ball gowns, glittering baubles, brooches, and bags, behind all that wardrobe opulence, there’s a hidden door leading to my little sanctuary—my personal church of family history. Each picture is a story, evidence that I am connected to all these other people, all different and beautifully complicated. I have them all carefully and strategically placed; I want to piece my family together, to hold them close to me through pictures. I mostly go into this room alone, to look at them and to be with them. In this room, I study my beautiful, fractured, fucked-up family and store their faces in my heart.
The picture that I stepped into that day on 131st Street is of my great-aunt, Pastor Nana Reese. It looks like it was taken in the 1950s. She’s tiny and elegant against the weathered brownstone wall: shiny brown skin, deep-set eyes, pressed black hair, no jewelry but a flower corsage near her shoulder. She is wearing a billowing white preacher’s robe, white sheer stockings, and square-toed church-lady shoes. She holds a big ol’ pocketbook—not a handbag, mind you, a pocketbook—with a towel wrapped around the handle, just in case the Holy Ghost busts out and brings the heat during service and she has to mop a sweaty brow. Propped up against the wall by her feet, in rough handwritten capital and small letters that are all the same size, is a sign in white chalk bearing a simple menu: BIBLE SCHOOL, PREACHIN’, Y.P.H.A., and NIGHT SERVICE, with corresponding times. Nana Reese was barely five feet tall; her head didn’t even come up to the molding on the windowsill. However, she loomed large in the picture and in her neighborhood, robed and ready to preach the Gospel to the congregation.
My cousin Vinny, full name Lavinia, was raised by Nana Reese, so Vinny called her “Mama.” It is from Cousin Vinny that most of the stories from that time and that part of my family come down. Both sisters, Nana Reese and Vinny’s Aunt Addie, my grandmother, each had one son—Addie’s was Roy, my father, the only one who survived. No one ever spoke of Nana Reese’s son, but the story, according to Cousin Vinny, is that he died as a child from “consumption.” Such a crude-sounding diagnosis, isn’t it? Consumption.
“Mama said he was disobedient, wouldn’t put on his coat, so he died,” Vinny says. Nana Reese was extra-crispy Christian. As a child Vinny lived in one of the apartments above the church. Nana Reese and
