The Book of Mormon Girl Read Online Free Page B

we were everywhere the satellites touched.
    How to describe what I felt in that instant, when Marie winked at the camera just for us through her thick blackfake eyelashes? How to describe the burgundy and turquoise watercolor tones of the pre-existence and afterlife, the joy I felt hearing the surging sounds of the Mormon Tabernacle, and seeing peoples of every nation, kindred, and tongue stepping forward into the currents of eternity? How to describe my hunger for that beautiful world of sparkling difference beyond profanity, and beyond the pollution we learned about in school, and beyond the fearsome men, who, according to our parents and teachers, might lure us into their cars with candy? How to describe the hunger that made me climb up in my mother’s lap and cry for its pleasure and beauty?
    •   •   •
    When I was eight years old, I could not yet see the shadows in my world of sparkling difference, the hard edges of the lines we drew to distinguish ourselves from others. I did not know, for example, that the people I loved had only recently allowed black men to hold the priesthood, after excluding them for more than a century. I did not even know how to see that there were no black people sitting in our pews on Sunday, just as I did not know how to see that there were no black children in my elementary school. After all, my grandparents and parents had moved away from Los Angeles to the orange grove suburbs to put freeway miles between themselves and places like Compton and Watts. In my primary classes, I learned stories of the kind and loving Jesus who would return to save us all from the destruction and crueltyof the earthly world. How was I to know that Mormons had played our own special if minor role in that cruelty?
    Yet all around me, just within the range of my hearing, grown-ups spun elaborate stories to explain away the absence of black people in the Mormon world. Some said that African Americans were descended from Cain, who killed Abel, or, as my mother explained, from Ham, the son who humiliated Noah. It was the curses God levied on those ancient characters that had been transmitted and preserved through time in the blackness of black people, and it was the curse of blackness that barred black people from the priesthood. Perhaps it was my father who told me another version of the story: that in the life before this one, our souls sat in great councils and deliberated over God’s plan to send us to this earth, where we would learn and grow through a lifetime of experience. Debates led to conflict, and in these great conflicts in heaven, it was said, the souls of those who did not fight valiantly for God’s plan later came to earth in the bodies of black people. The people I loved dropped heavy tears over stories of our pioneer ancestors trapped by snowstorms in the Rocky Mountains and yet did not blink when they stated with assurance that millions upon millions of African people across time were permanently unworthy of God’s favor. All of this I silently absorbed.
    It would be many years before I learned to sort out the stories that had been sown into me like tares amidst the wheat. I did not yet know and would not know for many years thateven when I was a child there were in Salt Lake City Mormon historians who had found evidence that in the early days of the Church black Mormons had truly belonged just like the rest of us, that there had been black Mormon men whose hands had blessed and baptized and anointed. And I did not yet know and would not know for many years that priesthood had been yanked away from black men and a host of excuses allowed to grow up and take the place of doctrine.
    These are the unspoken legacies we inherit when we belong to a people: not only luminous visions of eternal expanses of loving-kindness, but actual human histories of exclusion and rank prejudice. We inherit not only the glorious histories of our ancestors, but their human failings too, their kindness, their