5:00 a.m., January 2016
My eyes opened as the soft blue hue found its way into the window. Birds were greeting the yet unseen sun rays moving silently towards our part of the world. I lay and listened to her voice in the room next to mine. She was praying. I envisioned her as she was the night we all prayed together, on her knees, arms lifted, her mouth moving. I have no doubt it was the first time I heard someone speak in tongues. I sat, and I wept. Now, I lay. I knew she was on her knees again. The words coming from her mouth flowed in a songlike way through the wall that separated her from me. I couldn’t understand them, but I knew they were reverberating in the ears of the Divine, and I knew God was listening. I felt the Holy Spirit flowing freely from her. It moved under the crack between my door and the floor. It filled my room. Filled me. I whispered, “Thank you.”
10:00 a.m., November 6, 2018
I had worked out with my sister, had breakfast with a friend and had voted. I punched the “video” button at the top right-hand corner of the instant messaging app before I was prepared, and there was Phyllis Moore-Green, waving at me with both hands and smiling with all of her teeth. As we started to talk, I just kept thinking about my host mom in Rwanda as she prayed in the room next to mine at 5 in the morning. Phyllis was talking about her time in Kenya as part of a study abroad trip, and as she told me stories from her time there, I felt the Holy Spirit emanate from her soul, pass through the phone and touch my own, just like the Spirit did from the mouth of my host mother.
“The next morning, I heard tropical birds. It was like, so awesome. I am in the middle of the woods! In the jungle. Oh, and I’m awake now, I’m alive.”
***
Phyllis Green is a social work major at Union University’s Germantown campus, and she’s 54 years old. When the opportunity to study abroad in Kenya presented itself, she said, “Why not? I want to try that. I want to go.”
Her first story began with her at the safari park.
“I wanted to stay outside a little bit longer, but the lights were going to be cut off from the generator,” Green began. “So me and my roommate were inside the tent and I heard these dogs barking. ‘Oh it must be something out there!’ and then all of the sudden I heard this, oh my goodness, it was like a sound I’d never heard before. It scared the crap out of me.”
“Then,” she continued, “the front of the tent was moving, like really moving.”
She said her roommate offered to go out and see what it was. She told me she was looking around the tent for something to protect herself with. “All I found was two plastic hangers, what am I going to do with two plastic hangers?”
“She went to unzip it,” Green explained. “I had her shirt, just in case I needed to pull her back in real quick.”
The light was still on outside, and there were insects attracted to the light.
“It was these big June bugs,” Green said as she held up her hands to connect her thumbs and index fingers in an oval shape. The dog noises though, kept happening. “So, I’m like, ok Lord, I know you didn’t bring me all the way to Africa to kill me. You could have done that in Memphis.”
“I fell asleep, my doctor gave me some antihistamines to relax me, I took two of those. ‘Cause if something’s going to eat me, I’m not going to feel it!”
The next morning, after awaking to the sound of tropical birds and realizing she had made it through the night and was still alive, Green went to the main house for breakfast.
“We told our instructor what had happened, and they told us it was lions out there, fighting with the hyenas. The hyenas were trying to take the kill from the lions. So, if anybody tries to tell you that lions just roar, they lying, they have this fight or flight sound, and it’s so deep. I heard my heart in my ears, that’s how loud it was. I never want to go back there again!”
She wants to go back to Kenya though. For Phyllis, it was more than what I experienced in Rwanda, more than what I could ever experience if I go back to Africa.
“I was being able to go somewhere where I came from, my people. I didn’t go with any expectations because I didn’t want to be disappointed, you understand? I wanted what God wanted for me. I wanted to get it, whatever it was. I don’t think we do anything as a mistake. I went really open. And let me tell you girl, when you go to things, without expectations, everything that comes in, it’s just like Velcro.”
She clamped her hands together. Her eyes widened behind her gold-framed glasses. I knew she was right.
“I didn’t go with any expectations and I got such a wealth of information, such a wealth of aspirations, from those people. Knowing that they’re just like us, you know what I’m saying?”
Phyllis and her group were in Kenya for three weeks, never staying in one place for too long. As they visited different orphanages, she told me about one little boy who laid on her chest, looking up at her.
“They just wanted to feel that warmth, that touch, that feeling, that we have for one another. The human touch is so important, for life itself, to exist.”
One girl asked Phyllis’s instructor, “Are there black people like me in America?”
“Yeah, there’s one right there!” the instructor responded, pointing at Phyllis.
Phyllis asked the 8-year-old girl what she wanted to be when she grew up.
“She said she wanted to be a lawyer and come to America, and I said, there’s going to be people just like me who will be waiting for you.”
“My teachers were watching me real close, ‘cause they were like, ‘You really got something,” and it was like I made a different connection than they did.”
She explained how the natives are used to seeing white people come over there, but when they see people like her with the white people, there’s something deeper happening. “Dr. Wilson was like, ‘Um, you got a connection with them,’ and I was like, ‘Duh! You think?’”
She laughed. I knew it was true. Where we come from, who our people are, generations and generations ago, it matters. It’s powerful.
Her last story was the one that encapsulated this, encapsulated what it means to connect to your place and your people.
“The part that really moved me was when we got to go to the village where they actually dress the way they used to dress, you know, in the wilderness. We got the opportunity to go to their homes. I will never call their homes huts again, because that’s where they live.”
“I had a moment, where, they’re called the Masai tribe, they’re known for their jumping, the men. We were all standing there and they started jumping and singing and their voices, the whole ritual thing, it just really overwhelmed me. They don’t have a lot of material things, but what they have from the inside, that’s genuine, it’s strength,” Green said. “And so, Frances was showing us around, and he turned around and looked at me and he had this face like, ‘What’s wrong?’ and then all of a sudden, Addie, I burst into tears. I just said, ‘Lord, thank you for the opportunity to be here and see where our black men come from.’ But at the same time, I wept because they don’t know who they are. Our black men from America don’t know who they are, and I say that with all of sincerity,” Green explained. “It’s like that because we’re still finding out about who we really are as a people. We’ve been taken from our native land and brought over as slaves. We became what they were about, slaveowners, and what they believed in. But our spirits can never be touched, and that’s all the way around the board. A lot of things about our culture is being exposed now, and that’s because God orchestrated that, because he’s coming soon. I believe that he’s showing a lot of different things to us now, so that we’ll know and we’ll be at peace with ourselves.”
***
Life is a journey to learn about ourselves, our stories and the stories of our ancestors and the stories of our land and the stories of our Creator. Sometimes our stories lead us to faraway lands, sometimes they keep us in our birthplaces and sometimes they lead us to Facebook Messenger calls with strangers. Sometimes it’s a convergence of two stories, the story of those who chose to leave their lands for freedom, and the story of those who were forced from their lands for a life of captivity. Wherever our stories lead us though, it’s the belief that we can be more, learn more, do more and make a change that leave better stories for those who come behind us.
I hope, will all my being, that I bravely and unapologetically pursue my dreams as Phyllis Moore-Green has pursued hers. I hope that I hold fast the advice she left me as we hung up at 10:44 a.m.:
“If you have dreams and desires that you want to achieve in your life, that you keep moving, no matter what. The sky’s the limit? The sky is not the limit, you can go beyond, you can go beyond. If you can think it, you can do it. And always keep the Scriptures before you. He is alive, and He is well.”
Amen.
