Sonya Massey’s Last Words Were a Prayer
Before Sonya Massey repeated “I’m sorry” twice ahead of her execution by law enforcement, she said, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” I’ve heard this preached from the pulpit since I was a small child. It was repeated in my house, nearly a mantra often coupled with glossolalia. My grandmother believes. She is a minister. My mother believes. My mother teaches it to my cousin’s little ones, cupping their fragile hands inside her own, leading them through her recitation until it becomes theirs. My mother assures them that they will be covered in protection if they utter their need aloud, but only in His name.
My mother can and will rebuke anything. A pest in her house: She rebukes it in the name of Jesus. Lusting after Denzel: rebuked. Jokingly. Black folks know the range of tones our utterances hold. I heard a bevy of phrases Sonya Massey used, many of them tinged with levity. Women are socialized to make light or lean into that nervous laughter—the path of least resistance that leads us home and alive.
“Thank you. Love you,” Sonya said before two Sangamon County sheriff’s deputies entered her home near Springfield, Illinois uninvited and violently took her life.
If I still believed in the containers people put God in, Massey’s execution might have shattered my spirituality. The rebuke, the covering, didn’t work as I was taught it should.
While I know when we say conjureor spell, when we say invocation and ancestors, some pews will turn up and finger-wag. Will have something to say about witchcraft or how the connection we have to our ancestors is somehow demonic. How do we wrestle with that, knowing we know the face of evil after centuries of Black death and terror? We’ve witnessed it for too many months, as dictators and presidents carry on their wars in the name of profit, razing the homeland of a Jesus they pretend to believe in.
When Sonya Massey said, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” Deputy Sean Grayson immediately put his hand on his gun. My mother would say that is the marker of a demon. And I know she’d immediately begin prayer. When Sonya tried to rebuke Grayson, immediately she was my mother too. This utterance, so deeply coded in the DNA passed down to me from my mother and her mother and her mother and. Just as natural as rivers empty out into the sea.
The technology of Black women’s care is part of that passing-down. We know intimately how to identify and name the vitriol. That hatred we know all too well. That there is a method to our rage.
I am the granddaughter of an Evangelical woman preacher. I hear it when I read my poems to an audience. The response is similar to the call-and-response between a church congregation and who stands at the pulpit, their mmms and Yes, my Gods echoing through bookstores, university auditoriums, and jazz clubs. It’s also how we let each other know I’m here.
Christianity is complicated for me. I identify as “Christian” inasmuch as I believe, understand, and embrace that Jesus was a radical community member and organizer, who ended up a political prisoner and a victim of public execution by an imperial state. That might be the abolitionist seed planted long before I had the language. Perhaps we petition for His covering because we know all this about Him too.
There’s often a ringing in my ear, in my body, in my blood that rings when I’m close to Us, just beyond the veil. My sister-friend reminded me today it is a gift. I think and have been reminded that there is something to being divinely covered. But where was Sonya’s covering? Who is choosing who moves through the world, covered? I sobbed hard at the thought and had to take the rest of the afternoon off to tend to my pounding head as I tried to reconcile what I’d been taught, what I think I know, and what the state has to say about that.
The following day, while out running work errands, I came across two dead birds on my way home. One small sparrow and the other either a rock dove or something kin to it. I returned to my desk with my lunch, scrolling for a few before I got back to work. That’s when I learned that Sonya suffered from schizophrenia. I read the responses, collectively adding yet another name to our growing dead for no reason other than us just trying to exist according to the social contract we should know by now these institutions do not believe covers them.
I’ve been in an active mental health crisis, and deeply afraid of what the state might do while in it. I knew I needed help. I knew I didn’t want to be committed. I know about wellness checks that quickly go left. I vaguely remember saying to the person on the receiving end of my mania: Yes, I want help. Yes, I need medical help. No, I can't go to the hospital. Please, don’t call them. I’m afraid. It’s a painful self-awareness. A crack, just enough to remember what the state does and has done to Black women.
I knew I’d be hypervigilant in self-policing my own behavior, as medical professionals themselves prove to be culturally ill-informed and/or biased while providing care. I couldn’t pat my head if my locs itched. I couldn’t genuflect and return to the measures I’d disabused myself of while facing the possibility of state-sanctioned violence. I haven’t rebuked anything in a long time, relying instead on the invocation and petition of my ancestors. Knowing I’d have to whisper just above a hush. And while I knew some hospital programs had done people I knew all right, the danger in my fractured mind outweighed the few success stories.
While I don’t believe how my mother believes, I still believe in the power of praying mothers and grandmothers. We utter to transform. We utter as protection. We utter in praise, and we utter to shroud each other in divine grace. We utter in the streets as we Say Her Name and all the names that have come before. We utter demands, and we utter in resistance. Because we utter it, in unison. In threes for the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.
Sonya said, before they entered her home to harm her: Thank you, I love you. She must’ve been so scared and hopeful to offer even that.
How do we commit to liberating ourselves from the systems that require our rebuke in the first place? How does a “God-fearing” woman find common ground with people upholding systems led by roots of hatred, while we hope please, Jesus that they might have a “God-fearing” bone in their body too?
I wish Sonya weren’t one of too many. Unless we make radical change, she won’t be the last. I hope Sonya’s utterance led her home to glory, another recitation we proclaim before we bury our beloved. I hope she was greeted by our lost and fallen and most powerful and tender. While the thought provides a little respite, it’s no remedy. Black women should be cared for no matter what plane we exist on or state we exist in.
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