Maybe God Is Tryin’ to Tell You Somethin’

Color Purple. 

Alice Walker, the poet you are. A beautiful depiction of Black love. Not between a man and a woman, but between women. Exploring women find home. Not a place, but in the inner voice that sends a sign – you’re meant to be here. 

Shug Avery. I know you. I am you. 

Preacher’s Daughter. 25. Michigan. 

Lover. Fighter. Intellectual. Adventurous. Strong-willed. 

She knows too much and is trying to piece together each thread. 

I often think of the final scene. She hears the sound of the church over the hill and dances her way back home. The crowd followed her. The sounds of both worlds collided. And yet and still, the hug and kiss of her father graced her face, and she was home. 

I am finally making my way back home. The music is following me, and I am taking everything with me. 

I started this diary, Diaries of a Queer Black Auntie, at a time when I was running. 

Running from Flint, the small town I never wanted to become a woman in, running from family, running from anything that felt like a cage. 

I wanted to be free. 

Freedom has a cost. 

Freedom was loving anyone who looked my way. Anything to feel. Temporary highs that led to the lowest low of heartbreak. Freedom was the joint while listening to Sade on a Sunday morning. Freedom was nights out dancing the night away and forgetting every stranger’s name the night after. 

Freedom felt like forever. Until it disappeared in the minute I realized no one was there, but me. 

Alone. 

I held on to fleeting happiness longer than I needed to.

But the voice. 

The voice shattered the earth I sat in. 

Cross-legged on the floor of my apartment, facing my green loveseat. My cat Picasso is on the ledge, watching me trace the edge of the walls. Crying out – I can’t do this anymore. I surrender. 

Flipping through pictures of my life. Baby pictures. Pictures of old friends. Movie stubs. Asking myself - 

What is the meaning of it all? 

And then. Quiet.

Not the quiet of emptiness. The quiet of something arriving.

When God is silent, what do you do? 

You chase the sound of his voice, trying to find the secret formula to have him speak to you again. 

It doesn’t have to be loud to be a miracle. 

I don't know if I heard music first or felt it. But something rose up in me that I recognized from childhood. From Sunday mornings, I didn't choose. From my father's voice carrying over a congregation. From the women who spoke over me in tongues on Christmas Eve, the night before Papa died in 2024. 

They spoke of a blessing that was coming. The voice that reminded me that this run is leading me back to something I always kept within me. 

The voice didn't come in thunder. It came in the way it always had — woven into everything I thought I'd left behind. It was in the song I put on without thinking. It was the stranger at the coffee shop who said exactly what I needed to hear and never knew it. It was in my ancestors, who had survived things I will never be asked to survive, and still found a reason to sing.

God is not separate from the sound of Blackness. God is that sound.

The sip of water before the Pastor opens his mouth before the sermon on Sunday morning. The first cry of a baby as a mom holds her child in her arms. The laughter of Black women who have been through it and are still here, still loud, still full.

It is the sound of life. A reminder that something is bigger than you. 

I used to think the voice I was running from was outside of me. Something to earn, something to be judged by. The God of my father's pulpit, watching me become everything a preacher's daughter wasn't supposed to be. 

To become that woman I needed to be. 

But God is me, and I am him.

The voice I kept ignoring was blended with my own all along. 

I am Shug Avery dancing back across that field. 

And the music is not behind me.

It is in me.

The north star was never lost. I just had to stop running long enough to look up.