The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
by Deesha Philyaw
West Virginia University Press, 2020
Like Deesha Philyaw, I grew up in the South. Baptist church boy of Ensley, AL. My mother was a church lady. Both my grandmothers. My auntie, and so on. My maternal grandmother, Martha, cooked and delivered spinach casserole to the sick. In an all-white dress with lattice collar, she sat among the other saints on the deaconess board.
I guess I was bound to fall in love with God. I wanted some of that holiness. I couldn’t see behind the veneer. I didn’t understand that these women were whole women who embodied passions beyond making lime sorbet punch at the annual fundraiser. Some had survived the civil rights marches. Some worked construction jobs. Some loved men as hard as they embraced the holy ghost.
The characters in Philyaw’s short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2020, are also intimate with the Black church. All the characters in the book are either church ladies or connected to church ladies in some way. But we don’t sit with these characters in churches and fellowship halls. We follow them into their bedrooms. We watch their sobbing behind locked doors. We peer into the life that exists behind the curtain, outside of the drama and presentation of church.
In Philyaw’s opening story “Eula,” that curtain has been torn. We enter a sacred space between two women. The bedroom becomes throne room. Eula, lying in Caroletta’s lap, declares she has always been “the good girl.” She begs her best friend, Caroletta, to touch her. She and Caroletta, both thirty, dive into their first kiss, and then sex.
We find in Philyaw’s stories the holiness of the flesh, the sacredness of the material world. We find holiness in “How to Make Love to a Physicist.” Lyra and Eric talk about Einstein, the Milky Way, and Rumi. They theorize about heaven and hell. The story encapsulates more than just love between these two characters. “How to Make Love to a Physicist” is also a story of a woman learning to love her own self. Lyra takes risks. She consults her therapist. She takes more risks. And then Lyra learns to “take long, hot soapy showers, catching the water in [her] mouth until it spills out the corners.” I didn’t read many stories in undergrad, even in my Master’s courses, that feature a Black woman learning to take care of herself. I especially never read fiction where this self-care is integral to the progression of the plot.
Philyaw includes, too, the great fractures and fissures of life. In “Eula,” Caroletta is ready to dive into a same-sex relationship with her best friend. Eula’s stuck in her own head, tied to the dogma that’s been handed her by the patriarchs of the church. She’s too caught up in the fantasy, or obligation, of marrying a man; she can’t conceive of the validity of her relationship with Caroletta. And on top of that, she’s misconstrued God for a tyrant.
The patriarchy itself is another character in The Secret Lives of Church Ladies—embodied most starkly by Pastor Neely in “Peach Cobbler.” He gobbles entire peach cobblers that the protagonist, Olivia’s, mother bakes for him. He cheats on his wife, Marilyn. As the Pastor of Hope in Christ Baptist Church, he teaches on God’s wrath one Sunday and God’s mercy another.
But Eric the physicist also lives in this collection. He stands as a counter to Pastor Neely. He is patient and respectful of Lyra. From outside the church, he can see the danger of a God who “uses guilt and shame to enforce Christianity.” It’s important to point out, however, that Philyaw is not interested in setting up the kind of good man / abusive man dichotomy you find in some “inspirational” writing—and Tyler Perry movies. Philyaw is not here to judge any of these characters. Or to deal in angels and devils. She describes all her characters lovingly, but she also points the microscope at them.
I keep returning to the complex characters in “Jael.” Though the character Jael, in her titular story, shows her rough edges the reader gets to experience her first-person account of events. Much of Jael’s narration focuses on her crush on the preacher’s wife at church: “It’s something about the way her eyes sparkle and dance, instead of trying to look all holy.” We never read her as a troubled Black youth because she’s so relatable. We connect with her crush. We worry for her as her grandmother prays violent prayers in opposition to Jael’s sexuality. Though, again, we feel for the grandmother too because she is doing what she can to handle a formidable teenager. Philyaw leaves both women with their humanity intact.
Yes, I know church ladies.
My Grandma Martha had a dress for every church event. If she stood in on the usher board, she wore her navy blue jacket and skirt. Typical Sundays, she armored herself with bracelets and lipstick and heels. Though the one time she wore a dress with a slit, she told me she’d never wear it again. “I don’t want to be a showstopper at church,” she told me. She was a humble—and incredibly well-dressed—woman.
But she was most beautiful fresh from working in the garden. No wig, no high heels—scarf-wrapped head, face gold with sweat.
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is a meditation on those women and girls beyond what they reflect of themselves to the public. And beyond what people expect them to be. Our culture at large tries to generalize Black women. Churches, too—although they have done so much good for their communities—also struggle with supporting Black women’s identities.
Some of us have left the church. Some of us have found that God resides, and always has resided, elsewhere.
If the church won’t write us love letters, then we’ll write them to ourselves.
Cedric Rudolph teaches high school writers at the Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts school (CAPA). He is a founding editor for Beautiful Cadaver, which publishes social justice-themed anthologies and stages theatrical performances. In May 2018, he received his Poetry MFA from Chatham University. His poems are published in Christianity and Literature Journal, The Laurel Review, and The Sante Fe Literary Review.
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