I broke up with God when I was nineteen. I don’t remember the exact date, but I remember the light, the way it pinched me at the ducts and brought tree branches, clouds, license tags, pavement crystals, and the facial features of my then-boyfriend into a certain desolate clarity. An end had arrived for me in the winter of 2004, and there was no turning back. That spring would be raucous, but I had to hear myself. What I said was, and what I heard others say did. So, I told this man to come with me because I couldn’t breathe indoors anymore, and he came. He followed me out into the parking lot that united the Blount and Paty dorms at the University of Alabama, and, as we stood beside his maroon Jeep, which smelled even from the outside like a Steely Dan song, I said, heartbeats in my ears like dueling timpanis, I can’t be with you, I can’t be with anyone. I don’t know why I can’t, but I can’t. I don’t believe in God anymore, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.
Perhaps my thinking, still blurred by Southern Protestantism, was that my newly attained agnosticism needed its own baptism and abstinence. That day, I was feeling radical. Wasn’t the whole universe radical now that I was radical in it? And so, everything that had preceded this moment was false – including said boyfriend and the romance of his word games, my parents and the innocence of their community, and myself and some abiding sense of virtue. Without the God I was told was watching me watching me, did I have any witnesses? Did I have any destiny? What beliefs were real to me? The only thing that seemed legitimate was to go back to where this had all begun: books. All I knew was that I liked myself most when reading and generally liked people most when they were reading. So I did. I dropped out of Journalism and became an English major. I signed up for more French classes and declared Creative Writing a second minor. And I partied and complained and drank sweet tea and ate burgers and wrote papers and poems until all hours of the morning and gossiped and laughed and sang and spent all of my Bama Cash at the Chevron that accepted Bama Cash and walked on the river and pined for the lives I might live and read.
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Over the last twenty years, I’ve tried to decipher it, the moment when I knew I would never be able to have my faith again. Most of my friends from college, and even I, would have said that the months following the breakup with my freshman-year boyfriend were a time of great heartbreak for me. I lost a lot of weight, began smoking more, and grew increasingly bizarre in my taste in men while never quite finding a moment to be with the one I truly loved (who was not the Jeep guy, by the way). I blamed a lot of it on the Jeep guy and would hold my breath every time I saw his car buzz down The Strip, but I was living something much darker, a mental preparation for the exile my life would now include. No longer would I fulfill any of my parents’ wishes. I was not a believer, so I would not marry in a church or have tons of babies who would go to church. I wasn’t sure I wanted a long-term anything or offspring. I was so changed yet didn’t know how to wear it. Saying I’m sad because I don’t believe in God anymore at a house party in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was probably the last thing I wanted to do. But I was, I was profoundly distraught. And what was worse was feeling that my friends, as we got closer and closer to graduation, were drifting back into the vortex of Southern identities, identities I knew I could never put on again.
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By separating myself from the Church, I was essentially separating myself from all Southern communities. God was everywhere; he was Southern identity. You could be the best football player in the land, but if you didn’t perform some level of faith for the audience of Alabama, you were ostracized. And, if worse, you were more outright about your dubiousness, you were banished, canceled, transferred. If you don't like this country, then leave! Because I had been a somewhat devout Christian, I had allowed Him to be as omnipresent and important as everybody had wanted Him to be for me. To this day, I have to remind myself, when I feel as if my now-spirituality is evaporating under the pressure of Western secularism, how concerted I was in making a place for my faith to grow, how forthright I was with my doubts as if by being present for them I could placate them. How I am this person still. I am vigilant if not hurried about my philosophies. Issues do not rest in me; they keep me up at night. My religion could not be a lie; it had to be the truest thing. But finally, the hours of logic games beat me. I had killed “belief,” I had walked into a void. I was no longer able to entertain a Christian god, so I lived a divorce. I still live a divorce. And my spirituality retreated to poetry, into a new marriage of ideas.
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So, what does this have to do with hats? With a beret, no less, and an “Alabaman one,” as I dare call it? Well, perhaps not quite as much as I’d hoped. But the beret in the photos is my Alabama beret. It is a beret that hails from Alabama, or at least by way of my family. It’s a hat my maternal grandmother had, that she embroidered and sewed a cluster of pearls to. She probably made it for herself, but, now, I am the guardian of it, after she gave it to me on some summer day when she decided all of her granddaughters needed party hats. This beret, once ivory-colored and now turning like Bible pages, is a garment she altered to make her own. And it’s one of the first pieces of my new religion.
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Hats have always held a holiness for me. Someone early on, if I were to follow some Barthesian line of thinking, must have advertised them to me with some very sacred lexicon. I fell for the language, for the theory, of them. I love hats. I love the act of care and worship they are. I love how people look when affixing them to their heads, how they go from the haggard of normalcy to the redemption of hatted. I love how they rewrite countenance. I love how a hat can be a kind of walking benediction for the warmth and protection of one’s head. I love how a hat can be an answer to rain, before one must take up more space in the prying open of an umbrella. I love how a hat is cover, decoy, for the human underneath needing the grace of transfiguration.
My desire for a hat is my desire for this transformation, is a prayer for that.
For me, there is inner music to a hat, too. The fedora, the beret, the cloche, the fascinator. They all sing, in some polyphony of signifieds and signifiers, testimonies from past societies, of the donners of these hats. There is chatter, a particular attitude sounding, as if from a brook of time. And there is the imagery. The kind of Platonian beret, the form that splinters and scatters in collages before your very eyes. When you put on a beret, you are trying to wear a version of all of the best berets you’ve ever seen. When I wear a baseball cap, I see my head as many, a universe of people wearing baseball caps. I’ve never fashioned my own hat, I’ve never made one my own with embroidery and pearls or even by writing my name in it. I don’t own the hat in that way. I own it as one does a piece of land. My marks on the hat will be made. Some might even recognize my hat as my hat, but the hat will live on, the hat will go on to inspire other hatlike benedictions and fields of vision. My daughter might inherit my hat or my daughter’s child or, if I lose it, someone else’s daughter who needs a hat. Who needs the sacred mystery of finding a hat she might feel called to wear. I wear hats to think of people in this way, to believe in the small acts of worship hatted people make for shelter or style, and aren’t they sometimes the same?
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My new religion has some superstition to it, as any religion does. And it’s not just about a hat. Nor do I think it is any wiser (or dumber) than any other person’s system. I simply believe that we begin writing our destiny rather early. And I think I did mine, in ways that were once mysterious to me and that now, with the passage of time, feel more confoundingly obvious.
That I am a poet, self-estranged from her home, and living in Paris seems to be something that, unbeknownst to me, was hard at work in the currents of my life. Is this fate romantic or dark? I guess that depends on the hat I put on. In my béret alabamis, I see a secret, an unarticulated dream beginning to exact itself on the real timeline of my life. And I am happy because I have let my wildest, most radical desires take up their space, and I am living in one of the greatest art capitals of the world with another beautiful artist chasing the murmurations of his dreams while we raise a sweet, young person in the best kinds of conditions we could offer a human in the 21st Century. This could be the prayer of the beret, the prayer I might say I inherited from my grandmother (who might not have understood how I’d interpret the endowment). When I take off the beret, when I take off the theory of the hat, I am reading a darker fortune. I have abandoned my family to love poorly with another poor person who abandoned his family and farm for the joke of life that is falling in love with art. And now, the grind is catching up with us by the lungs, the gut. And we are doomed, by our own obstinance, to live on a polluted street on the edge of a polluted capital in a republic en disparition without our health and without our closest people realizing we love them.
My new religion has some superstition to it, as any religion does. So, when I wake up in the mornings, I try my damnedest to wear the outlook of the former, to sport the béret alabamais.
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When I broke up with God and, then later, when I finally broke up with the United States, I knew I was going to need a few hats to get me through. I’ve carried my grandmother’s beret and my grandfather’s tweed flat cap here, as items that would help me patch up this bifurcated sense of self. When I put them on, I am not a woman divorced from her family but tethered to it. And yet, I am also, in the same act, a woman who self-radicalized because she needed to look farther than the social contracts of American Christianity.
My new religion has ceremony, even if it’s not as regular as Sunday morning. I still take time with language to revere the joys and casualties of living, of being small, of having to answer to the nature of things outside of my comprehension. I still murmur to myself as if in prayer to beg for grace and alertness before what baffles and pains me — genocides, wars, homelessness, starvation.
When I ask my students sometimes to trace their history, to dig in and find a moment when they first had a relationship with language or story or the career path they’ve chosen, many of them can. And it’s not usually because a grandparent gave them a hat or an article of clothing that had a destiny written on it that they eventually excavate very specific events that changed the course of their lives. It’s because they’ve been attuning themselves. It’s because we do kind of know. It’s because we sometimes encounter a book or a person or a ritual of our own questioning that acts as an antenna, picking up a signal from the life we are already telegraphing. And when certain duties we’ve taken up to appease others’ desires start to block us, to truly disturb our course, we will have to break up with them, and this will most likely be a sad and utterly wounding loss. Because we do love others. And it might take time to feel that we can take care of ourselves and also these others. We might have to be selfish to reconstitute. But in looking backward through these equations of lives and missions, doing their best to live, we might be able to find an old friend, an old spiritual piece, that helps us bridge the realms.
What a smart, thoughtful, meaningful piece. And a fabulous hat. Congratulations. MP
Very brave! Lovely piece.