The Worlds of Langston Hughes

Front matter

/ Co MN Í 2 A k= LANGSTON MAEN ES

Modernism and Translation in the Americas

VERA M. KUTZINSKI

Contents

A Bw PH

Acknowledgments Chronology of Travels, Translations, and Other Key Publications Abbreviations

Introduction: In Others’ Words: Translation and Survival Nomad Heart: Heterolingual Autobiography

CHAPTER ONE NOMAD HEART Heterolingual Autobiography

Tu as promené ton coeur nomade, comme un Baedeker, de Harlem à Dakar

[You carried your nomad heart, like a Baedeker, from / Harlem to Dakar / The sea gave your songs a sweet, rasping rhythm, and / its bitter flowers opened up in the spume.]

—Jacques Roumain, “Langston Hughes"

How does a person such as Langston Hughes, who lived in and between worlds, write an autobiography in the first place? How does one write a self when that self is perpetually displaced, put at risk, and not just by actual travel? Autobiography is an exceedingly vexed literary genre with ill-defined boundaries that tends to raise a host of expectations about what subjectivity is and how it is to be represented. Autobiographies that stray into fiction by blurring the line between imagined and lived experience create problems for most readers. These days, they are readily deemed fraudulent and censored publicly. Add to this the fact that readers’ requirements for black autobiography have historically been quite specific and inflexible.! Writing almost a hundred years after Frederick Douglass penned his paradigmatic 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Hughes had considerably more freedom to reshape autobiographical convention. What it meant to him to “tell a free story” was unlike what it had meant to Douglass even in his later autobiographical writing, for what Hughes had to contend with in the 1940s and 1950s were different politics and strictures. There were substantial pressures on a black autobiographer in the USA to construct himself as a subject that would represent African Americans in just the right ways: as valued citizens and loyal patriots. Hughes faced this issue not just in one but in two autobiographies, The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder As I Wander (1956). The second one was, for the most part, written after his testimonies before the McCarthy Committee, whose members subjected Hughes to their own autobiographical misreadings. I analyze those hearings at length in chapter 5. In this chapter I lay the groundwork for extending to Hughes's writings, which I consider intercultural by definition, Japanese comparatist Naoki Sakai's notion of “heterolingual address.”? My path is not a straight one but a weaving together of texts and a host of intertexts, including the Spanish translations of Hughes's autobiographies, around scenes of translation.

NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE

When Langston Hughes arrived in Moscow in 1930 to write the dialogue for a Meshrabpom movie about Negro workers in Birmingham, Alabama, he encountered some unforeseen stumbling blocks.? For one, the German director, “especially imported from abroad for this film," spoke neither Russian nor English or French well (IW, 79, 90). For another, and to make matters worse, everything was written in Russian. As Hughes relates in I Wonder As I Wander,

The script of the film we were to make consisted of an enormous number of pages when I first saw it—entirely in Russian! Just like my contract, it had to be translated. This took two or three weeks.... At first I was astonished at what I read. Then I laughed until I cried. And I wasn't crying really because the script was in places so mistaken and so funny. I was crying because the writer meant well, but knew so little about his subject and the result was a pathetic hodgepodge of good intentions and faulty facts. With his heart in the right place, the writer's concern for racial freedom and decency had tripped so completely on the stumps of ignorance that his work had fallen as flat as did Don Quixote's valor when good intentions led that slightly demented knight to do battle with he-knew-not-what. (IW, 76)

Hughes leaves us with the impression that the ill-fated feature, *a kind of trade-union version of the Civil War all over again" (IW, 79), might have been a fascinating part of film history. At the time, however, the various mishaps surrounding its production were sources of seemingly endless frustration for the cast and, for Hughes, the stuff of hilarious anecdotes. But the “pathetic hodgepodge" of misunderstandings and mistranslations does much more literary work for Hughes here. Although the writing seems wholly monolingual, Hughes plays with several layers of significance that revolve around the acts of (failed) translation he thematizes. In this way, he makes his readers aware that the premises of his own writing are heterolingual and heterocultural. For instance, the film script Hughes might have written but did not in the end would have been an American translation of the English translation from the initial Russian, and the distance between these three texts would not just have been marked by time. Doing such literary work in the first place also depended on the satisfactory completion of another translation, that of Hughes's contract. Once we consider the implications of all the translations that quixotically proliferate in this brief passage, it dawns on us that, for Hughes, the very act of writing is always a translation whose sources are prior translations. Does this sound like Jorge Luis Borges? Russia may not, in the end, be as far away from Argentina as we think, especially not with Cervantes mediating our passage.

My brief excerpt is one of the many droll tales with which Hughes regaled readers in both I Wonder and The Big Sea. It was precisely because of such passages that reviewers have quite consistently showered Hughes with deprecatory adjectives such as “shallow and slick” and “pedestrian and thin” (CR, 274). The reception of The Big Sea was overall more generous than that of I Wonder As I Wander, which reviewers targeted for proffering little beyond an affable *smiling surface," with Hughes telling us *about himself but not of his self? (CR, 275).* Writing for the New Masses in 1940, Ralph Ellison carped about Hughes's *avoid[ance] of analysis and comment" (CR, 26r). *One wishes that more of life had irked him," Alain Locke scoffed when he reviewed The Big Sea for Opportunity in 1941, adding that “important things are glossed over in anecdotal fashion, entertainingly but superficially” (CR, 274). Worse yet, Milton Rugoff patronizingly opined in the New York Herald Tribune that Hughes's autobiographical prose was *characterized by a tolerance, simplicity and unpretentiousness that borders on the naive" (CR, 241). The only African American writer who raised his voice in Hughes's defense was Richard Wright. *Hughes is tough," Wright wrote in the New Republic in 1940, *he bends but he never breaks, and he has carried on a manly tradition in literary expression when many of his fellow writers have gone to sleep at their posts" (CR, 269). While it is difficult to say exactly what Wright meant by *manly," I suspect that his idea of masculinity was rather at variance with Hughes's. The notion of *manliness" recurs in Henry Lappin's review for the Buffalo Evening News Magazine, in which he calls The Big Sea “the first attempt by a Negro to write a full and manly account of the recent history of Negro literature in the United States” (CR, 237). What is drowned out by this nearly unanimous chorus of detractors is the fact that in both autobiographies Hughes does tell plenty about himself as a person and a literary artist. This is not to mention the fact that both autobiographies also put in evidence plenty of *modernist complexities" beneath seemingly tactful surfaces.? One simply has to know where to look or how to listen. I argue in this chapter that early reviewers and many later scholars have let their own expectations of what an African American autobiography should be get in the way of reading how and what Hughes actually wrote.

On the one hand, then, Hughes's literary artistry as an autobiographer has been neglected and misrecognized due to readers” unwarranted insistence that knowledge of the text give them access to knowledge of the autobiographer's private self. On the other hand, that self had to have the shape of a distinctively “black” identity. Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), which Robert Hemenway admits can be “a discomfiting book,” also fell victim to this peculiar version of the autobiographical fallacy. Reviewers' criticisms of Hurston's “folksiness” and her “raceless” posture are echoes of the charges of naiveté leveled at Hughes. But Hurston's case is not strictly analogous to Hughes's, in part because much was edited out of Dust Tracks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, especially Hurston’s not-so-tactful criticisms of USAmerican foreign policy. Ironically, what the expectation of a self revealed disregards is an author's concern with audience. The question of audience was particularly fraught for African American writers in the USA prior to the civil rights movement and the defeat of Jim Crow legislation. His remarks in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926) notwithstanding, Hughes was no less sensitive to and at times apprehensive about audience expectations than were other New Negro writers: *What can he [a black writer in the USA] presume about an audience, however liberal or even progressive, that is not predominantly black? What is the appropriate discourse for an audience whose power he distrusts but must nonetheless respect? And what is the relation of one's subjective vision to a public sphere in which every word can be (mis)judged?”” John Lowney poses these questions specifically for the 1940s, “the era of incipient anti-Communist hysteria” and “red smear” campaigns. They apply equally to earlier and later decades.

Why, then, would anyone expect an African American autobiographer living in the USA in the early 1930s, and especially in the mid-1950s when the so-called Red Scare was in decline but by no means over, to reveal his innermost thoughts for all the world to see? Given antiblack racism, red-baiting, homophobia, and other pressures that existed during Hughes's lifetime, would it not be perfectly understandable that The Big Sea, as one reviewer noted, has an *odd quality of seeming to be written in two moods— one that is explicit and another that follows through like an undercurrent"? Could we not expect that parts of I Wonder might seem “strangely evasive” and that, along with the value of frankness, Hughes also knows “the value of reticence"?? To Hughes, being reticent about his personal life would have been a matter of sheer survival.

Reserve might also help explain why I Wonder As I Wander, which commences roughly where The Big Sea leaves off, did not extend the later volume's time frame into Hughes's then present. Although I Wonder is twice the length of The Big Sea, it ends at the start of 1938, covering barely seven years, whereas the first autobiography spans twenty-nine, from Hughes's birth in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902 to 1931. Arnold Rampersad attributes this disparity to the fact that “the second volume of autobiography presented challenges and opportunities that Hughes had not quite anticipated," veteran writer though he was (BS, xi). It is more plausible, however, that Hughes, in the immediate wake of his broadcast testimony before the McCarthy

Committee —he began to work on I Wonder in 1954— might have responded to this harrowing experience by turning to his earlier travels to make certain political points. Notably, Hughes devoted a great number of pages to his stay in the Soviet Union in 1932-33, leaving few doubts about his positive, though by no means uncritical, impressions of a Soviet-style government.” If what had initially motivated Hughes had been a desire to set his own political record straight in ways that he could not have during that testimony, his defiance did not last long. Only two years later, he excised the same Russia chapters from The Langston Hughes Reader (1958). Most significant about the writing of I Wonder is that Hughes took imaginative recourse to travel writing to work through what was clearly a personal and political crisis of major proportions (see chapter 5). He did so in ways that allowed him to come away with his dignity intact, at least for the most part.!?

The historical exigencies impinging on Hughes's acts of self-writing are linked to broader theoretical concerns about autobiography as a literary genre. The usual premise of autobiographical referentiality is that life-writing is a more or less transparent record of an already completed and hence fixed subject, a self, and that we can therefore move from knowing the text to knowing that self without any obstructions.!! What if the autobiographer constructs a self that would not exist otherwise, that is more than a more or less mimetic representation of the external reality we call life?'? Since the very act of writing is *an integral and often decisive phase of the drama of self-definition,"? an autobiographer's may well not represent the kind of self we expect, or perhaps not even a self at all. This is very much so in Hughes's case. Stubbornly refusing to turn self-inscription into self-revelation, Hughes put pressure on the *two universals— truth and the first-person T —that [popularly] define the genre of autobiography.” 14 As a result, The Big Sea and I Wonder As I Wander redirect readers” attention to the very obstructions themselves, that is, to Hughes's literary strategies, which displace the figure of the author and set it in motion, making it a point of departure, not perpetual arrival.'?

Some reviewers did notice “style” in The Big Sea but complained, as Ellison rather unreasonably did, about *too much attention...given to the esthetic aspects of experience at the expense of its deeper meanings." 16 But it is precisely in the *esthetic aspects" that the *deeper" meanings reside, as the future author of Invisible Man (1953) would have been well aware. Straddling the fact-fiction divide, Hughes's autobiographies should be read as we read his verse: by paying close attention not to the obvious narrative line but to the elements that disrupt that line, throw it off course. The pattern of these breaks creates an implied beat over which Hughes tends to linger, as any experienced musician or poet would.! Ellison would have called this communicating on the *lower frequencies."

Ellison's metaphor alerts us to the importance of sound as a vehicle for knowledge in Hughes's writing, where the interplay between phonetics and visual representations is always troubled, not infrequently leading to some form of violence when thematized. lain Chambers's point about the problematic of the visual as a privileged vehicle for knowledge applies directly to the role of sound in Hughes's poetics: “[W]e have inherited the centrality of visuality as the hegemonic modality of humanist knowledge, leading, via cartography, writing, and visual representation, to the continual reconfirmation of the I/eye in every corner of the globe. The gaze is rarely able to attend to listening, is unable to accommodate a reply."!? Hughes's autobiographies, like his poems, require that we listen, not just look, for what he calls, in yet another turn of the figure of the sea, “the undertow of black music with its rhythm that never betrays you, its strength like the beat of the human heart, its humor, and its rooted power" (BS, 209; my emphasis).

The concept of the implied beat—the undertow of black music— confers upon Hughes's prose the rhythmic qualities of what Amiri Baraka has famously called the *changing same."!? Hughes himself connects his autobiographical writing with African American music when, in *Jazz as Communication" (1943), he riffs on the poetic metaphor from which The Big Sea takes its title— “Life is a big sea/ full of many fish. / I let down my nets / and pull? turns into *Jazz is a great big sea. It washes up all kinds of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady old beat, or off-beat.”*° Hughes's repetitions turn life (“Life is a big sea"), literature (“Literature is a big sea,” BS, 355), and jazz into intertranslatable terms; that is, they are perpetually translated into one another. Through this process of intertranslation, “jazz seeps into [Hughes's] words." I agree with Anita Patterson and others that jazz appealed to “Eliot and other avant-gardists during the 1920s, in part because the music affirmed their cosmopolitan outlook, enabled their struggle against conformity with tradition, and aided their engagement with vernacular sources.”?! Jazz, however, did something more for Hughes, whom Patterson also includes in her statement. It made his words move differently, inflecting their overtones and undertones to convey gradations of delight and despair at the same time.?? That Hughes also applied the words *overtones and undertones" to *the relations between Negroes and whites in this country [the USA]" points to an aesthetics awash in the history of race relations (Essays, 33).

In Hughes's prose, no less than in his poetry, proximity to the formal structures of jazz results in privileging diachronic movement and sound over stasis and visuality. *Music," Larry Scanlon explains, *defines its formal elements precisely by their movement through time. To highlight the affinities between music and poetry is to highlight the diachronic aspect of poetic form."?? Diachrony, of course, does not mean linearity or unidirectionality. Hughes tends to encode movements through time in tropes of transit, that is, movement through space. By aligning spatial movement with the formal properties of jazz, Hughes creates poetic patterns that emphasize cyclicality and reversibility. Layering these patterns in writing creates the effect of multidirectional movements across spatial geographies and temporal grids. Pasts, presents, and futures are no longer arranged along a single vector that points in one direction; instead, they are locations from which one can move in different directions and to which one can return at will and repeatedly. In this way diachronic patterns work together with synchronic arrangements. In Hughes's texts, their copresence always makes available histories of musical and literary forms as destinations in the past linked with particular actual and symbolic geographies. For Hughes, the rural history of the blues is always already inscribed in urban jazz, so that the question is never whether Hughes's is a blues or a jazz aesthetic. It is inevitably both.?*

A brief excursion to W.C. Handy, a Memphis musician whom Hughes admired tremendously, helps clarify how this jazz/blues aesthetic might work in Hughes's writing. Handy's celebrated and beautifully illustrated Blues: An Anthology appeared in print the same year as Hughes's Weary Blues. In Fatber of tbe Blues, his own autobiography, W.C. Handy talks about how he transformed *bits of music or snatches of song" into fully fledged blues compositions “embellished by my harmonizations and rhythm."?? Jürgen Grandt astutely concludes from this passage that “[t]herefore, Handy's blues are a product of pastiche and collage and result from the collisions of the snatches of folk songs, field hollers, and other vernacular musics on the one hand, with his classical training and inclinations on the other, and are thus thoroughly modernist." Hughes's autobiographical anecdotes work in the same way that Handy's *snatches" of different tunes do: they are blues composition in the making. For “all its eclecticism," Grandt continues, Handy *sees his music standing firmly within a greater African American tradition. The arc of this tradition, in the case of his famous “St. Louis Blues,’ reached from Africa to Argentina and Spain to Cuba (via the tango) and then to St. Louis.”?* This is the arc Hughes himself imagined. If he did not complete its full span in his actual travels, his books, as we shall see, went the rest of the way for him.

By the same logic, setting out also implies a return, or returns, to history and tradition. The relationship between what we tend to see as two separate movements is fluid in Hughes's writing, but it is not shapeless. The concept of syndesis, which Edward Pavlić has transplanted from anthropology to African American literary scholarship, explains this process well. Building on Robert Plant Armstrong's use of syndesis to describe *[Yorübá] cultural systems organized by aligning voices or rhythms in multiple layers of repeating cycles," Pavlić suggests that “syndesis creates a fluid and dynamic relationship between repetition and variation, as well as between past and present. The interplay between repetition and variation situates the past emerging in the consciousness of the participants in a fluid but structured milieu."? To Pavlić, these insights about the participants in Yorùbá ritual ceremonies can be applied to African American literature from the USA as well. The challenge he poses for what he calls *syndetic criticism" in the context of African American studies “is to describe how the [symbolic] spaces [of North and South] overlap, how the social patterns shape the contours of personal space and vice versa.” He adds that “the best theoretical exploration of these issues often occurs in the literature itself.”28 While I concur with both statements, I find that analyzing Hughes's work makes it necessary to enlarge the range of symbolic spaces, or *ritual grounds," relevant to African American literature.??

While repetition as a literary trope tends to be most palpable in the formal elements through which Hughes's poems situate themselves in relation to literary, vernacular, and musical traditions, it is no less evident in his autobiographies. The effect of Hughes's lingering over the implied or offbeat in his autobiographies opens up textual spaces in which selves can multiply. These selves are not simply mimetic extensions of the historical Hughes, even when the narrated events reflect on his lived experiences. Rather, they are the result of repetitions with a difference at the level of theme and character. I argue that the proliferating selves in Hughes's autobiographies and verse are closely linked to human and textual interactions that involve more than one language. When Hughes's selves engage with each other and with presumed Others they encounter as a result of travel, they create possibilities for communality out of what I call translational performances. Such performances model — sound out, if you will —relations among humans that work against, and as a result render audible and visible, *conditions of dialogue in which the different powers, histories, limits and languages that permit the process of ‘othering’ to occur are inscribed."?? That is, possible communal relations are tested out without necessarily being resolved. Unlike identity, which is an unmoving social delimiter, selfhood —being a person—is crucially a function of being in translation,*' of translating and being translated in turn. The same ontology applies to the kind of human community that acts of translation make possible, even if only for a limited time. Translation, then, is always at least implicitly at issue in any multilingual literary practice, even, and especially, when mutual understanding remains either elusive or is not, in the end, an exclusive function of language. What makes the translational performances in Hughes's autobiographies especially valuable for inquiring into how “social patterns shape the contours of personal space and vice versa" is their status as highly self-conscious acknowledgments of the possibilities and limits of creating communities across languages and cultures.

Since this issue of subjectivity connects Hughes's autobiographies with his verse, it is odd that until quite recently academic readers have virtually ignored The Big Sea and I Wonder As I Wander. It is as if Arnold Rampersad's remarks about Hughes's *honest, water-clear prose" (BS, xxv) have left most scholars with little more to add.?? Few have explored Rampersad's suggestion that *deeper meaning is deliberately concealed within a seemingly disingenuous, apparently transparent, or even shallow narrative"

(BS, xvii). What appears to have escaped notice altogether is that both of Hughes's autobiographies teem with tales of linguistic adventures and misadventures in both domestic and foreign settings, settings in which one translates oneself and is being translated in turn. While some have commented on the use of different languages in Hughes's poetry, even the sheer frequency of multilingual scenes in his autobiographical writings has gone almost entirely unnoticed.?? The insistence with which Hughes draws attention to translation in all sorts of settings is indeed striking. Whether traveling to closer or more remote areas of the world, including the outer reaches of the former Soviet Union, Hughes always, and repeatedly, remarks on the linguistic “bedlam” that was going on around him —conversations in Haitian Kréyòl, Uzbek, Tajik, Russian, Georgian, and Tartar (IW, 17, 149). I propose to read the tales of linguistic adventures and misadventures in The Big Sea and I Wonder As I Wander as traces of “syndetic cultural patterns [that] resist the stable and ordering influences of modern rationalization.” ** The passage I quoted at the outset of this section is but one of countless instances that show Hughes's keen awareness of the ever-present potential for cultural misunderstandings across languages and cultures. In the case of the unfortunate film script, the reasons for misapprehension are not linguistic incompetence but a lack of cultural knowledge. The hapless Russian writer had produced *a script improbable to the point of ludicrousness" because he had—unsurprisingly at the time— never traveled to the USA, relying instead on the *very few books about contemporary Negro life in our country [that] had been translated into Russian" (IW, 76). The film script, then, is already a translation of a translation even before being rendered in English: “Imagine the white workers of the North clashing with the southern mobs of Birmingham on the road outside the city, the red forge of the steel mills in the background, and the militant Negroes eventually emerging from slums and cabins to help with it all!" (IW, 79). *It would have looked wonderful on the screen," Hughes admits, *so well do the Russians handle crowds in films" — *Russians" meaning director Sergei Eisenstein, who threw a party for the cast in Moscow. There is only one small problem: superimposing a Soviet future upon a USAmerican past creates a clash of cultural sensibilities that, to Hughes, distorts the present almost beyond recognition. Like the movie scene in which a “hot-blooded white aristocrat” from Alabama would ask the *lovely dark-skinned servant" to dance at a party, *it just couldn't be true. It was not even plausible fantasy — being both ahead of and far behind the times" (IW, 78, 79).

While Hughes's recourse to Cervantes's “slightly demented knight" is a suitable response to this travesty, invoking Don Ouixote also has another effect. As a literary reference, Cervantes represents the undercurrent of another generic mode in this autobiographical narrative: not the OQuixote’s parody of courtly love but the picaresque whose tricky legacy— fictional autobiography — is one of the keys to Hughes's episodic inscriptions in both

I Wonder and The Big Sea. None other than a rather paternal Carl Van Vechten points us in this very direction when, in his introductory remarks on Hughes's “picturesque and rambling” life in The Weary Blues, he projects how Hughes might set up his autobiographical writing: “[A] complete account of his disorderly and delightfully fantastic career would make a fascinating picaresque romance which I hope this young Negro will write before so much more befalls him that he may find it difficult to capture all the salient episodes within the limits of a single volume."?? Van Vechten was right; one volume did indeed prove insufficient. Given that both of Hughes's autobiographies lay claim to a far-flung literary genealogy in which Cervantes and Lazarillo de Tormes sit gleefully with Frederick Douglass and Brer Rabbit, it is no accident that trickster figures akin to the wily pícaro populate Hughes's autobiographies.?6 Gatesians would probably prefer the figure of the “Signifyin” Monkey,” a trope that comes to life in the seemingly extraneous story of Jocko, the riotous monkey Hughes brings back from Africa only to have him defecate on a pool table (BS, 13 1-37).°” The pícaro, who signifies in similar textual ways, is surely a branch of a family tree that sprouted in very close proximity to North Africa. Yet simply conflating the Spanish pícaro with the West African figure of Esu-Elegba on which Henry Louis Gates bases his theory has the serious disadvantage of rendering imperceptible Hughes's allusion to the picaresque novel.

This allusion enables a discussion of narrative structure here in ways that Gates's theoretical framework does not. A wonderful example of the pícaro in The Big Sea is the sailor named George (no last name) on whom I will comment below. In I Wonder, there is Emma, the former actress who presumably makes a living as a translator but is really too busy playing a socialite *Kentucky Mammy? in Moscow (IW, 83-84). There are also “Yeah Man," the woman chaser— whose *Russian was far worse than mine when he would try to speak it at all....most of the women never knew a word that he said" —and Yusef Nishanov aka Nichan, who *knew about a hundred words of Russian—our only language in common" (IW, 112, 144). This is not to mention the ubiquitous besprizorni, the street urchins who lurk at every corner (see IW, 152—53). And let us not forget Sylvia Garner, the only one of the movie's USAmerican cast to defy *that old cliché that all Negroes just naturally sing— without effort" (IW, 8o). Sylvia's antics deserve a close look. Sylvia, who *became an American folk-song star on the Moscow radio" (IW, 81), in many ways exemplifies the figure of the translator-as-trickster. Hughes recounts that because of Soviet restrictions, when spirituals were sung, “the words God, Lord, Christ, or Jesus were not to be used... Sylvia would substitute whatever word came into her head” (81). Because her Russian listeners presumably did not understand English, or not well enough, she could get away with substitutions that were quite comical and perhaps as heretical as Lazarillo's would have been in sixteenth-century Spain: “My

God is so high, you can't get over Him, you can't get under Him," came out as “Old mike is so high, I can't get over it, I can't get under it! Oh, this mike is so high! Hallelujah!" (IW, 82). The most compelling scene for my purposes is the one prompted by Sylvia’s stubbornness: “I’m tired of faking. Pm gonna get God into my program today." Her friends are understandably skeptical.