I grew up hearing those two words. Everybody who attended Mount Calvary on 126th Street in Harlem heard them — not once, not occasionally, but as the signature phrase of a man who built his entire ministry around them. He would work a sermon up to a fever, voice rising and falling, the congregation leaning forward in the pews, and then he would lean across that pulpit and point and say it:
Let it go. Let it loose. Lay it down right here.
As a child I heard it the way children hear the repeated phrases of faith — as texture, as rhythm, as the familiar music of a Sunday morning. It didn't mean anything specific to me. It meant church. It meant that particular voice building to that particular crescendo. It meant the women around me beginning to weep in the specific way that women weep in holiness churches when something true has landed.
I did not know, when I was eight years old sitting in that pew, that the man saying those words was carrying something heavier than anyone in that room. That he had been carrying it since 1953. That he would carry it until the day he died, and that the Parkinson's disease that stole his voice in his final years would take his instrument before it took his secret, and that he would go into the ground with both.
The sermon he preached for forty years was the confession he never made. I have had to learn to sit with the specific cruelty of that irony.
When I started writing this book I knew immediately what the title had to be. Not because it was clever — though it is, in a way I find more painful than satisfying — but because it was precise. The phrase is the heart of the whole story. It names what Elias Cole preached and what he couldn't practice. It names what the sisters needed to do and couldn't. It names what my parents carried for forty years under the weight of a neighborhood's cruelty. It names what I am doing right now, on this page: loosing something that has been locked up for most of my life.
There is a thing that happens in certain Black church traditions where the preacher's words are understood to come through them rather than from them. The Spirit speaks. The vessel delivers. The congregation receives. Under that theology, it is entirely possible to preach a truth you have not yet lived — to be the conduit for something you yourself are not ready to receive.
I think about that often when I think about Elias Cole. I think he believed what he preached. I think he meant it every time he said it. I think in some part of himself he knew exactly what he was bound by and exactly what it would cost him to loose it — the reputation, the church, the carefully constructed version of himself he had built over decades — and I think he calculated, every year, that the cost was too high.
So he kept preaching it. Kept telling other people to put down what God never asked them to carry. Kept standing in that pulpit with his hand extended and his voice full of the conviction of a man who knows exactly what he is talking about, because he was the one who should have been at the altar.
The Parkinson's came for him in the late 1980s. I watched it from the pews as a teenager — watched the tremor in his hand, the slurring at the edges of his words, the Sundays when a younger associate had to step in. I felt what any young congregant feels watching an elder diminish: a vague sadness, the ordinary discomfort of witnessing a body fail. I didn't know what I was watching.
Now I know. I was watching a man lose the only instrument he had ever used to almost say what he needed to say. The voice that built that phrase to a fever pitch for forty years, gone. And still he said nothing. Still the secret held.
He died in 1994. I attended the funeral. Sat in the congregation with people who loved him and said the right things because they were true — he was gifted, he was generous, he changed lives. All of that was real. None of it was the whole picture.
The title of this book is what he told us to do, for forty years, from that pulpit. It is also what this book is doing. I am loosing here. Not because I am better than him, or braver, or more righteous. Because I am the generation that got handed what he couldn't put down, and I have decided that the locked room is full, and it is time.
If you are reading this and you have your own version of a locked room — your own thing you have been carrying that was never yours to carry — then you know what I mean when I say: it costs more to hold it than to loose it. The holding is the expensive thing. The loosing only feels dangerous because it is unfamiliar.
This book is me, loosing here.
I hope it gives you permission to do the same.