While transferring a few artifacts between storage spaces here at The Strong National Museum of Play, something I had not seen in quite some time caught my eye. Seeing the church fan was like bumping into an old friend. I want to share a few fond memories about its playful properties.
When I was knee-high to a grasshopper, the hours spent listening to old men sing long meter hymns off-key, followed by even older men yelling prayers, interspersed with an A and B selection from the choir, felt like an eternity. My toys were considered too much of a distraction beyond my toddler years, and sleep was forbidden. It did not help that my mother and I were often seated in the front row because she was married to the pastor. I share all this to contextualize the swamp of stimulus I was experiencing. On the one hand, I was overstimulated by the sounds and physicality of the liturgical expression; on the other hand, they were illegible to a 5-year-old, and no one attempted to explain. However, because it was Texas, there was always heat.
Where there is heat, there are fans. I was especially fortunate to have grown up in the era where funeral homes advertised their services on the backs of hand fans. Simple in their construction, they consisted of either wood or plastic sticks with a square foot of cardstock glued to the front. These fans often bore the visage of interchangeable scions: Martin Luther King, Jr., or a version of white Jesus. Or, in fancier churches, I would find fans featuring a staged photograph of the perfect Black family standing in an empty church, backlit by stained glass windows. This did not matter to me, because the primary function of this fan was as a vehicle to my imagination, which ironically took the shape of actual vehicles.
More often than not, the fan would transform into a fighter jet. Unfortunately, the dogfights with an imagined second jet would attract too much attention. To stay out of trouble, I would shift from fighting on Earth, to preserving life in space—as the fan’s wider portion would represent the colony of survivors from Earth’s final cataclysmic event. As it touched down on the unknown planet, known as my knees, the whooshing from the reverse thrusters of the ship would interfere with the exegetical work of the sermonic moment. I would again be forced to transition the vehicular abilities of the fan to something less apt to arouse attention. Since the fan/spaceship had already landed on the surface of my knees, shifting to more terrain-centric vehicular exploration only made sense. The impossibly thin dump truck that resulted from this shift was probably the most successful, even if not the most exciting. If I could get away with it, I would place one foot on the seat of my pew to create a mountain for expert shuttling of mining debris. The fan was not my only found plaything, but it was the most commonly accessible and most utilized.
I was also known to flap the halves of hymnals like doves, send tithing envelopes down rushing flood rapids as Noah’s Ark, and ride the A train along the back of pews via the pens provided to the congregation. (I will admit that the last one took some flexibility.) This type of play continued until I was initiated into the culture of the Black Church by way of the rituals and rhetoric of play that configured and protected the space.
I am not unique. This type of play was the lived experience of many children in churches across the nation, kids who found ourselves immersed in a culture we couldn’t understand. So, we made ourselves at home in the ways that we knew how. As millennials, we would leave the church to find that our Transformers were “more than what meets the eyes.” They could take the shape of vehicles, household items, or weapons of mass destruction. Taking a cue from our friends at Hasbro, church kids like me could see something just below the surface of something as unpromising as fans. While our elders may have been immersed in the meaning of religious rituals, kids repurposed the materials around us in the pews for our own purposes. We made the sanctuary into a playground for our imaginations.