A Proverbs 31 woman is the Beyoncé of evangelicals. She rocks T-­shirts and drinks from coffee mugs that declare, I’M A PROVERBS 31 WOMAN. Her babies wear bibs with MY MOMMY IS A PROVERBS 31 WOMAN printed on them. Her husband drives a car with a KEEP CALM AND MARRY A PROVERBS 31 WOMAN bumper sticker. In an unlikely twist of fate in the early 1990s, I became a Proverbs 31 woman. But not just any Proverbs 31 woman. I became the ultimate Proverbs 31 woman, by marrying Rev. David Freeman, pastor of one of the largest Black megachurches in America. I wasn’t yet twenty-three and my pre-frontal cortex hadn’t fully developed—so of course I thought I’d won the lottery.

Fast-forward eighteen years, and here I am backstage at the First Lady USA pageant, poised to take home the crown. I’ve spent most of these eighteen years unabashedly coveting the title. Both the New and Old Testaments list covetousness as a sin; I’m guilty as charged. But the saints would say I’m washed in the blood, so it all balances out. Now, finally, I get my chance to compete in the by-invitation-only pageant, which features twelve contestants, like Jesus’s twelve disciples. All of us are pastors’ wives, aka First Ladies.

The way I pictured it, becoming First Lady USA would be my life’s pièce de résistance, the great equalizer between me and the other women, who, as the daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters of pastors, deacons, assistant deacons, Sunday school teachers, and other proper churchfolk, were born with respectable-but-not-­quite-silver spoons in their mouths. I have no such lineage. The pageant had snubbed me for my first five years of eligibility, in part because I couldn’t trace my family’s church membership back to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and in part because the space on my birth certificate marked “father’s name” is blank.

Yet you best believe I’ve got the audacity—the pure, unmitigated gall—to parade around in this life and on this stage tonight like I belong here. Like I fucking own it.