You Are My Heart and Other Stories (2 page)

This was a time before college and pro basketball teams were dominated by black players—the first black player in the NBA, Chuck Cooper, didn't come into the league until the fall of 1949, more than two years
after
Jackie Robinson had joined the Brooklyn Dodgers—and it was a time before there were a lot of seven footers playing, so it wasn't unusual for guys Johnny's or Oscar's or Olen's size to play center. A few years before there had even been a player from the West Coast named Johnny O'Brien who was my height, or maybe an inch or two taller, who played in the pivot and had been an All-American.

It was also a time before sit-ins and freedom rides, before voter registration drives and bombed-out black churches received national headlines—before everything we know as the civil rights movement had come into being: before the Montgomery bus boycott and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, before the Selma to Montgomery March and the March on Washington, before civil rights workers were murdered and governors stood in the doorways of schools to keep black children
from going to classes with white children, and before riots destroyed black sections of cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, and Newark—before organizations like CORE, SNCC, SCLC, and the Black Panthers came into being, and before most of us had heard of people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X.

And even though it was also a time when what was called
de facto
segregation existed in New York City the way it did in most of the country, North
and
South, you wouldn't have known it from our neighborhood.

About a third of the students in my elementary school, kindergarten through eighth grade, were black, which was about the same percentage as Jews (Irish and Italians made up most of the other third), and virtually all the black kids, including Olen, lived in a three square block section—about a ten minute walk from my house—where their families owned their own homes.

Olen was the oldest of seven children, and he and Karen had come north from Georgia when he was in the fourth grade and Karen and I were in third grade. They came with their mother, grandmother, and brothers and sisters, but not with their father, and they moved into a two-story wood-frame house next to one owned by Olen's aunt and uncle—his mother's sister and her husband, who had five children, including the Tompkins twins, Rose and Marie, who were two years behind me. They also arrived with their Uncle Joshua, who pressed clothes in a dry cleaning store on Rogers Avenue, and it didn't occur to me until years later, after I'd moved away from Brooklyn and had a family of my own, that Joshua had not been a real uncle.

Starting in the fifth grade, Olen had a newspaper route in the mornings—he got up at five to deliver the papers—and from seventh grade on he worked after school, weekends, and summers delivering soda and seltzer, and he used to say that it was lifting the wooden cases and carrying them on his shoulders that had enabled him to build himself up so much.

Olen's mother, who worked as a cook in the lunchroom at P.S. 246—this was the elementary school Olen and his brothers and sisters went to with me—remembered that I'd had a reputation for being one of the smartest kids in the school, and about once a week she'd take me aside and make me promise to get Olen to study harder. Basketball was useful because it would get him into a college, but the main thing was for him to get his education. Before Olen was even fifteen months old, she told me, he could pick out any card you asked for from a deck, and where they came from in Georgia people used to gather around in their house to watch Olen do this. Nobody had ever seen a brighter boy baby, she said.

Olen's mother was usually in the kitchen cooking when I was there, and since a lot of what she made was fried in bacon grease and my family was kosher, the smells would drive me crazy, and when they did, Karen would delight in tempting me.

“Oh come on and have just a little taste,” she'd tease, and she'd offer me a strip of bacon or a sausage patty or some fritters. “What do you think—that your God will strike you dead if you do?”

I'd resist at first, but then Olen, Karen, and some of the others would get on me, and while they fried up thick pieces of bread in the grease, or passed a strip of bacon under my nose, they'd roll their eyes and smack their lips with pleasure.

Mrs. Barksdale would tell her children to leave me be, but she'd laugh when she did. “Not eat bacon? Well, I can certainly see why you people are known for your suffering!” was one of her favorite lines, and it was usually the one that made me give in, and when I did—closing my eyes while Karen or Olen or one of their younger brothers or sisters put the food into my mouth—declaring that I was being force-fed against my will—they'd all hoot and holler in triumph.

When I got to Olen's house that Sunday morning in October, Karen was at the stove, and her hair, which was shoulder length
and straight, was tied back in a lavender ribbon. The family was getting breakfast ready and Karen was working alongside her mother, both of them wearing aprons over their white dresses while they fried up sausage, bacon, cornbread, and flapjacks. “Let us pray,” Uncle Joshua said after we were all seated, and everybody clasped their hands and looked down while Uncle Joshua gave thanks to Jesus for His loving kindness, for the food we were about to eat, for
all
our provisions, for our health and salvation, for the gift of song He had given to Karen, and for the young man of—his exact words—“the Mosaic persuasion” that He had given to us in loving friendship.

“That's you,” Karen whispered quickly while everybody was saying “Amen,” and she said it without looking up, her hands clasped in front of her.

Mrs. Barksdale and her mother left before we finished breakfast, and when we got to church they were standing on the steps with several other women, welcoming us and handing out programs. The church was made of whitewashed cinder blocks, with a big painted sign over the entrance, in red, white, and blue—“The Barton African Methodist Episcopal Church”—and above the sign, a plaster statue of Jesus on the cross, the statue bolted into what appeared to be a large porcelain bathtub that had been turned upright. The women were dressed in bright white dresses, wore turquoise-colored berets, sharply angled in front, that looked like the kind British commandoes used during World War Two, and had purple sashes across their chests, with patches that identified them as “Spirit-Led Women.”

Inside the church other women, also dressed in white—eight or nine of them—were sitting in the back two rows, wearing blue capes and white nurse's caps. A group of older men, in black suits, ribbons on their lapels saying “Usher Corps,” showed us to our seats, and none of the men or women treated me as if it was anything unusual for a white boy to be there.

I recognized a bunch of kids I knew from Erasmus—of the
five to six thousand students at Erasmus, only about a hundred were black, and just about all of them had gone to our elementary school—and, like Olen and his brothers and sisters, they were dressed in their Sunday best: the guys in shirts and ties—a few of them in suits—and the girls in fancy dresses. When one of them would look my way and smile, I'd smile back, but maybe because everyone knew how close Olen and I were, none of them acted surprised to see me there.

Olen didn't say much while we waited for the service to begin, and I didn't want to gape, so I kept my eyes on the program. “Shout to the Lord all the Earth! Let us sing Power and Majesty, Praise to the King!” the cover declared. “Nothing compares to the Promise I have in You.”

What surprised me about the church was how
formal
everything was. Until I was Bar Mitzvahed, I'd gone to synagogue with my father every Saturday morning, and I still went with him a few times a month, and in our synagogue there were no programs or ushers or women in uniforms. People came and went whenever they wanted, stood up or sat down to chant the service in their own way and at their own pace no matter what else was going on, and people talked so much—some of the old men even snoring—that the rabbi would come to the front of the podium a few times during every service to demand quiet and to remind us that we were in the House of God.

The Order of Service at Olen and Karen's church was printed out, and the program also contained a Church Calendar for the week, a list of Daily Bible Readings, and a list of people who were Sick and Shut-In, with their addresses. When the service began—it was a “Special Harvest Service”—all the seats were filled, an usher and a Spirit-Led Woman stood at the end of each row of seats, and the room went dead silent.

Whenever Olen stood, I stood, and whenever he lowered his head in prayer, I did the same. Once people were paying attention to the Pastor, the Reverend Benjamin H. Kinnard, I relaxed,
and when the congregation recited prayers—mostly Psalms from the Old Testament—I joined in, and when they stood and sang The Morning Hymn—“Jesus Hears Every Prayer”—I sang along with them.

As soon as we sat back down, an elderly woman in front of me turned around and smiled—“My, but you have a lovely voice, young man,” she said—and Olen leaned into me, his eyes wide in astonishment—started to say something, then just shook his head sideways, and shrugged.

After that, the more Olen stared at me, the louder I sang. I didn't know the words to all the hymns, but I could latch onto the tunes fast and fake the words, and I found myself singing with gusto, so that when Visitors' Recognition came, and my name was called out, lots of people turned my way and applauded.

About halfway through the service, right after Tithes and Offerings (I followed Olen's lead and put fifty cents in the basket), Pastor Kinnard said that even as the harvest would be coming in, and not far down the road winter would be coming on, and even though dark times might be coming to any of us, still, with Jesus's love, and love in our hearts for Jesus, we could walk in the light, and when he said these words, Karen stepped forward from the choir. People in the congregation began talking out loud (“Walk in the light, oh yes, walk in the light,” and things like that), and Pastor Kinnard said that Jesus had blessed us this Sunday with a young woman whose voice could make the angels weep, Mistress Karen Barksdale, who would now sing “Walk in the Light” for us.

“You watch this,” Olen whispered just before Karen began to sing, and when she did—as soon as the first words left her mouth and rose into the air—it was all over for me. Her eyes were closed the way they were at breakfast when she was praying, and her voice was startling—clear, pure, strong—but it wasn't so much that I wondered how such a large voice could come from a girl her size—Karen was shorter than I was, and
wirey—but that I wondered how she had ever known—how she had
first
known—that the voice she had was there inside her, and that it was hers.

The choir swayed from side to side, keeping the background beat by repeating the words “Walk-in-the-light,” while, to one side of the choir, an elderly man played an upright piano, a boy of about ten or eleven played drums, and two of the Spirit-Led Women shook tambourines. People stood and waved hands back and forth, and when the music heated up some, and when Karen's voice soared above everybody's, singing out almost as if she were crying, but effortlessly—“
I want to be in love with Him!
”
—
I melted. I stood up then and sang along with everybody else, and when, warbling on the low notes, Karen's voice suddenly exploded into high ones and then shimmied back down, and when she sang out with all her might “
He's shining! He's shining!
” and the choir responded and they went back and forth with the words—“
He's shining! He's shining!
”—in what I would later learn was call-and-response, the place went wild—people stamping their feet and clapping their hands and turning in circles and singing their hearts out.

On the way home, I stayed close to Karen so I could tell her how incredible she was. Usually when I was around her, at school or in her home, she was easy with me: talking about her brothers and sisters or our teachers or homework or whatever was happening. But now, for the first time, she seemed shy, and it was only when Olen asked if she had heard me singing, that she acknowledged my presence.

“I heard you,” she said, “and in my opinion, you have genuine potential.” Then she looked right at me. “So I have a question for you, Mister Take-Any-Dare. Would you like to sing in the choir with us?”

 

For the next few months when I left my house on Sunday mornings, I took my gym bag with me, my good clothes packed
inside as if I was going out to play ball with the guys—and two evenings a week, when I said I was going to meet Olen, I'd go to his house and then walk to church with Karen for choir practice. Our first time there, Karen introduced me to Mr. Pidgeon, the church's Minister of Music, and he sat down at the piano, had me repeat scales he played, and asked if I could read music. I said that I could—I'd had accordian lessons for a few years when I was younger—and he said that was good, and he gave me a folder with music in it. He said I would sing with the tenors, that he appreciated the quality of my voice—its “timbre”—and that (when he spoke the words, Karen showed nothing) I had “genuine potential.”

We did a lot of familiar stuff like “The Lord's Prayer,” “Ave Maria” (Karen and a girl named Louise Carr alternated on the solos for this), and “You'll Never Walk Alone,” along with hymns and spirituals everybody knew like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” but the music I loved most was music I'd never heard before—pieces that seemed half-talked and half-sung and where, after you'd gotten through the basics, Mr. Pidgeon encouraged choir members to step forward and take solos if the spirit moved them to do so. Some of these songs were slow and sad and could start tears welling in my eyes, but the songs I looked forward to above all were the ones with a driving, insistent beat that became faster and faster, pounding away until you thought the church walls were going to bust open from trying to hold in the sound: “Don't Give Up” and “We Need Power” and “Packing Up, Getting Ready to Go”—songs that, except for the fact that they mentioned God or Jesus, you never would have known had anything to do with religion.