You Are My Heart and Other Stories Read Free

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.
    â€œThat’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