You Are My Heart and Other Stories Read Free Page A

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.
    â€œYou 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