You Are My Heart and Other Stories Read Free Page B

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.
    â€œI 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?”
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    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.
    Mr. Pidgeon worked as a caretaker and groundskeeper for the Dutch Reformed Church on Flatbush Avenue that was across from Erasmus, and sometimes, when I saw him in the yard there, raking leaves or tending to gravestones, he would wave to me and I’d go into the yard and we’d talk for a while,
mostly about my progress with the choir. “Control is the secret of beautiful song,” he’d always say to me, the way he did to all of us at the start of choir practice, and he’d urge me to remember that passion without control was as useless as control without passion. If I remembered that, he told me, I could become a pretty good singer.
    During the first few practices at Karen’s church, I found myself in awe of the way other singers could make their voices do these intricate flips and wiggles that verged on screeches, and at how they could pull them back and turn them into soft liquid harmonies, or could move from minor to major and back again without the musical score telling them when to do it, and I was determined to be able to sing like them. I practiced hard and after a few sessions, and once I was warmed up, I found that I could get to the really high notes and could throw in harmonies that made the music richer and stranger—and I also found, with practice, that I could modulate my voice so that, almost instantaneously, I could get it to go from a full-throated howl to a soft whisper.
    Until this time, I’d never thought of Karen in the way I thought of white girls I grew up with: as girls one