She’s gathering it within her. All of it.
The turret guns follow Ella as she walks up the sidewalk. Everyone who would have tended to the concrete is indoors or has fled the neighborhood for a place where Guardians don’t circle overhead, where surveillance orbs don’t scan their faces and match their features against their recorded data, where Augments don’t congregate on sidewalks, outside of shops, at subway entrances, to disappear anyone with a record. The young whites who have moved in, some of them carrying about them the faint whiff of weed in their dirty dreadlocks, turn their heads when they see her, then turn back around when she gets out of earshot. It’s a short walk, but it feels like a pilgrimage across a desert.
She gets to the church, and it stands out like a single, manicured toenail in a gangrenous foot. A single thought, and the door pushes open. The hinges have been oiled, she can tell, but the doors still make a ponderous sound when they move and when they close behind her.
A single man in rolled-up shirtsleeves slips hymnals under the pews.
For a moment, a feeling of transgression shoots through her. She feels like an interloper. Then it passes, and she’s able to step forward, loud enough to be heard.
The man raises his head, salt-and-pepper beard trimmed close to his jawline. He smiles, tired. “Bible study ain’t tonight, it’s tomorrow.”
“I know, Pastor. I just—”
Worry creases his brow, and she knows he’s thinking about the Guardians. He’s thinking of the algorithms that police the block and wondering if this break in the pattern of movement will bring them down on his head.
She doesn’t know why she’s here. Maybe if I wait long enough, this man can tell me, she tells herself. “You—my mother used to come here. Her name was Elaine.”
The worry vanishes, replaced by the joy that comes with time-traveling to an aureate memory. “Lanie,” he says, wistfully. Then sorrow darkens his features. “So sorry for your loss. Wow, you must be Ella.” He seems to forget the police forces outside. “It’s been so long. You live around here now?”
Ella shrugs.
“Here, take a seat.” He sits on the cushioned pew and pats the space next to him.
They sit in religious silence.
“Your mother was one of our most enthusiastic members. No matter how many shifts at the hospital she had to work, she came through. Some Sundays, she was even wearing her scrubs!”
Ella imagines those Sundays, Mama on the subway heading here straight from work, not even bothering to wake up her children, Kev revealing later that Mama had been texting him the whole time to keep tabs on his sister, to make sure she was getting her rest, to see if she’d broken anything, if she’d broken herself.
“She even headed her own Bible study.” He chuckles.
“You still get churchgoers?”
He rocks back and forth on the pew. “It’s not how it used to be. Everyone’s older or moved out. Some of the new residents come by, but few stay. These new kids, they don’t seem to have much need for what’s on offer here, but we keep on keepin’ on. That’s what we do, right?”
“Is it?” There’s bite in her voice. Too much bite.
He lets the moment settle. “You had a brother, right? Kevin?”
“Yeah. He’s out on parole.”
The pastor nods, putting the pieces together in his mental timeline. “Lanie used to bring him. Had him taking notes in that pew right over there. Probably to keep him awake more than anything else. But he’d walk in with that notebook and his glasses, and he’d be scribbling down all the points I was making in my sermons. Put quite a bit of pressure on me to get it right, if I’m being honest. Sometimes, after the service, I’d see his notes. He had bullet points and everything. She knew how that child worked. She was getting him to try organizing”—he waves his hand to indicate the human entirety—“all of this. How to fit grace and tribulation into the same cupboard. Probably figured that child’s strongest muscle was his brain.” He leans over to Ella and says, in a conspiratorial whisper, “But it’s the heart.”
“Do you worry, Pastor?”
“About?”
“About some kid who hates us walking into here and shooting you and your congregation dead?”
The pastor sits back in his pew seat and looks heavenward. “God’s will is God’s will. But faith is believing not just that He’s omniscient and omnipotent, but omnibenevolent as well. Faith is believing that the universe is organized out of love for us.” He looks to me. “What that white boy did? Many of us still carry it in us. And I’m not going to tell you to love and forgive it away. It’s not my place to tell you how to grieve, but—”
“Stop.”
He blinks at her.
“Why can’t it happen here?”
“I’m not sure what you—”
“Why can’t what happened in Charleston happen here?”
The pastor turns his gaze away and looks again to the altar, like he’s searching for guidance. “All we can do is the work. I recognize it’s not enough to preach free love. We have to combat free hate as well. You know the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, for a few years now, I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that there were ten righteous men, only their righteousness was not relevant. That’s been the great problem of the church. Pretending that in here is different from out there. For many people, it needs to be.”
“When you talk about righteous people, you talkin’ about white people?”
He smirks at her. “They ain’t all bad.” Then, he lets out a soft chuckle. “People need to feel safe here.”
“That mean gettin’ lied to?”
“Child, I don’t lie to my congregation.” Metal stiffens his voice, and Ella’s body sings to it. “We don’t get where we’re going by matching hate for hate.” And in his mind, she sees it. Amid the swirl of fire and screaming and riots, she sees streets packed with factories. Bursting with black life. A man dressed in the suit of an actuary coming out of his house and waving to the factory worker next door. The houses teeming with professionals and gangsters and new homeowners. The pastor, a younger man, eyeing the strip where sits a place with a sign emblazoned: THE CHIT CHAT LOUNGE. And he’s got a fedora on his head and a trumpet case in his hand. He joins the folk on the sidewalk and walks past the drugstore and the grocery and the woman opening her drapery-cleaning shop. And then the wig shop for the beauty salon where the street girls went to, not the church ladies who lived a few streets over. And in the air, the word “Detroit.” Before it all burned to the ground. “I’m just trying to carry us to the next day.” He grits his teeth. “Look at outside. We don’t have drug dealers on the corners anymore. I can’t remember the last time someone was shot on this block. My churchgoers can come and go in peace.”
“When there isn’t a curfew. Pastor, this isn’t peace. This is order.”
His eyes ask her, “And why would we give that up?”
Ella rises to her feet. Whatever she was looking for, she’s not gonna get it here. “I was a kid when they let O.J. off. Everyone knew he was guilty. I mean, everyone. Wasn’t till I got older that I realized why it happened.” He frowns, waiting for her to continue. “Same reason the housing laws got passed in 1968. Same reason we got civil rights in ’64.”
“Child, what do you know about ’64? You weren’t even alive back then!”
“But you were!” she shouts back. “You should know. You were in Detroit when the riots happened.” Ella calms herself. “They freed the slaves at gunpoint, Pastor.” She softens. “My brother, Kev. He was born during the L.A. riots. 1992. Mama and I were trapped in the hospital when it happened. When we came out, everything was gone, but I had a baby brother.”