I remember once, when I was seven, fearing, or even faking, becoming ill from the incense puffing in white whiffs from the censer swung by the dark young man in glasses and surplice walking in the aisle between the pews, while my tie and tight collar seemed to strangle me as I sat on the hard bench beside Dad.
I whispered, “… I think I’m gonna throw up!”
Annoyed, he took me from the church into the cold Harlem street.
But soon, either at St. Philip’s, or at St. Martin’s where the rest of my father’s family went, or at the little church in New Rochelle we attended when I visited Aunt Laura and Uncle Ed, some form of Sunday worship was part of my life.
Sunday school was tan walls and black-paneled wainscot, with a small front office to the right behind the dark Dutch door. Two steps led down here, three steps went up there — every room seemed to be on a different level. For at least two years my class was taught by Courtney — a brown, brilliant, socially concerned man with a balding head and great energy. When I was eight or nine, he put up with my attempt to duplicate Christ’s miracle of the loaves and fishes for my somewhat befuddled Sunday class. I tore apart the bread-and-butter snack we were served in the middle of the period. …
“I told you, you couldn’t do anything like that. Only Jesus could do that — that’s why it was a miracle!”
But what Courtney had said, of course, was: “No one would even try to do something like that today,” and I had immediately raised my hand:
“I could do it!” What I’d meant, of course, was: I could try. And without even vaguely expecting to succeed, try I had — though I don’t know whether I ever made the fine point clear. But the attempt had been for myself — not for anyone else. Surely it was possible to try the impossible — though by the end of my fumblings with crusts and butter, the crumbs on the maroon carpeting and dark floor planks, I’d learned that even to try was to endure a certain amount of incomprehension, to receive a certain number of giggles, and to court the derision of peers sitting in their cane-backed chairs and of whatever authority stood, arms folded, beside the black mantelpiece above the parish house fireplace.
When I was ten or eleven, Courtney was the first person to talk to us Harlem children about a young black minister, recently graduated from Harvard Divinity School (whose father had been a minister as well, Courtney explained) named Martin Luther King.
Whether I took it with my father (while my mother stayed home to fry fish, or fix gravied shrimp and bacon, or spoonbread, or shad roe and biscuits for Sunday morning breakfast on our return) or whether I took it alone, the walk to church was usually interrupted with a stop at Louis’s Shoe Shine Parlor. Just around the corner on 133rd Street, the parlor was a green-shingled enclosure with sliding doors, built out perhaps five or six feet from the wall on a stone slab set in the sidewalk. Inside, on a marble base, stood a high seat along the back wall, with four sets of red cushions and four pairs of brass footrests whose tops looked like the soles of baby shoes with a little dip on each to hook your heel. Multiple drawers and cabinets filled the space below.
A middle-aged black man who smoked cigars and wore a tweed cap and layers and layers of flannel shirts and vests with a threadbare suit jacket over them all, Louis (the “s” unpronounced) would shine, polish, and buff your shoes, while two or three other black men in suits, ties, and overcoats stood, depending on the weather, nearer or farther from the kerosene heater glowing behind its grill in the corner, talking about baseball or horse racing or cards or drinking or — if my father hadn’t come with me — women, till one would remember and Shush the others: “Don’t talk like that in front of the boy!”
Toes stinging from the pressure of the shoeshine rag that had tugged my foot left and right in its bite against the brass, I’d climb down and give Louis a quarter: fifteen cents for the shine, a dime for the tip.
“Thank ya’, suh’.” Louis would touch his broken cap visor. “Say hello to ya’ dad.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Thank you, sir.”
One of the men would open the sliding door with its glass windows (one pane cracked; another with a decal stuck to it advertising chewing tobacco): “You give my regards to your ma for me, now.”
And, with another, “Yes, sir,” I’d step out onto the sidewalk and, through a puff of my own breath gone visible, start across the street for the back of the church.
For years I never realized that it was not the front.
I sang in the choir for two seasons, first as a boy soprano, then as a tenor — though the long-promised and endlessly joked-over adolescent breaking of my voice never came: the switch between registers, which a year later left me a comfortable baritone, was gradual and painless. In the choir I learned, despite initial disbelief, that people really could sing directly from music — just by reading the dots and flags. Thanks to my violin lessons, I got so I could pretty much pick out vocally — or at least follow — my place in the harmony if there weren’t too many key changes. Rehearsals were in a room in the church basement on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, then again on Saturday afternoons. In the worn robe he wore for practice, Mr. Witherspoon would explain: “Now, if the boys will actually come in a half an hour early next time, then they can leave half an hour early. But please, ladies and gentlemen, work on your parts at home!” Then he would raise his eyes to the tin ceiling’s stamped green squares. “Well, that’s all for tonight.”
For a season I was an altar boy. And twice I was chosen to read the lesson for the day — though I could never understand what the point of a lesson was (those few Bible verses read from the pulpit to the congregation, the heavy ladies in veiled hats, the gentlemen with long brown necks above the blue or red or striped knot, four-in-hand or Windsor) if nobody ever explained it.
Then, at thirteen, I had a rather violent (for a thirteen-year-old) break with the church. After various meetings to discuss my crumbling faith, now in the still, sun-shot chapel with Father Scott, now at an autumn evening’s dinner, sitting beside the bright, quiet jukebox at a fried-fish restaurant with only four tables over on Lenox Avenue with Father Anthony, I refused to be confirmed — and upset my parents, if not the other ministers, who, till then, had been taken with my intelligence and dedication. My father in particular felt it would not do for Bishop Delany’s grandson.
But I had announced: I was going to become a Hindu — because Hinduism accepted all religions as equally valid. (In the sixth grade, down at Dalton, we’d read abridged versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata; I had been impressed.) Though I stuck to my guns and never took any sort of communion, it blew over as such things do. Perhaps because it represented a conflict never really resolved, it was easier to put both sides out of mind, so that for years my strongest memory of church-going was of sitting, in my suit and tie, in Louis’s wood-walled parlor, while the long rag dragged on my foot and the men pursued their loose, laughing, Sunday morning gossip.