but can’t admit and, in fact, must refuse if they are to wake up tomorrow, that has forced them, or others like them,
eventually to shut off access to any empathy they may once have felt. Their unruly maleness will not be contained, as
mine finally was, by a sense of sadness at an older man’s injured pride. Their anger won’t be checked by the intimation
of danger that would come upon me whenever I split another boy’s lip or raced down a highway with gin clouding my
head. As I stand there, I find myself thinking that somewhere down the line both guilt and empathy speak to our own
buried sense that an order of some sort is required, not the social order that exists, necessarily, but something more
fundamental and more demanding; a sense, further, that one has a stake in this order, a wish that, no matter how fluid
this order sometimes appears, it will not drain out of the universe. I suspect that these boys will have to search long and
hard for that order-indeed, any order that includes them as more than objects of fear or derision. And that suspicion
terrifies me, for I now have a place in the world, a job, a schedule to follow. As much as I might tell myself otherwise,
we are breaking apart, these boys and me, into different tribes, speaking a different tongue, living by a different code.
The engine starts, and the car screeches away. I turn back toward my apartment knowing that I’ve been both stupid
and lucky, knowing that I am afraid after all.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I T WAS AN OLD BUILDING, in one of the South Side’s older neighborhoods, still sound but badly in need of tuck-
pointing and perhaps a new roof. The sanctuary was dark, with several pews that had cracked and splintered; the
reddish carpet gave off a musty, damp odor; and at various points the floorboards beneath bucked and dipped like welts
in a meadow. Reverend Philips’s office had this same chipped, worn quality, lit only by an antique desk lamp that cast
the room in a dull, amber glow. And Reverend Philips himself-he was old. With the window shades drawn, surrounded
by stacks of dusty old books, he seemed now to be receding into the wall, as still as a portrait, only his snow-white hair
clearly visible, his voice sonorous and disembodied, like the voice of a dream.
We had been talking for close to an hour, mostly about the church. Not his church so much as the church, the
historically black church, the church as an institution, the church as an idea. He was an erudite man and began our
conversation with a history of slave religion, telling me about the Africans who, newly landed on hostile shores, had sat
circled around a fire mixing newfound myths with ancient rhythms, their songs becoming a vessel for those most
radical of ideas-survival, and freedom, and hope. The reverend went on to recall the Southern church of his own youth,
a small, whitewashed wooden place, he said, built with sweat and pennies saved from share-cropping, where on bright,
hot Sunday mornings all the quiet terror and open wounds of the week drained away in tears and shouts of gratitude;
the clapping, waving, fanning hands reddening the embers of those same stubborn ideas-survival, and freedom, and
hope. He discussed Martin Luther King’s visit to Chicago and the jealousy he had witnessed among some of King’s
fellow ministers, their fear of being usurped; and the emergence of the Muslims, whose anger Reverend Philips
understood: It was his own anger, he said, an anger that he didn’t expect he would ever entirely escape but that through
prayer he had learned to control-and that he had tried not to pass down to his children.