SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU C7
then grew up to become the long-
time administrator for the Alex-
andria Fire Department. Now she
is retired, and the head of the
choir for the heavily Black parish
is White.
Without singing, Te rrell feels a
bit lost. The other day, s he and her
husband, a retired police investi-
gator who is also a Baptist minis-
ter, were so bored that they got in
the car and drove south, with no
destination in mind.
During the Sunday service, in
her dining room, with her hus-
band upstairs and her grandson
in the kitchen, Te rrell makes the
sign of the cross along with the
priest, who she sees on her screen.
“I don’t kneel because I can’t
get off the floor!” she says, laugh-
ing about her at-home tweaks.
When the soloist starts to sing,
Te rrell mumbles along quietly.
Thirty miles away in the Dis-
trict, Vancine Washington, 66,
wakes up on Sunday mornings
“and kind of mopes around a bit.”
She, too, was born into St. Joseph
and sings in the gospel choir. Her
Sunday routine is to read some
scripture, then flip on the
streamed Mass. Washington, who
lives alone, says she doesn’t post
comments on Facebook like some
others do, and she usually doesn’t
even sing along.
“I’m listening more so than
participating these days. This is
the hand we have been dealt at
this time, and I want to put myself
in a place where I’m ready to
receive,” she said, noting that
several places in Christian scrip-
ture say, “God requires we make a
joyful noise. But that doesn’t al-
ways have to be with other peo-
ple. I see this period as an oppor-
tunity — a hard one.”
Also watching is Joseph
Brooks, 61, a tenor who begins
preparing three hours early,
heading at 7 a.m. into the base-
ment with his digital voice re-
corder to rehearse. Singing in a
choir is like being a minister,
Brooks likes to say. You’re a con-
duit for the Holy Spirit, allowing
the congregation to understand
God’s word in a primal, bodily
way.
He w atched on a recent Sunday
with his wife and daughter in
their Alexandria home. The con-
gregant running the camera for-
got to move the lens, so only
center stage was visible — the
priest and deacon, but not the
soloist who came in to sing with a
mask.
“It’s like reading a book and
someone ripped out the last two
pages,” Brooks said. “It’s a huge
void.”
After an hour, the service —
which recently began allowing a
limited number of people to at-
tend in person, without a choir —
was wrapping up.
Te rrell wanted her congrega-
tion to know she was there, even
though she couldn’t minister that
day to them or to herself through
shared song. So she scrolled down
her phone’s Facebook app and
began to type:
“Have a blessed day.”
[email protected]Before the pandemic, a group
from the church choir would go
out after Thursday rehearsals to
Hops Grill in Potomac Yard. Every
summer, they take a trip to North
Carolina for a fundraising con-
cert, bringing a busload of school
supplies for local schools. There’s
the annual retreat to places such
as Barbados and the anniversary
celebration concert of the choir
itself, which began in 1976.
When something is especially
moving at rehearsal and people
cry while singing, they talk it
through after — what words con-
nected with them and why. And
they treasure the feeling that
comes on Sundays, knowing they
helped others touch something
greater or more hopeful. Singing
with others, Bentley says, is his
therapy, his prayer. One coping
skill is to listen to a lot of religious
music at home in Alexandria
while he makes coffee and gets
dressed up — as Te rrell does —
before logging on to the live-
streamed service. “For me, sing-
ing is very, very spiritual,” he said.
Te rrell gets that.
Hearing her fellow con-
gregants sing, and singing to and
with them, helps build her faith.
They’re holding one another up,
she says.
Before the coronavirus crisis,
Te rrell sang with different groups
multiple times each week. These
days, she goes to the basement
and sings along with old gospel
tracks that she plays on her CD
player or her phone.
She was born and baptized at
St. Joseph and started school
when the city was segregated,ing inside a church is like “100
people coughing for an hour,” s aid
Linsey Marr, a Virginia Te ch engi-
neer and professor who studies
the transmission of airborne dis-
eases.
And unlike group talking,
group singing for now isn’t possi-
ble on Zoom because there is a
time lag.
That means no rehearsing to-
gether virtually for most choirs.
Some better-resourced congrega-
tions have tech staff who can take
a handful of their singers or musi-
cians and make a mash-up that
congregants can watch — like a
cool music video with those now-
familiar Zoom boxes. But trying
to sing along with the online
worship on Sundays, in your
home alone, can be a weak fac-
simile.
The Hymn Society had its an-
nual conference in July — virtual-
ly — and Hehn said people are
sharing ideas for how to be more
creative, including more call-and-
response exercises on Zoom and
blending in more movement and
art. Others have tried to encour-
age “porch singing” (which is
what it sounds like) and family
singing.
“On the one hand, it’s been a
huge loss, and people here are
really grieving,” Hehn said. “On
the other hand, it’s an opportu-
nity... a time to deeply reflect on
why we do what we do and how
we do it.”
For members of the choir at St.
Joseph, a 104 -year-old parish
founded by Black Catholics,
much more than Sunday service
has been lost.hour-long virtual service, which
leaves her feeling like a spectator
instead of a conduit of God.
If you have ever sung with
another human being, you know
that communal singing can be
deeply moving, even transcen-
dent.
One study found that perform-
ing music resulted in participants
having increased endorphin re-
lease in the brain “in comparison
to listening to music alone,” the
University of California at Berke-
ley’s Greater Good Science Center
reported. The center also cited
research showing a connection
between how much someone is
affected by music and how much
they feel connected to a group.
“In other words, music makes
us affiliate with groups,” the re-
search found.
For American religion in the
last half-century, singing has in-
creasingly become a way for
many to encounter something
larger than themselves. From
slick praise bands with highly
produced videos as stage back-
drops to rousing gospel choirs to
ancient devotional chanting, ex-
perts say more Americans experi-
ence the mystical through com-
munal singing than any other
way, including classic religious
rites such as Communion or bap-
tism.
“The importance of singing to-
gether in a Christian community,
it’s hard to overstate,” said Brian
Hehn, head of the outreach arm
of the Hymn Society, one of North
America’s largest groups focused
on congregational song. “For
most Christian communities,
singing is the primary act that
people are doing.”
Te rrell tries to make church as
meaningful as possible, in her
well-appointed mauve-and-white
dining room in Dumfries, Va.,
with careful table settings, can-
dles and crystal glasses. But when
“The Gloria” comes on, or “Softly
and Te nderly Jesus Is C alling,” h er
singing is quiet. Some choir mem-
bers don’t sing with the virtual
service at all. Others don’t com-
ment. Some don’t even turn it on.
“It’s been at some points un-
bearable,” said fellow choir mem-
ber Christian Bentley, 33, who
works in marketing and mental
health. “That feeling, when you’re
singing your heart out.... That’s
not replaceable during covid.
Live-streaming can’t do that.”
The director of music at St.
Joseph, Eugene Harper, calls the
choir’s last meeting, on March 15,
“a day of infamy. Everything we
thought of as church — the body
of Christ, the community of faith
coming together in song and wor-
ship — ended as we had come to
know it.”
Coronavirus clusters have been
traced back to worship services,
and epidemiologists say singing
together in the covid-19 era seems
to be especially dangerous.
Research suggests that singing
releases large droplets that can
transmit significant portions of
the virus. So a congregation sing-
CHOIR FROM C1
With church services online, choir misses singing together
PHOTOS BY KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST
Christian Bentley, a member of the St. Joseph Catholic Church choir, says that singing has been a form of therapy and prayer for him. To
cope with being unable to sing due to the coronavirus, Bentley often listens to a lot of religious songs before logging on the virtual service.Callie Terrell says singing to and with other congregants helped
build her faith. Now, she sings along to gospel CDs in her basement.Ask a group of children in one
neighborhood what they want to
be when they grow up, and their
answers will show that they see
athletics and entertainment as
their routes to success. Ask that
same question in another
neighborhood and those
children’s answers will reveal
that someone didn’t just tell
them they could be a scientist
but explained that there are
many different kinds.
For his nonprofit’s motto,
Garner picked the phrase:
“Where kids can cast dreams
into reality.”
“We don’t have the types of
dreams that people with
privilege have,” he explains. “You
have people who always told you
that, ‘You can be and you can do.’
And we have always been told,
‘You cannot be and this is all you
can do.’ It takes people from
outside your community to say,
‘You can be something different’
for you to know that. That’s my
job. That’s my job as a teacher.
That’s my job as a mentor.
“That’s my job,” he says, then
pauses, “as a nonprofit founder.”
That title still feels new.
At the beginning of the year,
before the pandemic, the
protests and the plummeting
employment numbers, I
promised to use this column
space to “explore ways we can
help propel children who have
the fewest resources toward
success.” The need for solutions,
practical and creative, has only
grown. The pandemic promises
to widen educational and
economic gaps, and it could
even toss families who arepolice custody. Garner is one of
them. He stood in those streets.
He snapped photos from inside
those crowds. He declared,
“Black Lives Matter.”
And then, he took those words
further.
He figured out a way to show
Black children they matter.
In recent days, he launched
Inner City Anglers and started
signing up some of the
organization’s first members and
delivering T-shirts to them. On
the front of the shirt appears a
logo Garner designed. It features
a child with an Afro sitting on
the nonprofit’s initials and
holding a fishing pole. The
organization doesn’t exclude
members by race or ethnicity,
but it aims to help children in
neglected neighborhoods — and
in the region, that too often
means Black children.
I first learned of Garner, who
teaches art at Shepherd
Elementary School, when he
helped publicize a form that D.C.
public schools started sending
home with students to give
teachers more information
about their circumstances. He
told me then how his m other
died o f AIDS and how he passed
through 17 relatives’ homes
before graduating high school.
When we speak again on a
recent afternoon, he tells me
that he is tired of seeing Black
children stand in front of him
and pull from the same small list
of life goals. If you have talked to
children across the city’s Zip
codes, you know what he means.
VARGAS FROM C1 Carmen Jr.
“That’s when we have our best
moments,” he says. “When me
and my son go out, he’s different
and I’m different. We have talks.
We enjoy each other.”
As a child, Garner didn’t have
a father in his life who could
take him fishing and he knows
many of the children he and
other adult volunteers will take
on trips through the nonprofit
won’t either. But they may one
day have children, he says, and
in that way, what they learn now
may last long after the pandemic
is a memory.
“We’re teaching them
something that they can teach
their kids,” he says. “These are
things that they’re never going
to forget.”
Garner says he modeled his
nonprofit after a six-week
mentoring program he led that
focuses on teaching children
about themselves. At the
beginning of that program, he
met a 12-year-old boy whose life
had fallen along a similar
trajectory as his.
“A t the beginning of the
program, I asked him, ‘What if
someone says something bad
about your mother, what would
you do?’ ” Garner recalls. “He
said, ‘I would kill them.’”
At the end of the program,
Garner says he asked the boy
that same question. His answer
that time: “I got too much to lose
to let another person determine
my actions.”
He understood himself better,
Garner says. He understood that
he mattered.
[email protected]
sitting securely on one side of
that chasm to the other side of
it.
Fishing trips, of course, aren’t
going to fix all that. Garner
doesn’t expect them to — at least
not on their own.
“I’m trying to get people to
copy what I’m doing,” he says. “I
want people to go into their own
communities, find something
they love to do and then
introduce that to the kids. You
only know what’s introduced to
you. If we have more people
introducing good ideas into our
communities, then our
communities will be better off.”
When Garner initially came
up with the idea for the
nonprofit, he planned to launch
it in 2021. Then his enthusiasm
caused word about it to spread
and he soon realized that
families needed help now.
“I don’t think I’ve slept in the
last couple of weeks,” he says on
the day we talk. “Parents have
been calling me, asking, ‘When
does it start? How is going to
start? How do I sign up?”
On the day he drove to the
five homes to tell the children
about the organization and take
photos of them wearing their
new shirts, their parents all
asked him the same question:
“A re you going to take them
today?”
Garner says he is still working
out the logistics on how to safely
transport children during a
pandemic, but he aims to take
the group’s first members
fishing soon. He hopes to
replicate some of the best
aspects of going with his son,THERESA VARGAS
He could have done anything with his stimulus check. He decided to help kids.
CARMEN GARNER
Inner City Anglers founder Carmen Garner says that fishing was a
lifeline when he was growing up in a rough neighborhood.“I was that kid on the step waiting for
someone to come pick me up. Now, that’s
what I’m going to be doing. I’m going to be
picking these kids up.”
Carmen Garner, on his motivation to start Inner City Anglers“On the one hand, it’s been a huge loss, and
people here are really grieving.
On the other hand, it’s an opportunity...
a time to deeply reflect on why we do what we
do and how we do it.”
Brian Hehn, head of the outreach arm of the Hymn Society