You Are My Heart and Other Stories

by Jay Neugeboren

  Inside the church other women, also dressed in white—eight or nine of them—were sitting in the back two rows, wearing blue capes and white nurse’s caps. A group of older men, in black suits, ribbons on their lapels saying “Usher Corps,” showed us to our seats, and none of the men or women treated me as if it was anything unusual for a white boy to be there.

  I recognized a bunch of kids I knew from Erasmus—of the five to six thousand students at Erasmus, only about a hundred were black, and just about all of them had gone to our elementary school—and, like Olen and his brothers and sisters, they were dressed in their Sunday best: the guys in shirts and ties—a few of them in suits—and the girls in fancy dresses. When one of them would look my way and smile, I’d smile back, but maybe because everyone knew how close Olen and I were, none of them acted surprised to see me there.

  Olen didn’t say much while we waited for the service to begin, and I didn’t want to gape, so I kept my eyes on the program. “Shout to the Lord all the Earth! Let us sing Power and Majesty, Praise to the King!” the cover declared. “Nothing compares to the Promise I have in You.”

  What surprised me about the church was how formal everything was. Until I was Bar Mitzvahed, I’d gone to synagogue with my father every Saturday morning, and I still went with him a few times a month, and in our synagogue there were no programs or ushers or women in uniforms. People came and went whenever they wanted, stood up or sat down to chant the service in their own way and at their own pace no matter what else was going on, and people talked so much—some of the old men even snoring—that the rabbi would come to the front of the podium a few times during every service to demand quiet and to remind us that we were in the House of God.

  The Order of Service at Olen and Karen’s church was printed out, and the program also contained a Church Calendar for the week, a list of Daily Bible Readings, and a list of people who were Sick and Shut-In, with their addresses. When the service began—it was a “Special Harvest Service”—all the seats were filled, an usher and a Spirit-Led Woman stood at the end of each row of seats, and the room went dead silent.

  Whenever Olen stood, I stood, and whenever he lowered his head in prayer, I did the same. Once people were paying attention to the Pastor, the Reverend Benjamin H. Kinnard, I relaxed, and when the congregation recited prayers—mostly Psalms from the Old Testament—I joined in, and when they stood and sang The Morning Hymn—“Jesus Hears Every Prayer”—I sang along with them.

  As soon as we sat back down, an elderly woman in front of me turned around and smiled—“My, but you have a lovely voice, young man,” she said—and Olen leaned into me, his eyes wide in astonishment—started to say something, then just shook his head sideways, and shrugged.

  After that, the more Olen stared at me, the louder I sang. I didn’t know the words to all the hymns, but I could latch onto the tunes fast and fake the words, and I found myself singing with gusto, so that when Visitors’ Recognition came, and my name was called out, lots of people turned my way and applauded.

  About halfway through the service, right after Tithes and Offerings (I followed Olen’s lead and put fifty cents in the basket), Pastor Kinnard said that even as the harvest would be coming in, and not far down the road winter would be coming on, and even though dark times might be coming to any of us, still, with Jesus’s love, and love in our hearts for Jesus, we could walk in the light, and when he said these words, Karen stepped forward from the choir. People in the congregation began talking out loud (“Walk in the light, oh yes, walk in the light,” and things like that), and Pastor Kinnard said that Jesus had blessed us this Sunday with a young woman whose voice could make the angels weep, Mistress Karen Barksdale, who would now sing “Walk in the Light” for us.

  “You watch this,” Olen whispered just before Karen began to sing, and when she did—as soon as the first words left her mouth and rose into the air—it was all over for me. Her eyes were closed the way they were at breakfast when she was praying, and her voice was startling—clear, pure, strong—but it wasn’t so much that I wondered how such a large voice could come from a girl her size—Karen was shorter than I was, and wirey—but that I wondered how she had ever known—how she had first known—that the voice she had was there inside her, and that it was hers.

  The choir swayed from side to side, keeping the background beat by repeating the words “Walk-in-the-light,” while, to one side of the choir, an elderly man played an upright piano, a boy of about ten or eleven played drums, and two of the Spirit-Led Women shook tambourines. People stood and waved hands back and forth, and when the music heated up some, and when Karen’s voice soared above everybody’s, singing out almost as if she were crying, but effortlessly—“I want to be in love with Him!”—I melted. I stood up then and sang along with everybody else, and when, warbling on the low notes, Karen’s voice suddenly exploded into high ones and then shimmied back down, and when she sang out with all her might “He’s shining! He’s shining! ” and the choir responded and they went back and forth with the words—“He’s shining! He’s shining!”—in what I would later learn was call-and-response, the place went wild—people stamping their feet and clapping their hands and turning in circles and singing their hearts out.

  On the way home, I stayed close to Karen so I could tell her how incredible she was. Usually when I was around her, at school or in her home, she was easy with me: talking about her brothers and sisters or 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.

  “I 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?”

  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 might want to touch, hold hands with, or kiss. Now, though, especially after a practice or a service, I couldn’t think of her in any other way. What was cockeyed was that when I was with her I felt incredibly comfortable and incredibly awkward at the same time. And when her Uncle Joshua or the Reverend Kinnard said “Let us pray,” and she closed her eyes, lowered her head, and drew in a slow, deep breath, I felt something else entirely: a stillness inside me that was like the stillness I sensed in her. I would clasp my hands and lower my head too, but I wouldn’t close my eyes because I loved looking sideways and watching her in profile, and when we were apart the rest of the week, and for years to come when I found myself in difficult times, I would often summon up a picture of how beautiful and peaceful she looked in these moments, and this would help me through.

  The Friday night before Christmas vacation, we were scheduled to play James Madison at home. They had beaten us on their court in early December—our only defeat so far—but had lost one other game, so that if we beat them this time, we’d move into first place in our division and be on our way to getting an automatic first-round bye to the city championships.

  This was my first season on the team, but because we were usually way ahead early into the second half, I was getting to play more than I’d expected to. I wasn’t scoring much, but I was distributing the ball well and playing solid defense during the five or six minutes a game the coach called on me. Everybody knew how intense I was—in team scrimmages it was as if my life depended on every single play: if I didn’t score, or steal the ball, or if the man I was guarding scored, I died !—but what Mr. Ordover, our coach, praised me for—and this, since I’d started going to choir practice, was new for me—was that for all my seemingly madman ways, once I was in the game I could focus and play under control so that I rarely made a turnover, or a mistake on defense.

  We broke the game open early on when, during a six minute stretch, Johnny and Olen went on a tear and we outscored Madison 21 to 3. Johnny was having his best game of the year, outplaying the Madison center, Rudy LaRusso (who went on to have a long NBA career after being All-American at Dartmouth), and winding up with 32 points. Olen wasn’t far behind, with 24, but best of all was that with a solid lead the coach put me in before halftime to give Jimmy Geller, our regular point guard, a rest, and when the guy guarding me dropped off to double-team Johnny or Olen, I fired away, hitting four straight shots from the top of the key.

  We were a pretty happy crew that night, and in the man-byman evaluation Mr. Ordover did after every game, he said that what was most important about my contribution wasn’t the points I scored—I was third high scorer, with thirteen—but the intelligence with which I played. Intelligence, he declared, was what separated the very good ballplayers from the rest.

  Most Friday nights after home games, we’d all get together in a back room at Garfield’s Cafeteria, where, when the team walked in, the crowd would erupt in cheers. This week though, Jane Friedlander, who lived on Bedford Avenue near Midwood High School, a more middle-class section than ours, had asked me to spread the word that she’d gotten permission from her parents to have a victory party at her house.

  As soon as I came out of the gym with Olen and the rest of the team, I spotted Karen—she was across the street with a group of her friends—and I didn’t hesitate: I went up to her and told her that Olen and I were going to the party and asked if she wanted to come too. She didn’t hesitate either, and after we got to Jane’s house and took off our jackets and put down our gym bags, and while everybody stopped dancing and crowded around to tell us how great we were, she stayed next to me.

  “So,” she asked a minute or so after things had quieted down, “are you going to ask me to dance, or what?”

  “Sure,” I said, and I took her hand and we walked into the middle of the living room. I put my arm around her waist—the record that was playing was one of my favorites: Eddy Arnold singing “To Each His Own”—and I was so excited to feel her close to me—she let her cheek rest against mine the instant we started dancing—that it didn’t even occur to me that people might think it unusual to see a white guy dancing with a black girl.

  It was only later on in the evening, when the crowd had thinned out and I was standing around with some of the guys and going over plays from the game, that I realized Olen was gone, that Karen was the only black person left at the party, and that maybe people were noticing she was the only girl I’d danced with all night.

  Usually at parties—or, the previous few years, when I was on our synagogue basketball team and we traveled to other synagogues for Saturday night games-and-dances—I danced with lots of different girls, and most times by the end of the evening I would choose one girl to walk home with and maybe get to make out. But this time I danced with Karen every time they played a slow dance, and each time we moved around the floor (she told me a few times how much she liked having me hum softly in her ear) we got closer and closer until, instead of letting her right hand rest in my left hand, she put both arms around my neck and I put both my arms around her waist.

  A few minutes before midnight, Jane’s mother came down the stairs and said that our parents were probably wondering where we were and that we should consider the next record the last dance. Jane put on Tony Bennett singing “Cold, Cold Heart,” walked up to me and, in a voice that sounded just like her mother’s, announced that I hadn’t danced with her all night and that I now had the opportunity to correct this significant omission.

  So I danced with Jane, and by the time the record ended, Karen was gone. I caught up to her within a few blocks, and when I asked if she was mad at me for not dancing the last dance with her, she hesitated, shook her head sideways, told me not to worry about it, and slipped her hand into mine. We held hands all the way home, and when we got to her house—all the lights except for the porch light were out—she tugged on my hand and led me along the side to the rear door. She let go of my hand then, leaned back against the door, and closed her eyes.

  “You can kiss me if you want,” she said.

  Because my parents both worked in Manhattan, they didn’t get home most evenings until after seven, which meant that all through January and early February, from the time I got home from basketball practice until my parents arrived, Karen and I were able to be alone in my apartment. We were careful, and would enter my building separately, and sometimes, if the coast wasn’t clear, she’d go back to her house and we’d only get to be together for choir practice. Walking to and from church, though, we’d duck into doorways to kiss, and sometimes we’d find a car with its door unlocked and would climb in and make out in the backseat. A few times, too, Karen would wind her way through the backyards and alleys of my block, go down to our cellar, ring the kitchen bell—our apartment was on the fifth floor of a six-story building—and I would haul her up in the dumbwaiter.

  The first few weeks we were together after Jane’s party, we would neck until our lips were almost raw, and I couldn’t believe how wonderful it was simply to kiss again and again and again—long
, sweet, delicious kisses—and to try out all kinds of things neither of us had ever done before. By the second week of January, Karen was letting me touch her on the outside of her sweater, and a week or so later she let me unhook her brassiere and feel her breasts. After this, we took to lying together on my bed, naked from the waist up, and moving against each other, my leg between hers, or her legs around my waist, until I came. The first time this happened, I panicked and kept saying how sorry I was—“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, oh God, I’m really sorry”—and how this would never, ever happen again, but when I said this Karen just pulled me closer to her, stroked the back of my neck, and kissed me softly on the cheek.

  “You are my heart,” she said then, words she repeated the next few times we were together. When the same thing had happened about a dozen times, though, she started a new routine where whenever I said I was sorry, instead of pulling me to her, she would start giggling, after which I would insist that I was really, really sorry.

  “Sure you are,” she would say, then add: “But I’ll bet it felt really, really good.”

  When she said this, I’d answer that it was certainly possible that it felt really, really good, and we’d burst into laughter, and grab and tickle each other until one of us had wrestled the other off the bed and onto the floor. Sometimes, too—one of our favorite things—we would stay there on the floor, face down, one of us on top of the other, pressing against each other as hard as we could for as long as we could.