“Congrats, man,” Evan said to Clyde.
“Can you believe it?” Billie said, hugging me. “He just asked me outside.” She looked down at the sparkling ring and then back at me. “Can you, Journey? Can you believe it?”
“No,” I said, and seeing how happy my friend looked, I didn’t have the heart then to say what I was really thinking—that Clyde had done this because Ms. Lindsey was leaving to find Benji. I hugged Billie again and kissed her on the cheek.
After that, the prom became a kind of engagement party for Clyde and Billie. They led the electric slide and when the king and queen went up on stage to claim their royal crowns, they handed them off to Clyde and Billie. I was so happy to see her getting what she wanted for once. And then I thought maybe I was wrong. Maybe Clyde did want to marry Billie and Ms. Lindsey’s leaving only helped him see it. I knew he loved her. And I knew she loved him. I couldn’t see myself bursting Billie’s bubble. Not then.
Chapter Twenty-three
It was the close of the 7:30 service at the church. Tired and sleepy-eyed, I’d inched out of bed that morning to follow our old ritual of going to church right after the prom and before the graduation ceremony. When I was in high school, I thought it was so absurd that they’d have the prom on Saturday night when most of us had to be in church the next day and we’d also have graduation right after that. But the older I got, the more it made sense. If kids knew they had to be in church at the early service the next day in order to make graduation in the afternoon, they were less likely to be out in the street too long after the prom. While this didn’t keep them from breaking even their extended curfews, it gave the adults something to laugh at as the kids crept miserably to their seats at church, some just an hour or so after getting home from wherever. Nana Jessie said that the church service between prom and graduation was once considered a send-off, the last time many of the kids would congregate in their church as official members before leaving for college. Back then, she’d said, some of them were going a long way. They were catching rides all the way up to Wilberforce in Ohio, Howard in Washington, D.C., and Hampton in Virginia. Many of these routes still weren’t safe for them. And transportation and lodging were few and far between. The church gathered to bless them. To lay hands on them before they headed out into the world.
My father was in the pulpit. Dressed in a kente cloth robe one of the African church members
had specially made for him, he was pensively looking out into the seats as the choir sang “Grateful” together with him at the lead.
“Flowing from my heat are the issues of my heart. /Is gratefulness,” they sang as my father embellished with “hallelujah” in his tenor voice.
Grateful
Grateful
Grateful
The tenors roared.
Grateful
Grateful
Grateful
The altos chanted.
And just before the sopranos began to cry out, I was on my feet shouting.
Grateful
Grateful
Grateful
I joined in, praying for God’s mercy over my actions as I lifted my hands, my palms facing upward for just one touch from God.
“I’m not a perfect man. Never have been,” my father said as the choir began to hum softly behind him. “I’ve tried. Lord knows, I’ve tried.” I looked to see my mother’s eyes transfixed on him. She moved not once. Just kept her hands on the Bible. “But I learned long ago that there are no perfect men. Just us all down here striving to be. Just to be. Be. And we fall. And sometimes we stay there. But you know, church—” Taking my seat, I watched as he paused and took a sip of the water sitting beside his Bible. “I’ve never been surprised to see a man fall. What surprises me is what he does when he falls down. Who he talks to. Goes to. Chats with. And, church, that’s because it seems that when most men are down, they go to everyone and everything else but their Creator to get fixed. We self-medicate. We drink. We smoke. We cheat.” A humbling silence unfolded around my seat and almost visibly swam around to my brother and rolled up to my father’s feet. “We pay thousands of dollars to sit in a chair and talk to some other man who has problems of his own. And I’ll never know why we do this. Why we don’t go to the Maker, take it to the altar.”
The organist hit a chord and the entire congregation, even the tired and reluctant kids who’d been forced out of bed after the prom, began to make indistinct sounds in agreement.
“When your car is broken, you don’t take it to the dry cleaner’s. You don’t take it to the grocery store. No. You take it to the fix-it man. Someone who has experience fixing that particular item.”
“Yes, pastor,” someone called out, springing to her feet. “Tell it now.”
“And if you’re really smart, you’ll bypass the fix-it man altogether. Yes, he has experience with that particular item, but he didn’t make it. You realize that if you really want to get that thing fixed the right way—”
The choir continued to hum and the organist struck another chord to carry my father’s break.
“If you really want it done right ... you take it to the maker.” He balled his hand into a fist and brought it to his mouth briefly before going on. “And that’s good news. Because if you know that, then you must know that when something is wrong with you. When you’re out searching for help to get back on your feet. When something has come into your life that was so hard that it rocked your very foundation and made you question everything that you thought you were—”
My eyes filled with tears, I looked up into the section by the door where I’d seen Benji standing the other week. I wanted so hard not to see him there again. Not to find him in a crowd of a million and have him lead me to Dame. I wanted a clean heart. A clean mind. A clean spirit. I prayed and clutched Evan’s hand as I closed my eyes and turned my head away.