Children crossed busy intersections in dresses and bow ties, followed closely by proud, dapper fathers balancing unlit cigars between their grinning teeth. Hatted and gloved mothers led the charge, holding up their frilly pocketbooks to halt postured men on horseback as if daring them to run over their sweet families. Streetcars hissed as the Barney sisters frolicked up and down the sidewalks, showing off their fresh hairdos. All shops, barber to blacksmith, had closed for the Sabbath and everything was just so. Everything, that is, except seventeen-year-old Isaiah Wilson, sitting on the front-most pew of Sunday school at Mount Zion Baptist.
While he was always in attendance for regular services, he considered two-and-a-half-hour Sunday school a bore. After much argument, his mother had finally hauled him there, and he definitely regretted it. Isaiah lazily kicked dimples into the thick maroon carpet as the first lady of the church read aloud the sick and shut-in list. He flipped through the red-and-gold hymnal, searching for a song he cared to learn the words to, but the only ones he recognized were “Amazing Grace” and “Holy, Holy, Holy!”
He should’ve brought his well-worn copy of The Souls of Black Folk, by his favorite author, W.E.B. Du Bois, but he’d left it underneath his pillow from the night before. Isaiah had all but memorized the work in its entirety, but still he kept rereading, chasing the exhilaration he’d felt the very first time.
Back then, he’d been eleven years old, gripped by Booker T. Washington’s philosophies. Greenwood’s public high school donned his name—Booker T. Washington High School—and Isaiah wanted to fit in by the time he reached those grades. He sought out Washington’s words and devoured them for many years. He was trapped in that familiar space of nothing-can-be-better-than-Booker, when Mrs. Edith, Greenwood District’s lead librarian, handed him The Souls of Black Folk and he was immediately set free.
Du Bois spoke to Isaiah’s longing for an active role in the future of his people. Like Du Bois, he was tired of waiting for someone else to save him. Tired of pretending proper in front of ravenous white folks while they drained his community of its hard work and culture. Tired of waiting and watching like he had a few nights prior from behind that pitiful curtain. And tired, most of all, of anticipating the next attack. Everyone knew it was coming, sooner or later, maybe even to a community as idyllic as Greenwood. Isaiah could feel it deep in his bones, and he knew that he was strong enough to meet it head-on. Brilliant enough. Brave enough. Talented enough to save himself and his people. Du Bois’s book was a masterpiece, putting to words Isaiah’s youth and Blackness in ways Washington hadn’t.
Isaiah took a dull pencil from his suit jacket and began transcribing his favorite passages directly from memory to pass slow church time.
With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?
As imagination of him walking alongside W.E.B. Du Bois swept his mind away from Sunday school, he felt a twisting pinch to his rib cage.
“Ouch!” he yelled out, calling attention to him and his mother, who was silently apologizing to surrounding church members. “That one hurt!”
With a stealthy movement, his mother snatched the squatty pencil from his grasp. She must’ve peeked over his shoulders to read the passage as he was daydreaming.
“Stop writing that militant nonsense,” she told him in a whisper. “It’s counterintuitive to our cause.”
She was onto him, he thought, also she was wholly wrong—stuck in her docile ways in a world that demanded action and movement. This was the mentality that had kept him frozen behind the curtain while Angel Hill stood threatened. Regret entered his tense body as he realized the magnitude of his own cowardice. Du Bois never would’ve hidden. He would have burst through the door, revealing himself a savior. Isaiah sat in his regret until it passed, and then, with nothing left to write with, he folded his arms and simmered.
Greenwood folks filled the church with an orchard of flowered hats and fedoras. A symphony of fluttering fans stapled sturdily onto Popsicle sticks brought the wind, while Pastor’s sermon brought the fire, blazing the congregation into singular accord. Isaiah wished he could do this one day—meld a people into one body, shifting back and forth together without ever realizing. But he couldn’t even convince his mother to love Du Bois as much as he did. And worse, he couldn’t convince himself to be brave.
By the end of Sunday school, the pastor opened the floor for weekly testimonies. Seventy-eight-year-old Mother Williams, as always, went first. Shakily thanking God for being here today and waking her up this morning and such. Hypercompetitive and never to be outdone, eighty-year-old Mother Jackson went second. Equally shakily thanking God for being here today, and yes, waking her up this morning. She won that round with an impromptu rendition of “A Charge to Keep I Have.” Then went everyone else—a procession of similar thankfulness and praise hands. After the thirteenth, Isaiah was having trouble with his heavy eyelids. In addition to the redundant testimonies, the Oklahoma heat was draining him of energy and thoughts.
“Wake up, child!” his mother said with an elbow to his still-aching ribs. “You’re in the Lord’s house.”
By the time the choir marched in for 10:45 A.M. service, they’d already been there two whole hours. He kept huffing at his mother’s lavender lace hat and her praise hands raised toward the wooden cross hanging from the ceiling and the painting of pale blue-eyed Jesus centered on the rear wall directly behind it. Even more dread took him over when the male chorus marched in with a depressed, synchronized sway. The male chorus was never music; it was instead a low, guttural growl and a moan, entirely without harmony or exuberance. Just his luck, he thought, he’d chosen to go to Sunday school on the male chorus’s Sunday to lament.
As the gloomy choir rocked side to side grumbling “This Little Light of Mine,” Isaiah thought, never again would he accompany his mother to pre-church. There were so many things he could be doing with his time rather than listening to what sounded like baritone birds dying in unison. He could be walking around Greenwood with his best friend, Muggy, whose family owned the town butcher shop. Or he could simply be sitting on his porch and writing his poetry or reading some of his favorite works. He knew he shouldn’t have given in to his mother. He folded his lean arms even tighter.
“All heads bowed,” said the pastor after the male chorus finally took their seats in the stand behind him. “All eyes closed.”
After prayer, Mother Evans began singing the Lord’s Prayer a cappella from the pulpit, and three young girls dressed in ankle-length white dance robes pushed each other out of the rear study and onto their makeshift dance floor. The congregation chuckled at the youngest one, who kept stepping on her robes and stumbling, but the last one out brought all laughter to a quick halt.
It was Angel Hill.
The stark white silk against her deep dark complexion made Isaiah feel like he was trying to stare at the sun. His eyes unconsciously began to squint, and he quickly shook it off. Someone might have been watching him, but after a quick look around the sanctuary, he knew that no one was. On that strangely hot, tornadic, spring Sunday morning, the only thing anybody in that room saw was Angel.