HYMN
Emily Hiestand

Recipient of the National Magazine Award
First published in The Atlantic Monthly, Editor: Michael Curtis; and Domestic Travels (Beacon Press, 1998); revised slightly 2023
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The school for the spirit is everywhere and unofficial, but when I was a child in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, much of the formal spiritual education I received took place in a large room in the Annex, a cinder block building adjacent to the Presbyterian church our family attended nearly every Sunday. The room was a consecration of folding chairs, library paste, and construction paper in assorted colors, and in that school, we learned many things: the Ten Commandments; how to be a shepherd in the Christmas pageant; and a phrase I have never forgotten, "the still, small voice.” And we learned hymns.

Each week one or two of us were asked to select the hymns for our children's service, and one week a timid, towheaded boy sat by my side as we leafed through wafer-thin pages and I chose "Wasn't That a Mighty Day," "Wade in the Water," and "Go Down, Moses."

The hymn numbers were chalked on the board (we gave just the numbers, not titles, to the teacher), there was a reading, and then we recited the prayer we were learning, being careful and proud to say "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors," in the Presbyterian way, rather than "trespasses" and "those who trespass against us," as my Southern Baptist relatives did.

The problems posed in a child's mind by the two phrasings, both individually and in comparison (bankers? property lines?), are a detour of too great a magnitude to entertain here. When the time came to sing, we opened our hymnals to the numbers on the board. We sang the first song and were turning to the second when one of the teachers suddenly halted the proceedings, searched our faces, and asked, "Who chose these hymns?"

The tone of the question was not admiring, and not entirely accusatory either. It was not at all easy to interpret. The timid boy and I must have looked the most miserable for the teacher's eyes came to rest on us. I had not abandoned a slight hope that we were being singled out for praise, but after I had been identified as the active agent, I merely received a long, hard look. Those were the days when a look was still a full player in the house of manners.

The teacher herself then selected other hymns (dull ones), and the morning went on in an ordinary way until we were released to run to our parents in the fellowship hall of the church proper, where we squirmed until the adults finally stopped socializing and I could race to the family car, be driven home, take off my fancy clothes, and at last, over my mother's chicken and dumplings and then the funnies in The Knoxville News-Sentinel, return to the regular world. But I was changed.

For the rest of the day, I hoped by a mimic of normalcy to paper over the gulf that had opened between myself and society. I had chosen bad hymns. Or not bad exactly, because what would they be doing in the hymnal in the first place if they were not good? Adults often gave a reason, however tenuous, for their rules: "Look both ways because a car might be coming" or "Eat your flan because your mother made it specially." But no explanation was offered for why we should not want to sing what were then called Negro spirituals. I grasped that the matter, whatever it was, was not theological, but rather some social nuance, and I suspected that it had to do with the spine-tingling quality of my chosen hymns — songs that were stately and high-toned with longing and sorrow, and, curiously, far more happiness than could be found in the regular grizzled psalmodies.

There was a good deal about the situation that a seven-year-old could not grasp. I did not yet know that during the Civil War the Presbyterian Church had split into Northern and Southern branches, that in nearby Knoxville, Presbyterians had sided with the Union, and that ever since, some of the Presbyterian churches in our region, although geographically in the upper South, followed the liturgy and policies of the Northern branch. Moreover, many citizens of our town were scientists who had come from other regions of the country, even other countries, to distill uranium and conduct atomic research.

Oak Ridge was Atom City, hardly a typical Southern town, and yet when Christine Barnes and I went to McCrory's Five-and-Dime we passed two water fountains, one of them labeled with a hand-lettered cardboard sign. We had seen the Jim Crow sign as long as we had been coming to the dime store, and we found it not exactly repulsive — we didn't have the consciousness for that — but in some way shabby. We didn't like it and we defied it. Many times when we were eight or nine, Christine and I went to the "colored" water fountain and drank from it. Our act was a combination of scientific interest — calmly testing to see what would happen to ourselves or to the five-and-dime if this curious division were breached — and a child's inborn antenna for the weak places in adult logic.

Tennessee in the early fifties was a segregated state, although the mountainous, hardscrabble communities of Appalachia had never been conducive to the plantation and share-cropping systems, and many of the Black citizens of Oak Ridge during and immediately after the World War II years had migrated from Mississippi to labor in the secret atomic factories. In those early days of Oak Ridge, they discovered one of the most intentionally segregated communities in the country; Manhattan Project officials had carefully set up the town's housing and commercial districts to conform with prevailing racial customs of the region.

By the late 1940s, however, scientists and religious leaders had begun to object. Oak Ridge would send White pastors to Selma with books for Black church libraries, and would desegregate its own pools, movie houses, and restaurants more willingly, perhaps, than any other Southern town. A group of White men guaranteed all their business to the first White barber to integrate his shop. Black and White women created a day-care center and swim programs. But progressive Oak Ridge was layered over the original racist patterns, and during the 1950s, African Americans still lived and went to elementary school apart, in a segregated part of town.

It was in this unusual town, in a border state, in my parents' music cabinet, that I first discovered Black gospel music: a handful of recordings tucked amongst Charlie Parker's "Bird of Paradise," the operas Turandot and Der Rosenkavalier, and a single of Rudy Vallée singing "As Time Goes By." My younger brothers and I had a small portable record player for listening to the translucent orange records of "The Little Engine That Could" and the terrifying "Tale of the Grasshopper and the Ants." But after we had been trained to place of the needle on the empty band at the beginning of a record, we were allowed to use the adult phonograph — quietly.

Sitting on the floor, with my back resting against the cabinet, I listened over and over to several thick 78s, mostly of Mahalia Jackson (accompanied by Mildred Falls) rendering the slow poetry of "Take My Hand, Precious Lord," and the flattened thirds and sevenths of "If You See My Savior." These were compositions of Thomas A. Dorsey — not Tommy Dorsey, but the synthesizing genius first known as Georgia Tom, who layered blues tropes over religious hymns, migrated north to the steel mills, and began to create gospel blues at the Pilgrim Baptist Church of Chicago. A little older, I would listen to the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet, to Blind Willie Johnson singing his eerie, strangled 1929 recording of "Let Your Light Shine on Me," and to the mighty sound that came from Ira Tucker and the Dixie Hummingbirds.

I was listening, unawares, to recordings made in the wake of the success of the Mills Brothers, gospel songs arranged in jazz, boogie, and blues influenced styles that appealed to White as well as urban Black audiences. Many years would pass before I found the small, independent-label recordings of the more rural gospel tradition, of the early-Depression-era choirs, and quartets from the Black colleges singing "Get Right, Stay Right" and "I'm In a Strange Land." Meanwhile, the few records I did know spun on the felt cushion of the record player in our living room — issuing the haunting bent notes of the Southern new world. As Mahalia went "sightseeing in Beulah," I sang with her, forgetting that my grandfather, a fine baritone, had declared, "Child, you cannot carry a tune in a basket." No matter: Mahalia and I had feasted with the Rose of Sharon, had been on speaking terms with the spirit.

It was not only the words — each one a physical fact, each one opened up, entered into and walked around in — but the majestic juice of the sound: the sweeping river of the woman's voice, bigger than any woman in our science town had ever allowed herself to sound, and the low, sweet, solidity of the male voices. There was sorrow, but even so, long after the record went back into its cardboard sleeve there was gladness and buoyancy. It was a serious sound, and it also jumped. This was more than song, this was philosophy, which children are always on the alert for, as well as for all evidence that adults are pleased to be alive.

To try to say entirely why one loves what one does seems not only a fruitless task, but a little wrongheaded, on the order of dissection and with similar consequences. "Who chose these hymns?" The answer, needless to say, was that the music had chosen me, and mercifully I was yet too innocent to wonder whether I had any right to what was on that handful of 78s in my parents' music cabinet. By the time I had grasped the ironies of my rhapsodizing to Black gospel, and soon the Delta blues of Son House and Robert Johnson, the cri de coeur of Bessie Smith; by the time I understood that the absence of some dignities and possibilities I took for granted were one provocation of African- American lyrics — by that time buses of freedom riders would be rolling south toward Anniston and Birmingham.

But that was still a little in the future. It was a summer in the early fifties, and I was perhaps eight the Sunday afternoon I sat with relatives on a front porch in Alabama and saw a long line of Black folks coming along the dusty red shoulder of the road beating tambourines, shouting and singing in a celebration unlike any I had ever witnessed in Atom City. "They've let out at Hurricane Baptist," my Aunt Clara said. "Looks like somebody got saved this morning." I was ready to go to the road — to follow along or be closer, I didn't know — but my aunts said, Oh no, that would be tacky, impolite, and not done. (Tackiness was, I knew, in a way worse than wickedness, which is rooted in original sin and subject to forgiveness, whereas tackiness is something you ought to be able to avoid altogether.) "You stay right here on the porch," they said.

Most, if not all, of my Southern relatives spoke respectfully of their Black neighbors, with whom they shared a God, speech patterns, cuisine, Hurricane Creek, and the Alabama heat and wilting humidity. At that time, my grandparents and great-aunts and -uncles were firmly embedded in the culture of segregation, but personally, in that curious, oft-remarked doubleness of the South, they were neighborly. They and their African American neighbors had lived on adjacent lands for a long time and their connection was real: collard greens, peanuts, tools, and sick-bed courtesies were exchanged. A great-uncle did legal work gratis for his African American neighbors, mostly routine matters; but once his intervention with the court spared a man named Oscar Prince from an undeserved and hideous fate. Over the course of their lives, many of my relatives traced the logic of their faith through to its radically beautiful conclusions.

And yet it was clear enough in the early fifties, sitting on a porch, going to a five-and-dime, singing in a Sunday school, that there was some ill-defined but strong line that was not to be crossed. Most of a century has passed since W.E.B. Du Bois named that line and called it the problem of the twentieth century, but as the millennium arrives, the legacy of the color line is palpable in American life. One of the times that line is still deeply inscribed and observed is Sunday morning. That hour on a porch in Alabama was decades in the past. I was nearing fifty and had lived in New England for twenty years when I woke up one cold winter morning ready to heed an old intuition.

Surely anyone of any faith or ancestry may feel the moral fire that has moved in this church and others like it. And anyone may register the gravitas of its rooms. Anyone may notice that this church is a place of routine loveliness, an American place where respect for elders, the honed artistry, the sheer comeliness of the community, is sanctuary in itself.

The Union Baptist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts sits between a U-Haul warehouse and a Shell service station. On Sundays, its members may park in the lot of a defunct nightclub across the street. The church building is a handsome late nineteenth century structure, shingle-clad, with a tower that was once struck by lightning. The entrance doors are made of a honey-colored wood with a bas-relief cross on each panel. Inside, a congregation is busy this morning getting children into their small red robes and getting the four choirs of the Combined Choirs combined. "Merry Christmas and welcome to Union!" calls a woman bustling across the foyer.

The sanctuary is up two flights of stairs, a great room with rows of turned maple columns that support a wide mezzanine and organ loft. There is a rainforest of poinsettias on the altar, and high in the chancel wall a diamond-shaped stained-glass window refracts the low winter sun into a beam of light. Over the next several hours of the service, the beam will scan slowly across the room, surrounding one person after another in a violet nimbus.

The house is full this morning, with perhaps 400 people in the pews. I notice, of course, that 399 of us are chestnut- or chocolate-brown, or the color of café au lait, or toffee, or blue-black, or an ochre-brown — the great spectrum of hue we improbably collapse into the single word "Black" — and that I am the shade the Japanese call pink, that graphic designers specify as PMS 475, a light beige improbably called "White." But I knew this would be so. And I confess that I, a lover of hats, am also noticing the hat line. I am one of the few women present not wearing a great hat.

Except for weddings, funerals, and brief prayers in tiny, candle-lit chapels on Greek islands, this is my first morning inside a church in three decades. Hat envy is not the first feeling the prodigal wants to have upon her return, but there it is. I could be wearing a great hat too, I think — and without one I feel incompletely dressed. A woman nearby wears a ruddy turban with a single saffron plume that moves gently in the air. A few rows ahead, a woman wears a deep red hat with a wide brim. It looks sedate — until the wearer rises, revealing a comet of solid rhinestone on the underbrim. A young woman wears a high-modernist hat that rivals the upswept roof of Dulles Airport. Here are African wraps; a Moroccan pillbox; hats with veils, netting, and beads, and an elderly woman wearing a beret at the perfect Parisian angle.

A number of years have now passed since that December celebration, and I have had cause to think in that great room about more than hats. Everyone knows that the Black church in America is a rock and a beacon, and others are far more steeped in its ways and history, more qualified to speak of its nature than a White woman whose beliefs do not rest within any one system. But surely anyone of any faith or ancestry may feel the moral fire that has moved in this church and others like it. And anyone may register the gravitas of its rooms. Anyone may notice that this church is a place of routine loveliness, an American place where respect for elders, the tradition of formal address and courtesy titles, the honed artistry — the sheer comeliness of the community — is sanctuary in itself.

•

The oldest women, the matriarchs of the church, are the first to extend a welcome, the first to ask my name, where I live, whether I am married. These women pat my hand, saying things like "Bless you, child, come back and see us." It pleases me more than I can say, not only to be so graciously received, but also to observe a group of elderly women wielding their power to size someone up. During the earliest months I attend this church, my pew mate is most often Doris Callender. ("Miss," she corrects me when I say Mrs. Callender — "I'm Miss.") Miss Doris Callender is a petite woman who often wears a blue felt hat and always sits near a stained-glass window where, without eyeglasses, she follows Scripture in a tiny Bible printed in tiny type — a text that is to my younger eyes only a blur.

Many mornings the message for me comes not only from the pulpit but from Miss Callender, who has just turned eighty. I know because her birthday offering of eighty dollars was printed in the bulletin. "One for every year the Lord has given me," she told me. She is reserved but kindly, and one morning discreetly slips me a tissue when she sees me dabbing my eyes. When I thank her, she whispers, "That's what we're here for, to help each other," proposing an answer to life's most pressing question in nine soft words.

I sit next to Miss Callender and another elderly woman — a widow I'll call Gladys Reed — through April and May, and in June of that year a heat wave settles over New England. One sweltering Sunday the sanctuary is aflutter with paper fans donated by a local funeral home — exactly the kind of fans that my great-aunts kept on their front porches and in their parlors, the kind of paper fans printed in over-the-top Maxfield Parish colors and stapled to flat wooden sticks that resemble giant tongue depressors. The sermon is under way and the room is growing warmer. As a young, white-gloved woman — officially, an "usherette" — passes our pew, Gladys Reed silently pantomimes that she requires a fan. The usherette whispers apologetically that the fans have run out, whereupon Mrs. Reed silently fixes her with a look. It is a swift, momentary look, and in another room it might not even be noticed.

But here, where elders are treasured, are attended, the younger woman fully absorbs the meaning: an elder wants a fan right this minute. Scurrying, the usherette returns with an extra program that Mrs. Reed might use in lieu of a fan. My seatmate barely glances at it, dismissing the patently absurd idea of using a program as a fan. Next, the top part of a fan is brought — an old and battered cardboard lacking its wooden handle. Gladys Reed sniffs, moves her hand in a minimalist gesture. Stricken, the Usherette disappears. Ten, fifteen minutes pass and the room grows warmer. And then the young woman reappears — out of breath, clearly having left the church, driven some blocks to the funeral home, picked up new fans, driven back, raced inside and upstairs to the sanctuary, and hurried down the aisle to present Mrs. Reed with the first from a stack of new, whole fans. This is proper and Mrs. Reed accepts the fan with a discreet, pleased nod.

•

This community of old-fashioned civilities is pastored by the Reverend Jeffrey L. Brown, a lean, brilliant man with a droll sense of humor and what one of his co-pastors calls an "on-fire heart." Not yet forty, Brown was a founder of the Boston Ten Point Coalition, a group of progressive urban ministers whose effect among our city's most disenfranchised young people has been so profound that the coalition's model is being translated to Tampa, Louisville, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other urban centers. The Ten Point Coalition has caught the eye of government policymakers, who are looking at the ways faith-based institutions, specifically Black churches, bring a singular know-how to coalitions working to create more livable American cities.

And it has caught the eye of leaders in South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Rio de Janeiro, other places where children suffer from nihilism rooted in injustice, violence, and poverty. Reverend Brown studied at Harvard, but he learned to preach — we can be thankful — elsewhere, beginning at the foot of some master in a hamlet of North Carolina. Brown is at ease penning op-ed pieces for The Boston Globe, leading a prayer protest in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, delivering a scholarly paper, negotiating a midnight peace with gang members, and visiting a Unitarian pulpit across town. In his own pulpit Reverend Brown can, as he puts it, "cut loose."

Across America, more Black women than White are in the pulpit, although until recently most of them have ministered to small congregations in storefront and home-based churches. Following traditions that Africans brought to America, women in mainstream Black churches have considerable authority as worship leaders, prayer warriors, and teachers. Officially, however, the major Black Christian denominations have been as slow as their White counterparts to ordain women. It is notable then that at Union Baptist, Jeffrey Brown shares the pulpit with two distinguished women: the Reverend Dr. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, an acclaimed scholar and professor of African American studies and the sociology of religion; and the Reverend Zina Jacque-Bell, a devoted teacher of Biblical texts and a luminous innovator.

About this trio I feel what everyone else in the congregation must — lucky in the way we feel when, say, a couple of planets and a full moon make a rare, shining conjunction in the evening sky. Each week the pulpit at Union is alive with story and exegesis of text, with cultural diagnosis and calls to action, with counsel for souls, and flashing wit — all interwoven in the best tradition of Black sacred oratory: "God's trombones," the author James Weldon Johnson called the men and women who inhabit the Black pulpit. Lucid and subtle on the significance of Job's suffering, bracing on the nature of courage, passionate on the supreme importance of nurturing children, Reverend Jeffrey Brown usually manages to work into his remarks how fine someone looks — or how fine everyone looks — and the fact that Bible study is at 6:30 Wednesday night.

This sanctuary is also a home to the sounds that have spoken to me from the beginning, that inexplicable alchemy of longing and joy. Here, a middle-aged woman in sunglasses sings a bluesy version of "Can't Nobody Do Me Like Jesus" that could qualify as one of the five proofs tendered by St. Thomas Aquinas. Here, the congregation stands each week to sing choruses of "Glad to be in the service / glad to be in the service / glad to be in the service one more time" — several hundred people on their feet giving every human indication of gladness. "God is good," an elderly man declares. "All the time!" responds a chorus. Here, as a pastor makes an especially nice point, a young man shouts, "Tell the world!" A woman in a trim business suit stands: "Teach!" she calls, in a penetrating voice that zings through the air and lands on the pulpit like a flower thrown to an opera star. The woman raises one arm, waves it slowly, back and forth above her head. More women stand, and the air is full of graceful waving arms. Four men begin an antiphonal exchange with the preacher, elongating "well" into a two-syllable word that rises at the end like an encouraging question.

"There is one more thing…" Reverend Brown says.
"Weh—ell?" the men say in unison.
"The Christmas message came from someone in particular. . ."
"Weh—ell?"
"From someone who could not stay at the hotel . . ."
"Weh—ell?"

Here pastors often begin in a whisper, and slowly, with the sermon as one text and the voices of the congregation another, build voice until the room is a sea of "Say that!" "Fix it!" and "Preach!" — the call-and-response tradition whose template must be the creative play and reciprocity in life itself. On any morning the air is rich in metaphor: living water, the tender hand that lifted me, friend and comforter, redeemer, mighty maker, the lamb, the lily, the love divine. And yet, many days Reverend Brown must stand back at last from the pulpit and shake his head, arrived at the border of silence, the depth of feeling where no words may go. Among the linguistic traditions are the testimonials given before the official service begins. Every Sunday morning someone will stand up to give thanks because "He woke me up in my right mind this morning!" An octogenarian will rise to say, "I'm breathing today, I have a roof over my head, and I'm satisfied!"

It is while listening to the clarified voices of one church that I too remember to be glad when I wake up in my right mind, glad for the roof, glad for breath. How simple it is, but it is, of course, the shift — the turn, the conversion from a constant whine to the bass note of gratitude. It is not an easy turn for anyone in this culture, which treats all its citizens to the cruel premise that there is no such thing as enough. It could not have been easy for these elders, who have had more reason than most Americans to doubt providence. What a subtle thing is going on here: at the same time that this community is steadily helping its members gain a fair share of the nation's goods, it is steadily infusing material reality with another idea of wealth altogether. 

Given history, and given the chosen apartness of many Blacks in the post–civil rights era, what Clarence Page has called the “social apartheid,” does my presence diminish the creative refuge of this sanctuary?

Like other Black churches in America, this one is both an oasis and a center of community life: meals for the homeless, fashion shows, Kwanzaa celebrations, career day fairs, scholarship awards, tribute dinners, lectures, and the purely social gatherings Union refers to as "having a good time in the Lord." Once upon a time, the membership would have come largely from the immediate city neighborhood, but as many African American families have migrated to the suburbs, members now return to this church from all points on the metropolitan and socio-economic maps. One morning the theme from the pulpit is inclusion — meant to address the cultural diversity within the Black community: the Caribbean, Afro-Latin, Euro-African, and African American heritages represented in the congregation.

Some of the things said: That we cannot be judging one another, for we don't know who might be an angel come into our midst. That cliques are forming in the church and Reverend Brown does not like that. That the church is not the building, not the pastors, not the officials. The church is not the choirs, great and fine as they are. No, the church is love. And another thing — the pastor does not want to hear about anyone not coming to church because of not having the right thing to wear. He recalls being a small boy sent into church to secure a pew for his family, remembers rushing in without his coat, being stopped, being told he could not come into church without a coat. "That brother didn't know if maybe I didn't own a coat," Brown fumes. "I will never forget that. Couldn't come into the church because I didn't have a coat! As long as I am pastor," he declares, "anybody can come in here in anything. If there is some raggedy person outside wants to come in, I'll go out and bring him in — personally set him down."

He means it, and the church describes itself as having "the widest doors in the city." This is a place that aspires to communitas, where society's distinctions are softened. So, I too am welcomed. All visitors are warmly welcomed. But when it seems that I might be something more than an ephemeral visitor, a great tentativeness comes upon me. The church has long been Black America's most precious institution, the institution that African Americans control completely, a nurturing place of leaders, of artistry and mind — the place where a microcosm of sanity and goodness can be conjured. I can only imagine that many members must cherish one realm free of Whites. (“Free of White control,” Reverend Brown later writes on a draft of this essay.)

Given history, and given the chosen apartness of many Blacks in the post–civil rights era, what Clarence Page has called the "social apartheid," does my presence diminish the creative refuge of this sanctuary? I don't yet know anyone in the congregation well enough to ask outright, and my smattering of African American friends are either amused or appalled to learn that I am going to any church. Like me, these friends left organized religion long ago, and are either still getting over it or have taken refuge in the Buddha or in their art, spending many Sundays, as I have, in one of Nature's cathedrals, or in what Wallace Stevens memorably called the "complacencies of the peignoir."

The dearest of these friends looks at me earnestly. "You want to know what the members of that church are thinking about you? They're thinking 'Uh oh, there goes the neighborhood!'" He holds his serious face a moment longer, then bursts out laughing. "I couldn't resist," he says. "Actually," he continues, now truly serious, "I have no idea what they're thinking. And you know better than to ask me that." He wags his finger at me. "Why do you assume I'll know what other Black folk are thinking? You need to realize that your church is very different from the one I grew up in. We were never hallelujah people, except for my Aunt Ethel. I grew up just like you did, in a Presbyterian church. And we were quiet, we were God's frozen people.” One more thing," he adds firmly. "Don't get any ideas about me coming with you."

Another African American friend also levels with me. "Don't hope for a welcome from everyone," she says. "But remember, your spiritual life isn't about other people's approval." She pauses. "Now, if you don't mind me asking, girl, why are you going?"

•

My reasons go back very far, but as it happens, I began to attend this church named Union during the years when Black and White Americans were beginning to say out loud that, for all the gains we have made, we still do not know each other well, do not frequent one another's social worlds, and that the line may even be congealing again. In my life I have only rarely been in predominantly Black gatherings, and almost never incidentally.

Now, in Union's rooms I am doing just a minute bit of what African Americans have done a good deal of for three centuries — sojourning in institutions dominated by another group, becoming adept in style-switching. Crossing the color line is different, of course, for the historical oppressor than for the historically oppressed, and though I gain a keener sense of how it feels, viscerally, to be radically in the minority and to lack insider knowledge, assuming this status voluntarily, for a few hours each week among people of good will, is hardly a parallel to Black America's experience.

Less agile at the crossing than are members of this community, in the beginning I am also hyper-aware, ever mindful to present a positive face of Whitedom — a self-conscious, walking-on-eggshells politesse that can make me clumsy. One morning as I stand for a responsive reading, the hymnal in my hand grazes the head of an elderly man in the pew in front. Holy moly, I have hit an elderly black man on the head with a hymnal! I lean down to apologize, and as I do, the gentleman turns his head to look at his wife, possibly thinking it was she who touched his head. He now receives a second shock — an unfamiliar White face looming just inches from his own — and he starts. He visibly jumps in the pew. His startlement startles me, and I jump too, and no one near us fails to see this scene. Most manage to keep a straight face, but the small boy next to me begins to giggle. His mother frowns at her boy and then at me, too, and as soon as possible the boy and I slink down on our pew, silently, side by side, both of us, for our own reasons, trying to contain ourselves.

In another church I might volunteer for something as a gesture of good intentions, but here I grasp that the most respectful thing to do is to do nothing, is to wait. (And to try not to hit anyone else with a hymnal.) There is no quick, easy way to override the long accumulation of meaning that America has ascribed to color, and here there will be only personal answers to the matter of my presence, across the usual vagaries of human chemistry. A few members are cool at first, but the great majority are entirely gracious, and several — a retired professor, a number of the deaconesses, the pastors, and Union's great tenor, Emma Nance — go out of their way to give me clues and actual things to do, including some writing for the social action committee. One day, after a meeting, I am in conversation with a woman who has become overworked at the church. She's going to take a break, she says, to take stock. I applaud her decision, and then observe that I am in the opposite situation, that my participation is limited — by history, I say. "Well," she replies, "some people do get stuck in the history. Oh, my yes, the history is there — but it doesn't have to define us."

James Baldwin was thinking about how to negotiate this history when he predicted that any real dialogue between Blacks and Whites would require a personal confession from Whites that is "a cry for help and healing," and a personal confession from Blacks "which fatally contains an accusation." One Sunday not long after I read that passage, the Reverend Professor Dr. Gilkes is in the pulpit: "I am talking about our men this morning," she says. "Our men can be paid to be entertainers and basketball stars, but the enemy will not open the doors of higher education! The enemy will not let our men become educated! And if one of us gets over, the enemy changes the rules!" She catalogues the effects of the enemy's ways — the number of Black men in prison, the number apt to die before the age of twenty-one — and she likens America's Black men to Samson, who when shorn, blind, and imprisoned could yet summon a divine strength to crumble the house of his captivity. "We will tear down the enemy's walls," she says — her voice is blazing now, her arms outstretched. The woman has reached with her voice down into the torment of centuries, and seems to be speaking for all that time.

The other pastors stand and go to her, gathering around close, as if to hold and bank her cathartic fire. The wooden floor of Union begins to rumble under a slow stamping of feet, and the whole room is weeping. Afterwards, as I remain seated, sobered, Grainger Browning, the head of the social action committee, comes up, greets me in his usual ebullient manner, and lingers to ask, "What was that like for you, to hear that sermon — what I'd call a completely Black sermon?" He pauses. "I mean," he continues, "it happens to us all the time, to be the only one in a crowd, hearing something from a completely White point of view, but what is it like for you to hear that kind of sermon?"

A retired professor of sociology, Dr. Browning is curious, and he is also being kind, guessing that I might feel, as of course I do, a mingling of implication and empathy. I form some words about solidarity, but my friend interrupts. "I know your politics," he says. "You probably agree with the sister more than I do. What I am asking is how did it feel to hear a sermon from a completely Black point of view?" Before I can muster an answer, Dr. Browning continues. "You know, I don't think in terms of Black or White much anymore," he says. "I really don't. Of course, I notice. I'm not color-blind; I'm not that far yet. But I do not let it affect my actions. I check myself. And as a teacher, I made sure that I was fair to all my students. I think that a percentage of us now — not the majority, but maybe twenty percent of people, both Black and White — will not divide along racial lines, who will not let that happen again to our country. We are people who are standing in the gap, just wanting to solve it."

•

Much of what happens in this great room happens in other rooms where people gather to think about meaning, to give thanks for the blooming universe. But some of what takes place here is unique to the Black church tradition. One of the pastors alludes to that uniqueness one day. She is praying. "Lord," she says, "we are the descendants of a people who chose to survive. We are your people and we have come together this morning to worship you in a special way — for we have a special history, and a special way of knowing you."

The special world inside these walls is not an inversion of the pathology outside its doors — that is, it is not a world of presumed Black supremacy. The temptation to imagine such a place must be great, if only as a poetic justice. And certainly African Americans, who have long observed the debasing effect of racism on Whites, may know a moral refinement that an oppressor cannot. But something more original than inversion is at work, a move that slips the knot of reaction. There are many veins of African American spirituality, of course, but the several Christian forms have common themes.

In today's seminaries, scholars understand Black theology as a distinctive interpretation of Christianity. Building on African metaphysics, on a view of the universe as informed by benevolence, Black American Christians have drawn especially on the social justice teachings of Amos, Isaiah, Hosea, and Micah, on Christ's love for the neglected, and on the exodus into a promised land. The symbolic narrative of Black Christianity is one of survival and resistance — and creativity. The story is told in a highly allusive language, and language that moves easily between stately and earthy tones, between redemption and fish fries — language that presents the temporal and spiritual as inseparable.

Many have agreed with Dr. King that the African American saga transcends its historical particulars to speak to common human hopes. For generations the Black church has been at the heart of that saga, and Reverend Brown now speaks of his spiritual tradition as a body of thought that offers what he calls "correctives" to the dominant culture — a moral and intellectual discourse that issues a steady call for America to fulfill its promise. We might think that a place that can do that — a place that fueled one of the great transformations of American society, and which has preserved real community through the twentieth century — is a place that has some vital clues, not only for its core members but for the larger community of the nation.

Reverend Brown speaks of his spiritual tradition as a body of thought that offers "correctives" to American culture, a moral and intellectual discourse that issues a steady call for America to fulfill its promise.

Entering slowly into the life of one church, I begin to grasp how many of my hopes for America, and even the style of my generation can be traced to communities like this one. "Oh yes," says Reverend Gilkes one day in conversation. "Whites have always liberally borrowed elements of Black spirituality and style. And White people love our spirituals, our music. But traditionally, they have never accepted Black leadership." One morning as we are singing "We’ll walk in the light, beautiful light, Come where the dewdrops of mercy are bright," my eye happens to land on the mirror above the organ loft. A great swath of the congregation appears in the reflection and among us there is one jarringly pale face. "Who can that be?" I think, and am surprised, seconds later, to realize the answer.

The wish to belong, to know and be known, is deep in us. And the wish to travel, to expand into the unknown, to carry messages across borders, is also deep. Both instincts are probably linked with survival, though the traveler is sometimes viewed with wariness. Hermes, the ancient god of travelers, is not only a guide but a trickster, very like Eshu Elegbara, the African guardian of the crossroads, another of those changeful figures that show up in every culture.

Old pagan emanations such as Hermes and Eshu are probably not often admitted to the church basements of Christendom, but some kind of shape-shifter hovers there the first time I cook for a church supper. I have made a large pot of Portuguese kale soup, a hearty, fragrant soup that people have loved at my table for twenty years. (You can put a dollop of sour cream on top if you like.) I am attending my soup, which sits between a bubbling macaroni-and-cheese casserole and a huge bowl of rice and peas, from behind the buffet table, ladle in hand. The first arrivals through the buffet line look at the unfamiliar soup skeptically.

"What is it?" one hungry teenage lad asks.

"Portuguese kale soup," I say, proudly, ladle raised for action.

"I'll have the macaroni casserole, thank you."

Nine or ten more people in line give the soup one look and pass it up. My debut is not going well.

Finally someone comes along and asks, "Is it collard greens?"

"No, it's kale greens."

"No thanks," he replies. But he has given me a clue.

"It's greens and beans," I say, truthfully, to the next person who asks, who is the choir director.

"Oh, I'll have some," he says, and, upon tasting this greens and beans, adds loudly, "It works for me."

Brother Philip's endorsement gets me two more takers, and then a young lady comes along who peers with interest at the soup.

"This looks like an Italian minestrone," she says hopefully.

"Well, yes," I say. "It's a lot like minestrone — almost exactly."

The young woman has two helpings, and her girlfriend asks for the recipe. Hovering near the line, but not in it, is a young man who has overheard the several names already given to this soup. Now he steps up to the buffet table with a grin.

"I wonder if your soup could be a jambalaya?"

"Yes," I say without hesitation or shame. "It's jambalaya."

"Oh, this is my lucky day," he says, chuckling. "So, if you will, please put that jambalaya over the rice and peas. Not too much sauce," he adds, showing me how to make the concoction. Tasting the mélange, he says,

"That's bug!"

Now all this young man's friends want the bug jambalaya spooned over rice and peas — all except one young man with braids, who says he thinks my soup looks more like Northern African food.

“Aren’t those North African beans?" he asks.

"North Africa is very near Portugal," I say.

•

Anyone with my tendency toward travel does well to take stock of cautionary advisories. "We need to go over into those other racial and ethnic communities," the late critic bell hooks once said, "and we need to speak about what happens when we do, including what makes it hard." But hooks excoriates Whites who appropriate Black culture in an exploitative fashion, and once nearly vaporized Camille Paglia, who imported some of her sassy style from gay Black queens and now goes about enthusing over her rapport with African Americans: "Whooo!" Paglia once gushed. "It's like I feel totally myself."

That was too much for hooks, who wrote in response, "Naturally, all Black Americans were more than pleased to have Miss Camille give us this vote of confidence, since we live to make it possible for White girls like herself to have a place where they can be 'totally' themselves." Similarly some Native Americans are furious that Euro-Americans have presumed to take up Native beliefs. (First you take our land, and now you want our spiritual treasure, too.) Neither hooks nor the First Americans are lamenting the influences peoples have on one another, which, they well know, can be stopped about as easily as the wind. Rather they are distressed by the ways in which power imbalances distort exchanges between peoples.

Closely following the identity debates within the multiracial and African American communities engages me in thinking not only about how (and how much, and if, and where, and why) I may participate in elements of other identities, but about how these social constructions may fare in an emerging transracial society. I find myself seeking out and listening to others grappling with the possibilities of more-permeable identities.

In her book, Notes of a White Black Woman, law professor and civil rights attorney Judy Scales-Trent proposes that "the difficulty in understanding the notion of ethnicity comes from asking the wrong question all along. The question should not be, 'Where did your people come from?' but rather 'What countries did your people travel through on their way here from Africa?'" And then, recalling the notorious "single drop" rule in America, by which any African ancestry rendered a citizen legally Black, Scales-Trent offers a disarming proposal: "Those Americans who call themselves White," she says, "are all pretending to be something else — 'passing,’ for Mother Africa is mother to us all."

During a conference given by the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard, a widely traveled anthropologist recounted, with amusement, the chameleon nature of her identity. "In America," she said, "color-coded identities are the norm, so here I am a Black woman. But to the South Sea Island tribe I study, all outsiders are other, and all others are identified by the word for ‘white.’ Visually, I am close to the islanders' color, but I am an outsider — therefore I am White! In Brazil," the woman continues, "I am seen as a member of cultura branca, White Western culture, as opposed to Afro- Brazilian culture, whereas in Europe I am perceived, first and foremost, not as Black but as an American, secondly as a woman, third or fourth as a person of African descent. What color am I?” she asked the assemblage.

We try all our lives to be human, to know what kind we are. It is not an easy job, and it can be encouraging to gather with those who seem like us. It can also be terrifically dangerous — so say the Eastern European poets and writers who have witnessed the power of the group to silence individual conscience, who are trying to warn Americans about investing too much of our identity in any kind of ethnic or cultural tribalism. (Thinking about the recent savagery in the former Yugoslavia, the poet Charles Simic writes: "Here is something we can all count on. Sooner or later our tribe always comes to ask us to agree to murder.")

Even for those of us with just the garden-variety amount of displacement and assimilation, identity is a shifting thing these days. As the journalist/political scientist Jim Sleeper has written, "We are all being 'abducted' from our ancient ethnic moorings by powerful currents we no longer control or fully comprehend." What we will become is unknown, but many who are proud of their origins also value the freedom to claim the elective affinities of which Goethe spoke. It is undeniable that matters of realpolitik power and control underlie and sculpt many aspects of identity. It is undeniable that political and physical survival can be at stake in maintaining strong group identity. But it is also true that for a learning species like ours, which has moved slowly over the globe, gleaning from others is not a denial of native identity but a true and fundamental part of it.

The writer Richard Rodriguez surprised and delighted an audience in Miami one winter by saying that it is the Maya Indian in him that loves Shakespeare, the Indian that likes to wear Milanese suits, the Indian that is nimble and adventurous enough to say "Yo soy Chino," "Yo soy Italiano," "Yo soy Ingles" — which, Rodriguez puckishly noted, he was saying in the language of the conquistadors.

I am thinking about these matters when Roots Day is announced — that day each year in late spring when, as Reverend Brown merrily phrases it, worshippers are invited to come "wearing as much African garb as you have Africa in your heart." This comment is meant to set people with different stylistic preferences at ease, but it might have caused me considerable wardrobe deliberation that first year, had I not forgotten which Sunday was Roots Day, and arrived in my usual 1940s-style gray silk suit. But many other people wear their regular outfits, too, including one mainstay of the church, a tall, elegant man in his late fifties, a retired Army Captain, who arrives wearing his standard double-breasted charcoal suit. He is greeted by a woman in the lobby:

"Deacon, is that old suit how much Africa you have in your heart?"

"My sister," he replies easily, "I wore dashikis all through the seventies, and to tell you the truth, I am just about dashikied out.”

More difficult than the wardrobe question is the label on which we are to write the name of our root place — "the place you come from," a little sign on the table says. A man next to me writes "Georgia" in felt tip pen, peels away the backing, and presses the label to his chest. Others are writing "Jamaica,” Gambia," "Congo-Angola." All the tags point to history's diasporas and migrations. I stand at the table, pen in hand. Members rustle around the table in an array of African robes, kente cloth, turbans, dashikis — the sisters presenting themselves in what Cornell West described as a “rich stylization."

Deaconess Lillian Allen approaches the table, stands next to me, and writes on her label "West Africa and Massachusetts." As she peels off the backing and taps the label onto her dress, she notices my hesitation. She touches my arm lightly, looks me in the eyes and says, "You're home now."

•

Once, for a few weeks in Greece, I felt completely at home in a place called Aphrodite's Rooms-To-Let. I have been at home walking among Brancusi's polished bronze eggs, hunched over tide pools at the edge of several seas, in red clay fields, and on the eastern shore of Chincoteague, eating blue crabs that my father had caught with a string. Like so many other homes, the one I have found in this community is comforting, quickening, haunting, exquisite, and thorny — sometimes all at once. With one hand I take communion with a congregation, and we are the body together. Meanwhile my other hand is caught in stubborn patterns no individual gesture can undo, most especially the myriad, built-in affirmative action programs for White America, all those privileges so nearly invisible to many Whites. Doubtless, too, there are inscapes of understanding that pass me by in these rooms, but on Roots Day, as we stand by the folding card table, Deaconess Lillian leaves her hand on my arm a moment longer. "Some things transcend," she says.

Then she must hurry to join the choir, which is readying for its entrance procession — a procession made in a slow, syncopated step, led by a grandmother, a line that can send you into a long meditation on the one and the many. Nearby, Dr. Browning is buttonholing people to buy space in the Men's Fellowship calendar. "For five dollars," he says, "you can put up to five names, birthdays, and anniversaries in the calendar. How many may I put you down for?" Three children run up the carpeted stairs with tambourines in hand.

"Turn to your neighbor," Reverend Brown says when he steps into the pulpit.

"Your neighbor is the one next to you," he says, deadpan. "Say, 'Neighbor,—'"

"Neighbor" — the word swells up from several hundred congregants amused by their pastor's playful side.

"Neighbor, you look maaahvelous this morning."

Reverend Zina Jacque-Bell comes to the pulpit. "And now," she says, "please turn with me to that great old hymn of the church, number 222 in your books, but you won't need your books, you know the words: 'We've come this far by faith. Oh, can't turn a-round.' No, we can't turn a-round. Everyone who can stand, please stand.”

Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Content At-a-Glance

Acknowledgments

“Hymn” is dedicated to the Union Baptist Church of Cambridge, Massachusetts with enduring gratitude: the many contributions and kindnesses of the church leadership and congregation were the sine qua non for this essay. Reverend Jeffrey L. Brown, Reverend Dr. Professor Cheryl Townsend Gilkes,and Reverend Zina Jacque-Bell offered encouragement and generously shared their erudition, which informed this writing over the course of several years. Innumerable contributions also came from the congregation of Union as a whole — and in particular from Deaconess Lillian Allen, Pauline Beckford, Cecilynn Bent, Nancy Brothers, Professor Grainger Browning and Deaconess Esther Browning, Doris Callender, Deaconess Jane Dietrich, Deaconess Pam Harding, Dr. Sylvia Johnson, Philip Layne, Charlotte Morris, Deaconess Emma Nance, and Alice Waith.

Warm thanks also to the editors of The Atlantic Monthly and Beacon Press for their expertise and creative collaborations during the publication process. Any editorial flaws that remain are my own.

Recipient of the National Magazine Award
First published in The Atlantic Monthly and in Domestic Travels (Beacon Press,1998); this slightly revised version of “Hymn” reconciles minor editorial differences in the two earlier publications and is the preferred, final text.

Review of “Hymn” by Eric McHenry