Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow

Author:Charles M. Blow [Blow, Charles M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2014-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

I decided to try God again, to give me the strength to fight the fights that I couldn’t.

Luckily, Reverend Brown left Shiloh soon after my botched baptism request. He was replaced by a smaller, less intimidating preacher. So I got up the courage to walk down the aisle again, and this time, when asked if I wanted to be baptized, I said yes.

When the baptismal day, Easter Sunday, rolled around, I focused on the minutiae of the morning, carefully recording the details: The clear sky the color of a Louisiana iris petal—deep blue, a hint of purple, a spot of yellow along the edge as the sun rose. The glow of my bedroom lit through sheer curtains softly rolling in the breeze. The chirping of morning birds outside my window, occasionally interrupted by the hum and beep of passing cars. I was desperate to remember everything about the world before I went under the water, sure that whatever was down there would fundamentally and irreversibly change me.

I put on my only suit and tie and got into the car with my mother and brothers. I pressed my head against the window as the car made its way down winding roads bracketed by lush spring foliage. No one spoke.

We pulled into the church parking lot, the gravel crackling under the weight of the car, and found a space. I got out and was escorted through a back door and into a hallway. One of Grandpa Bill’s brothers, Uncle Lee Arthur, was waiting there, smiling proudly. He led me to the bathroom to change into my baptismal robe—a white bed sheet to be draped over my shoulders and pinned in the front. The preacher’s chatty son went into the bathroom with me and made small talk. I could hear that the service was in full swing, but I couldn’t make out what was being said. It didn’t matter, because I could keep up with the timing by the tone. The services were all the same—the same arc of excitement building to the same-sounding sermons:

“Good moanin’, saints. Can I git a aman?!”

“The spi’it movin’ in heh dis moanin’ . . . Aman?!”

“Dis moanin’, I would like to come to you from the [whatever] chapter of the [whichever] book of [whomever]. And the wird sed . . .”

If God was quoted speaking in the passage, it would have to be repeated at least three times.

“‘And the Lawd sed . . .’”

“Y’all didn’t heh me dis moanin’. ‘And the Lawd sed . . .’”

“Ha! Ha! We ’bout ta have chuch in heh dis moanin’! What he say?! ‘And the Lawd sed . . .’”

If the Word came from one of the more cryptic books of the Bible, a deacon would stand and shout, “Make it plain!”

Then, the same overweight woman, sitting in the same spot, would erupt into pew-tilting, Holy Ghost–inspired convulsions at the same point in the sermon—every week. It often felt like the repeat of a play, folks pretending.

But one of the more authentic people, I felt, was the pastor’s wife.

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